Anonymous
Photograph by an IYRT BC Team Member
If you’re reading this, you deserve better.
When I broke up with my boyfriend, it felt like my entire world was flipped upside down. Everything I had known and loved for the past three years was suddenly not there anymore. For a while, it felt like I was living in a movie, expecting to leave the set of my tear-jerking romance drama and go back to living my normal life.
I felt like a horrible person who hurt the boy that I loved more than anything– the one I claimed I was going to spend the rest of my life with. The words of my friends and family were constantly echoing through my mind.
“I’m just so shocked. I feel like this came out of nowhere. You never spoke up about being unhappy with him.”
While they had witnessed our relationship from the outside, what they didn’t see was the internal battle I had been fighting for months.
The battle looked like knowing that I wasn’t being fulfilled by my partner, but wishing so badly that I could be. It looked like respectfully communicating to him over and over again the behavior I was unsatisfied with, being promised change, yet being left with the same result. It looked like thinking that there was something wrong with me for asking for the bare minimum. And it looked like trying to change the way that I was created to love and be loved just to make things easier for him.
My love for him caused me to spend months ignoring the unhappiness I felt in hopes of him changing into the man I needed. Until one day, I realized that I was waiting around for him to change into someone he wasn’t capable of being. I did not have to accept the way he was treating me and I did not have to spend the rest of my life with someone who wasn’t fulfilling me.
When I finally made the decision to end my relationship, I kept being told that, “Things will be hard for a long time.” While I know that the intention with this remark was pure, I couldn’t help but feel discouraged by it.
Let me be the one to give you hope. The ache you are feeling will get smaller each day.
If you’re reading this and you are in a relationship where you are unhappy, I know the terrifying, gut-wrenching feeling of thinking about breaking the heart of someone you love. But it is even more terrifying and gut-wrenching to stay with someone who does not make you feel loved. If they were capable of making you feel that unappreciated in the time that you dated, what would it be like to feel that way for the rest of your life?
Love makes you feel valued. Love makes you feel wanted. Love makes you feel important. You deserve all those things and more. Do what you have to to find that kind of love. If I can do it, so can you.
Anonymous, Boston College
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