Author and Columnist
I have not been looking forward to this entry, though I was increasingly aware that we would come to this point soon.
Now we come to the long-overdue breakup. Responding to earlier entries, it came as no real surprise. However, I know you chose these letters to turn into entries in part because they were long enough to retroactively form a narrative, but also that the story led in this direction. It is only next year that you will write your actual first entry.
Yes, you did write this. More than some other entries before this, it meets the format for what these would become. Here, you tell a story because you can find no other way to get it all out. Here, though you were writing to people you cared about, you take the reader into confidence.
Kate accused once that you had made this entire site to snipe at her. You meant Xenex as a palindrome of your nickname, Xen, but she made have read it closer to Xen's Ex. (When you and your father were discussing making a proper website, you bandied about names that were closer to your name, but this is the only one that was then available.)
This was a turning point. What I wish for you most in reading this is not that Kate doesn't leave. She should have around this time. It was not the first time she tried to break up with you--this may have been the third--but it was about due.
What I wish for you is that she left you, then left you alone. You needed to break away from her and figure out the next part of your life, but she didn't want to let you go. And you thought that you didn't want her to, that compromising yourself romantically and sexually might mean that she took you back. I don't know how long she took after breaking up with you before she was with other people or if she had begun before the formal breakup, but Kate was ready at least to move on with her life even if she didn't want to let go the comfort of you.
What should be noted is that the week before Thursday, we had spoken very little because she was spending much of her time at parties at her friend Colin's house.
Colin was who she wanted to go with her to Canada if you didn't. You suspected there was something more than friendship there, but she had close friendships with several young men, many of whom lived in the same house. You did not have the energy to be jealous of them all.
She told me that she had a confession to make and that I wouldn't like it. I told her to fire away, because I particularly hate the anticipation of whatever might follow such a statement. She told me that she had been smoking a tobacco pipe (a habit provided to her by Colin's house, incidentally). I told her that I didn't really mind.
You became tired of playing her Jiminy Cricket and parent when you just wanted to be her lover. You fell into the former two roles too easily but had let it go after Canada. You just wanted to be with her without that pressure.
So, she smoked. It wasn't your business, and you knew it. She wasn't you, and you didn't care to dictate her every moment.
I told her that unless she was cheating on me or doing heavy drugs, it wasn't a huge deal. She told me that she didn't like that she felt the need to hide things from me or confess things to me. I told her to not do those things then.
Yes, this does seem to have been her issue and not yours. It had been your issue for years, but you got over it. Kate did not yet.
She asked me how I would have felt if I just walked in and saw her smoking a pipe, I told her that I wouldn't have been surprised; that is wasn't outside the bounds of her character. She began crying a lot and saying how different we are from each other.
Putting it together, it really was that she wanted to cleave closer to the household of boys who would offer her their pipes. This was the similarity she sought. You were too squeaky clean. Too... not them.
She said that we like to do different things. I asked for an example, she could not provide one.
She wanted to sleep with other people and do drugs. You didn't. There, that's two.
From here, it ballooned into that she felt trapped and stifled by the relationship.
See?
She came upstairs and said that she didn't want to be in a relationship but that she still wanted to be my best friend.
Yeah, not yet. A best friend would have left you alone for a little while to get back on your feet. I don't mean to imply that she was not sincere in this. She absolutely was. She loved you, but she needed to have the college life she desired.
I wish you had told her that you needed your space, but you thought you could charm her back into the relationship.
I acquiesced, thinking that I could woo her back and she would regret her words.
See?
Immediately after the film ended, she asked me to go home. She started crying, because she thought I looked so sad.
Yes, you were sad, rightly so. You should have gone home. Kate was selfish, but that is to be expected. She wanted only to be herself for a bit. You should have been selfish too.
I was near obsessed. You know what it is like when you are half awake and something very serious is on you mind? Well, it was so bad that I got up, disassembled my several non-working cordless phones and made a working one.
I wish you had sought therapy of something more than 4AM phone calls with Alison and writing letters to your friends. You have a small mental illness, and you cannot fully handle this trauma--who could?--and let it dig deeper into you. Your friends, none of whom are trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or are certified to prescribe mood-stabilizing medication, do not have the necessary qualifications to lead you back to autonomy (if, indeed, you ever had that to this point).
She asked me if I would like to see "Rope" with her, JB (her roommate), and Virginia. I told her that I would like that very, very much.
Utterly unfair to you, but she likely meant well. You were her first real relationship and indeed her first real breakup. She didn't know what she was doing; she was only fumblingly feeling her way through it.
She also told me how wonderful, sweet, caring, attractive, etc. I was and how much she loved me. Certainly not the words of just a friend.
Again, not fair. You didn't need to hear this from Kate. It was the beginning of her stringing you along, not that this was her conscious intention.
You, outside of a romantic relationship, felt good to her. You were her best friend, but so were JB and Virginia, one of whom lived with her and the other down the hall. You were outnumbered in a few ways.
Now, bear in mind, I had no idea Kate had mentioned any of what had occurred to JB and Virginia. They certainly behaved no different then they normally do around us, certainly not how you would behave in such a situation.
They were, more than likely, her cheerleaders in the breakup. They were liberated and enthusiastically doing every debaucherous thing their college offered to them. You were a drag.
So, they knew she had dumped you weeks before you did.
I would occasionally, involuntarily, try to kiss Kate on the cheek, to touch her hand, or hug her. My brain felt she was acting like a girlfriend, so it was okay to show her that I loved her. This was met with her writhing away from my hand, which depressed me further.
That's pretty much what your relationship with her will be for the next seven months. She will cuddle against you, flirt with you, tell you that she loves you. She will kiss you or more because you are easy--and I mean that in every sense. When you reciprocate or instigate, she will shove you away.
As I hugged Virginia goodbye, she asked why I was sad all night. I told her Kate had broken up with me. She told me that she knew, that Kate had told her. I was SHOCKED. I wanted to figure out when she told her and why. I wanted details! Virginia would not comply and left with Kate.
How odd that she would ask why you were sad. Virginia didn't take relationships as seriously as you did, but this is a confusing disconnect. I don't blame you.
While Kate was gone, I filled Tina and Stevehen in on what I knew and what I was going through. [...] they hoped Kate would decide to be with me again. [...] When I went back downstairs, Stevehen nearly 180ed on his previous statements and just told me to calm down and leave Katie alone.
What did she tell them that could have made him turn so quickly? I am friends with neither Stevehen nor Tina and so I cannot ask them, not that I could expect them to remember something from twenty years ago.
It does not feel fair to hypothesize now, though I can conjure what she would have told them if I were writing the story of this.
I confronted Kate with this after they left and she said she had no idea why they said that. [...] I'm pretty sure Kate is being mostly honest.
Except when she thinks that being honest will hurt you while you are standing in front of her, even if it will hurt you more in the long run. Which, if I have not made this point clear enough, is an action that makes sense for a nineteen- or twenty-year-old. If smoking a pipe is well within Kate's character, this is even more so.
I occurred to me that Kate might genuinely not want to be with me anymore and I might never be her boyfriend again.
Oh, you poor thing. Breaking up with you means that Kate doesn't want to be in a romantic relationship. It is self-evident and all but impossible to see when you don't want to.
There was a night five or six months after this that might have been a date. Not fooling around, because you had done that a few times, but hanging out together, seeing a movie, eating at the diner. I remember her sweater, how fuzzy it was, but I cannot be sure of much else about that night beyond the feeling that it was a date. (I'm aware that you will have written it up, but I promised not to read ahead or link things, so I will be reminded and surprised.) You didn't kiss, but you may have hugged a little long and held hands. Nothing more came of it; I think because you started dating someone else. If that had not happened, there might have been another date. Getting back together would have been a mistake. I am not ungrateful that this didn't happen. You needed someone new, though Kate loomed large over your next relationship. (In part, you entered your next relationship to get away from the mutual clinging with Kate; this did not work.)
I also told her about how I was feeling, about the wailing, so on. She told me that I had to find someone else to talk to about all of the pain and problems she was giving me, because she couldn't listen to me.
Harsh, but true. Much of this was pain avoidance from her side and wanting to guilt her into acknowledging that she wasn't being fair to you. Who is to say that she had to be fair? Even the one who does the breaking up loses something in making that leap.
You are both acting in a way that makes perfect sense but will cause nothing but friction and frustration. So be it.
So I talked to Kate for a few hours, about existentialism and Dave Matthews Band. Fun stuff. We were getting along splendidly.
Again, I wish you had just let her go. Give her a month where the two of you found your independent footing again with no contact. After that, talk like friends. But, at this point (and for a while after), you were not friends. You were two people who love one another, but you were not close to being friends.
You never gave her the chance to comprehend what a life without you would entail because you clung to her. And she, in a slightly different fashion, clung to you. You were entwined, but she was seeing other people. When that hurt her (as seeing anyone in a non-serious manner will from time to time), she had you to soothe her until she was satisfied enough for the next person.
It was a disservice to you both.
Virginia was a fairly calm girl throughout high school. So now she is trying to be as wild as possible to make up for her "lost years."
Accurate enough assessment. I'll give you that one. It is a stock character, but that is the nature of being a college student.
Well, she was nearly gloating and said she was glad Kate wasn't with me anymore. She began to say that it was good I wasn't in such a serious relationship until I stopped her and she admitted that I am very confident, self-assured, and knew what I wanted in life. She also added "and you want Kate."
Virginia may have been projecting or, if not that explicitly, delighted that one of her best friends was now more like her. Without you as her boyfriend, Kate could go off and party with her without reservations, which must have been a great deal more fun.
That said, gloating is an awful thing to do to the kind of mope you are, but Virginia's loyalties do not lie with you.
But she was saying that she hopes Kate goes off and fucks lots of guys and parties a lot more because I have been holding her back.
Which I think is further testimony that Virginia wanted someone more like she was at that time in her life. Virginia did not want a serious relationship. (I remember a guy she dated, Tony, who I thought was cool and handsome, whom she dumped on the plane over to England for the semester abroad she convinced him to take. There was a country full of men she had not had the chance to sleep with, and she couldn't let Tony inhibit her opportunities.)
And she said that even though Kate stated that I made her life so much better and I helped her get off a lot of drugs and have the ambition to go to college, she and JB advised Kate not to be with me.
Also accurate, but that doesn't mean that Kate promised you any more of her life than you got. You helped her get to this point in her life. She decided to take it from there.
JB became Kate's roommate because her old roommates were avidly using cocaine, and she did not feel safe or welcome. At the time, Kate's roommate was prissy and hated Kate for not being, one of those customary college conflicts. JB, almost at once, began avidly using other drugs. It's a funny world.
And they are potentially fucking her over to justify their aimless lifestyles and because they feel that if Kate doesn't go to a party because I am up there, then they cannot go (Kate=car and tolls).
Oh. Yes, I can see that too. I was operating under the idea that this was more of an existential issue, but this is direct and practical. When Kate was spending time with you, she wasn't at their whims.
I don't think you are 100% in the right with this theory, but you are far from 0%.
And though a lot of my friends are badmouthing Kate now, I do love her so much that I can hardly stand it.
I have never fully appreciated the implied "I told you so" that people undertake after a relationship is over. I understand it, mostly when I have spent the last month morose that a relationship is dying. Nor is it wrong to point out genuine flaws that would lead to the end which the bereaved had been trying to putty over. However, the "I never liked them, and they were a worthless scumbag" only makes it feel that the recently dumped was a fool for sticking around.
Kate was a fine person. She just wasn't the right one for a romantic relationship anymore. That doesn't mean that Kate isn't going to do hurtful things in her search for the kind of life she wants (and she will do a lot--some of which sounds thrilling--before she gets there). She absolutely will. She will gut you a few times over. It didn't need to happen, but you put the knife in her hand and stood against it. You have culpability for your gutting.
Right now, I feel very emotionally confused because she is talking to me like I am her boyfriend (telling me how much she loves me) but treating me as not even a very good friend.
My most pressing advice to you again--which I know you cannot take and not merely because I am writing this two decades after and you are incapable of reading it--is to let her go. Not forever, but no contact for a while. None at all. No late-night weakness phone call because you miss her, miss your relationship. No emails. No answering her pages. Without a singular hesitation, no seeing her.
One month seems impossibly vast, but it could have improved so much for both of you. I can't tell you what would have happened after that month, only that it would have likely been healthier.
But it won't be healthy. It will be the hardest breakup of your life--and you are once left three months before your wedding, and by the first woman that you let yourself fully love. (These, regrettably, are not the same woman.) Your breakup with Kate will last half a year; it will erode you and, at times, make you feel like you are disgusting.
Maybe you learn a lesson. When the ex-fiancee dumps you, you tell her that you don't want to see her for a while, though you have a few less-fond conversations. (This is no skin off her nose. She leaves dumping you and spends the night in bed with her new lover, whom she marries and eventually bears two children.)
With the other woman, you convince her for months not to break up with you and endure hard months of her trying to leave before she does. It is the inverse of your breakup with Kate, in a way, because Kate gave you months separated where it seemed that you might get back together while she slept with other people. With the woman you loved, it was months together while she was faithful, punctuated by it seeming you were about to break up. With this breakup, you were mature enough to better handle the struggle of it.
