On the How the Best Outcome Can Still Suck

Be warned, I’m writing this a bit as therapy. Recently, my relationship with my girlfriend ended in the best possible way. She is a wonderful person, and I think that together, we cultivated vulnerability and asked the right types of questions to lead to what I consider to be the “Best Possible Outcome” of a breakup, which is not just amicability but the hope and probability that you’ll remain close and possibly remain good friends.

But yeah… it still sucks…

The weeks leading up to it were filled with awkward situations, and even with the transparency and vulnerability that we had with each other, sometimes it’s just hard to know what you’re feeling until it slaps you in the face. Thankfully, when that slap happened for her (which was, perhaps, within a day of my own self-face slapping), we immediately got onto a video call and had the discussion, which would be our last as a couple.

We talked for 51 minutes, and in that time it was obvious that we were both thinking the same thing. Circling the same subject like loving sharks around a prey they didn’t want to kill but needed to survive, I’m haunted and heart-warmed by the care I saw on her face as we inched closer to saying the quiet part out loud: That our relationship had become a friendship.

This is not like any other breakup I’ve ever encountered. Many of them had been amicable, but most of them had been… confrontations. I think this one is different because when we embarked on our ill-fated journey together we were in very similar life situations. We had a mutual understanding that I’ve never encountered in another person before, and we had so many things in common (I know, I know, feel free to roll your eyes) that it felt like we needed to be in each other’s lives. Where my other relationships began with a physical fire, this one was a deeper intellectual blaze. During our 51-minute conversation, me perched in the corner nook of my couch using my phone camera, her settled onto her cosy couch with her laptop, we talked about who we were when we met, who we’ve helped each other grow into, the various ways we’ve failed to support each other, where we’ve succeeded. But ultimately, we talked about how it was time.

I know you’re wondering why, after a year and a half, we had a 51-minute video call to break up, and this is a fair question. This is quite simply because we live in different countries. In the beginning, we were very lucky in that her family lived in the country where I reside, and I adore the country where she lives, so we found ample occasions to visit and grow our connection and our fascination with each other. I also grew to love her family, and, being so far away from my own, find them to be a bit of a proxy family.

Some have asked, and we have discussed, whether our taking the dive and moving closer would have prevented this, and perhaps it would have. It’s definitely possible. And that’s the direction we intended to go, there were even options that we considered, but each of them seemed more like our hand being forced into love rather than us grasping hands and jumping in together. So it’s possible, but it’s also possible that the distance is what allowed us to build on our connection. It’s possible that distance is what kept us alive for as long as it did.

But it still sucks.

It’s funny because while there’s been a noticeable slowdown or, let’s call it, hesitancy in our communications since the breakup, nothing major has really changed. With her living so far away, we don’t have the larger logistics to figure out, like who gets to keep the dog. But little things have continued to pop up, and it’s these things that I’ve found myself having the most difficulty with. Things like no longer having an automatic person to share jokes with, someone curious about your day - and conversely, someone whose day you’re incredibly curious about. Someone to call on the drive home (a funny one: I miss finding clever ways to convince my car’s terrible voice assistant to call her instead of a colleague I haven’t talked to in over a decade by absolutely butchering her name).

It’s the tiny habits of the relationship, even a long-distance one, that take some delicate unravelling, lest you unravel. And I have, in thankfully only little moments so far, unravelled a bit. I know that if I were to send her a message saying that I was having a tough time because I saw a pomsky and thought of her she is the type of person who would be there to help. Not because I was her boyfriend, but because she’s a great human who cares for other humans.

But the absurdity of these tiny pains also makes me so grateful that we are living the best possible outcome instead of the worst possible outcome. I am a firm believer, that the best outcome doesn’t require your preparation, but maybe I should spend a little bit of time reexamining this belief. Just a little :)