I never stopped loving him. You hear all the time in movies and TV shows, “I woke up one morning and I didn’t love him anymore.” That was never the issue. Even today, I still have so much love for him – for what he did for me as an artist at the beginning, for the times when he could be so amazingly sweet and generous with himself, for how much he loved me no matter what I did or said. And I did some terrible things. I lied to him about money. That was the worst thing. We had such money problems and I couldn’t find a way to tell him because I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in his eyes that I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t stand the recriminations about what a failure I was because I couldn’t fix it. So I just stopped telling him the truth because I couldn’t bear it. That was so wrong of me. But I didn’t know what else to do.
Or at least I thought he loved me despite what I did. As we went through counseling, he brought up so many things that I didn’t think were true but they were true for him. He didn’t trust me. Because I had lied about the money. That must have meant that I was lying about other things, which he never explained what those things were.
I grew to dislike him. I grew very angry with him. I grew very disappointed in what I felt he had turned my life into. I grew dissatisfied with the lack of support from him and the disrespect I felt coming from him. Mostly, I grew angrier and angrier because I felt he didn’t hear me. The night he walked out of the bedroom when I was literally on the brink of suicide and he left me there, my anger solidified and I was done. Even though we still went through almost a year of counseling, that night, with the closing of that door, I was done. That was irreparable. And I’m sure he has the irreparable moment as well, when he knew it was over. We both let it go on longer than it should have and we both hurt each other so much by hanging on to the hope that maybe, somewhere under all the hurt and the rage and the bitterness that there was still a love there.
And I think there was… and still is. I will absolutely love him until the day that I die. I will carry in my heart the moments that were precious and that held that love for so long. I will never regret the time we had together because I wouldn’t be who I am without it. There is a piece of my heart that he will always have.
There isn’t a word for what I did stop feeling for him. It isn’t that I stopped caring for him because, to me, that’s almost the same thing as love. I just stopped… maybe wanting him is closer. I stopped wanting him in my life. I stopped wanting him to be involved in my creative life. I stopped wanting him even to be involved in my personal life. I loved being at the theater because that meant I didn’t have to deal with him and be with him. The saddest thing is that I stopped wanting him near me physically. We’d always been connected that way and, sometimes even still, I long for that physical closeness. Just a hand on my knee or the small of my back, those personal, close, intimate places (not sexual places) that only the ones we love are permitted to touch. When we’d go on long trips in the car, he never took his hand off of me. It was secure, it was warm, it was safe. I don’t know when it stopped being that but I knew I was in trouble when I stopped wanting that. I stopped wanting his approval, I stopped wanting even his opinion. Then I stopped really wanting him in any way. That’s what was lost. The want, the need, the desire to have that person near you and in your life and just a breath away. When you stop wanting to call them to share news, when you stop wanting to share the joys of your life with them. When you stop wanting.
The night that door closed behind him and he did not understand my pain, my sorrow, my anger, my deep, deep depression, that’s when the wanting stopped. Because I knew that, no matter how much I wanted him to be there, to be in my life, to want to be there, he just couldn’t. When he couldn’t respond to my most basic need to be made to feel safe, to feel secure, to feel saved, that’s when it all stopped. It took a while for the stopping to be complete, but that’s where it started.
It’s been more than two years since that night. A lot has changed. My life is so different now. It’s hard to look back and see myself then, how fragile I was. I still feel that way sometimes, fragile and breakable and vulnerable. But now, even without someone significant in my life, I know there’s a net there that will catch me if I fall this time. And it’s weird and sad and sorrowful that that net wasn’t there two years ago. The one who should have been holding the net was, I think, looking for a net of his own. And I was too weak to hold it out for him. So we just stood by and watched each other fall, helpless, hopeless and afraid.
And even the greatest love in the world cannot survive that.
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