Important in Your Life

 

This picture of the ex, who I will call Captain Crabbypants, makes me sad to look at.  I have been missing the bantering, chitchatting and joking that was, in some sense, the essence of our relationship.   I have been resisting the urge to complain to him about how hard he is to engage in banter these days, even though we both sincerely intended to stay friends.  I am trying to refrain from drama queenish behavior.  I understand that space and disengagement may be best for both of us.  But I realized today what I miss is knowing that I am of central importance in his life; that maybe what is scary and sad about being single is not being of primary importance in anyone's life.  

I thought about the boyfriend before him, who I will call The Reptile.  I was not happy or satisfied in our relationship, yet the pain of our ending was long and strong, lasting many times longer than the relationship itself lasted.  And this was because of how clear he made it that I was not and had never been important to him.

My relationship with Captain Crabbypants was so hard and confusing, because I was never very attracted to him.  In fact, at times I recoiled from him, not just in the sense of not being physically attracted to him, but that it some very basic way, my gut instinct was that he was not for me.  Sometimes I would have walk out of his apartment and stand in the hallway because his apartment made me claustrophobic.  So, from that perspective, I should have trusted my gut and never gotten involved with him.

But there are reasons that I didn't, some wholesome and some pathological.  I genuinely liked him and found him entertaining.  We always had a good time talking to each other.  That would be the most wholesome reason why I wanted to override my gut and try to work things out.  

The least wholesome reason was because of my pattern of getting sucked into a certain kind of drama.  He was emotionally entangled with another woman most of the time we were together, and I had the unfounded, not entirely conscious conviction that if he finally and definitively chose me and let her go, everything would be solved.

A reason in the middle ranges is that up until now, no matter how bad things got, and even when we were broken up, he always made me feel like I mattered to him, that I was crucial to his life. I have to let that go, I am letting that go, but it hurts.