What should you do when your heart wants one thing, and your pride refuses to allow it?
When you pick up the phone and look at the person's name and your heart is saying, "Do it. Say what you want to say. What you need to say. Type I miss you and hit send." but your obstinate pride just won't let you hit the buttons? It's Black or white, mutually exclusive, I can't salvage the relationship without sacrificing my stand and admitting that I might have been wrong. Which I wasn't. But at some point you stop caring about being right and just want the person back...
So what do you do?
It seemed that we were talking less and fighting more. Not playful fights; yelling, cursing, I never want to talk to you again fights, that always ended with me coming back because as much as I can't stand to lose, I hate conflict with someone I care for even more. And after months, I felt drained, like I was fighting upstream to something that was no longer there, or had never been there at all, I'm not sure... either way it had to end. It was becoming a distraction, one that as a college student I couldn't afford, I thought about it in class, with my friends, at home before I went to sleep. I needed to know where I stood. I decided to try a little experiment. A "let's see what would happen if I did this" kind of thing. One of my friends posted a blog in which he said, "...it starts with a balance shift. When a relationship dies, one person (or maybe no one) finds themselves more invested than the other. It's usually one person calling more than the other, or one person suggesting to hang more than the other." And when I thought about it, it had gone from him wanting to hang out more than me, to me starting every conversation, making every call, wanting to hang out more often. And I thought, what would happen if I stopped, cold turkey, just stopped communicating with him completely? If the relationship was fine, he would notice and ask what happened, why I seemed to fall off. He would initiate conversation to pick up the slack, carry the weight. If it wasn't, he wouldn't notice, and if he did, wouldn't care. So I did it. Not a single word. Complete radio silence. I expected a few days to go by, no one sees that kind of thing immediately, or at least, that's the excuse I gave myself. Then days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. Obviously, if you can go months without talking to someone you spoke to on a daily basis, that person, and your friendship, means nothing. A hard pill to swallow, but it went down, and I moved on... mostly. It comes in waves, days when all I think about is that person, morning to night, every minute, and then there are weeks that go by when they don't cross my mind. I suppose it will be that way for a while yet. In any case as much as I talked hard and said he didn't matter and I didn't care, part of me missed, or still misses at least, how things used to be. And I thought, as my birthday came up, that even if we hadn't talked in a long time we could put the pettiness aside for my special day, that he would text or call or Facebook wall post, anything to say I care enough for you to cross my mind... but he didn't. And then I said, he's busy, surely too busy to remember on the day of, but later I'll get a "Happy belated bday! Sorry I missed it, forgot, whatever!"...nothing. And as much as my mind is saying, unforgivable, dead that dude and don't give it another thought. And as much as my pride is saying, weak, just the fact that your thinking of talking to him again and begging for the friendship you long for is sad. My heart is saying, I still and always will have a special place reserved for him.
In any case, my feelings have changed, somewhere between summer break and my change in age a fundamental shift occurred. I can feel it, deep down, something saying that even if we both tried, it will never be exactly as it was, like how celibacy will never make you a virgin again no matter how long you do it. I've reached a place where there's no animosity, no longing, just a quiet ambivalence that I can live with. The blog went on to say, "I believe once a relationship gets to the point where it's dying there's no way to go back to the old relationship you remember, even if both parties are invested...I guess when a relationship dies we need to let it or at least accept it. Like life, it's unhealthy to hold on to dead things." Real talk if I ever heard it.
Here's the original blog I took from by Pretentious Voices: http://pretentiousvoices.blogspot.com/2011/05/on-death-of-relationships.html
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