“I think I need a break.” Six Words That Changed My Life Forever
Conscious Transition from My Broken Engagement
When It Fell Apart
“I think I need a break.” Six words that shattered my world as I knew it. My world imploded & it took my heart with it. Not for a second, not even once in the two years we had been together, had I imagined he wasn’t certain of marrying me, of spending his life with me…or that I wasn’t “the one” for him. Not once did I think we would cease to grow together in life. But in that single moment, everything changed. We weren’t “us” suddenly; we became completely dispersed. I went from planning my life with him to unearthing the strength to live the next moment without him. Forget tomorrow, I didn’t know how to get through that one single moment. The shock of what those six words bared knocked the wind out of me. And I had my first panic attack in life. My heart started beating at an unnerving pace, the blood rushed to my head and it started to spin… it felt like it was going to explode. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t sure if I was having a heart attack. I am too young to have one, I told myself. Suddenly my chest felt heavier than a boulder, I felt faint and incredibly nauseous. I fell to the ground against the wall and tried to regain control over my body. The panic attack finally subsided after what felt like hours. I knew it had only lasted for a few seconds though. And then the torrent of emotions came flooding in suddenly making me feel incredibly aged. I couldn’t muster up the strength to even stand up. He was standing next to me in complete shock. Unable to move. Unable to hold me. Unable to say a word. Unable to do anything. And that’s when I knew something was wrong. Wrong beyond repair. He wasn’t the man I was in love with. The man who had proposed to me just a few months ago. That man would’ve held me instantly in a moment like this. But instead, he was frozen. Distant. Withdrawn. It’s hard to explain the contrast between the love I’d felt from the man who would’ve moved heaven and earth for me in one moment, and the utter shock of seeing that man willing to walk away from everything we had built in the next moment.
With that much love comes the possibility of heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak that can tear you apart and leave you tethered to the deep recesses of grief and bitterness.
Finally, he said we should go home and talk. I couldn’t say a word in the cab ride home. My heart was pounding so loud; I swear the cab driver could hear it. I felt the blood rush to my head again and another panic attack rising inside of me. I closed my eyes and I fought it. It felt like I was fighting for my life. It was in that moment in the cab ride home, trying to hold on to my consciousness in the literal sense that I decided to surrender to love. Two years of dating and I decided to surrender to love then. (What a demoralizing thought. But that’s a conversation for another day.) And I was terrified. The fear, the intense fear of losing him and realizing I loved him that deeply hit me like a ton of bricks. Because with that much love comes the possibility of heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak that can tear you apart and leave you tethered to the deep recesses of grief and bitterness. And here I was, facing that possibility head on when I had never imagined it would happen with him. He was my love. My partner. My rock.
It was as if I had missed a step and fallen into a pit on the road and when I crawled back out, I found myself on a completely different road heading in a completely different direction.
At home, I watched him struggle to explain himself. I listened to him talk about how he was confused, worried and unsure of our future, of our relationship, of his happiness. How he wanted to move out and live alone to gain perspective and clarity on what he wanted in his life. While he lived apart, he hoped to discover that he could not live without me and that I was his happiness so that he could marry me without any doubts. Unable to look him in the eye as my heart fell to pieces one word at a time, I stared at the ring he had put on my ring finger just a few months ago. He wants a break. The gravity of those words was enormous. This was a HUGE complication. This wasn’t just another fight we would get past or another doubt we would overcome. This was a major commitment and emotional maturity issue. I sat there dumbfounded wondering how I had missed the severity of his doubts and insecurities throughout the past two years. How I had missed his lack of commitment and confidence in working on a relationship no matter what… Most importantly, I asked myself where we had gone so wrong that we ended up on the brink of ending one of the most important relationships in our lives overnight? This was the crux of the question that led me on my quest of understanding what a conscious relationship and marriage mean. It was as if I had missed a step and fallen into a pit on the road and when I crawled back out, I found myself on a completely different road heading in a completely different direction.
My Quest for Answers
Now, a year later, as I look back, it’s almost as if I’m observing the past few years of my life as a third person. I’m being kind to myself and him and beginning to understand some of the things that led to my failed relationship. On the outside to the world, my relationship was perfect. But on the inside, something had felt amiss and broken. But whenever I had tried to discern it, I had failed in identifying it. Sometimes you have to let your heart get completely shattered in order to allow love to seep in through the cracks. It took endless agonizing nights of gut wrenching pain to face the truth. Nights when I would reel from the onslaught of emotions and couldn’t stop crying for hours on end. Those nights when I would be overcome with so much pain, I would lie on the floor curled up in a ball against the carpet because it was strangely comforting when I needed to be held. After going to the darkest, deepest respites of the pain of loss and abandonment, I surfaced and saw things in a whole new light.
Sometimes you have to let your heart get completely shattered in order to allow love to seep in through the cracks.
The trauma from his parents’ divorce when he was two years old surfaced once he proposed along with fears of failing in a marriage, having his heart broken and being abandoned. Something was so profoundly broken inside of him because of this. I understood for the first time that he wasn’t going to be able to gain perspective on any of this until he left our relationship and moved out of town to find it alone. I desperately seeked answers to what I could’ve done differently, where I went wrong in the relationship. We dated for two years and never did I gain a pulse on his insecurities, fears and reservations about our relationship and marriage. And I had to tear myself apart and allow my inner core of vulnerability to surface in order to find my answers. You see, in order to understand his fears and insecurities, I had to be prepared to face the possibility that he may not be able to face them once exposed and walk away from me because it was no longer the invulnerable place he felt “safe” in. And the simple truth was that I wasn’t ready to face that possibility. Having grown up away from my father most of my childhood and teenage years (for schooling), I discovered that I had my own dependency issues and fears of abandonment. I finally understood why I wasn’t able to have a conscious relationship with him. Somehow I knew, deep inside, that things were broken inside of me too. So how could I expect him to cut himself open for me? It was disingenuous. So I chose to continue building our gingerbread house with the weak walls of dependencies, misconstrued as deep love. The fact that we had made promises to marry each other based on this foundation… was in the end our downfall. We hadn’t even begun to understand what it meant to be true partners to each other until we were facing the very serious step of showing up every single day for each other, for the rest of our lives.
What I Discovered About What Marriage Means (to me)
I’m barely starting to scratch the surface of what marriage means but on the top of my list for a successful long-term relationship now are communication, commitment and intention. Not just when you say, “I love you” to each other. Or when he gets down on his knee and asks you to marry him and you say yes. Not just the day you get married. It takes commitment and intention EVERY SINGLE DAY. You wake up and you make a choice to love this person that day, all day, all night. And you do it again the next day. And again the day after. For their beauty and their flaws. For me, this realization came when I was faced with the possibility of losing him. And his six words made me understand what marriage meant to me more than any love stories, any movies, any friends could’ve helped me understand. And it was the scariest thing I have ever realized. When that gingerbread house we had built from a place of fear crumbled and we were both left vulnerable and skinless, we discovered what each of our strengths and weaknesses were as partners. In that moment of consciousness, I understood I was ready to commit to him on that level and show up for him every single day. And he realized he was not ready to walk down that road. This is where our growth in the relationship became imbalanced and the fork in the road led us to our separate paths.
When that gingerbread house we had built from a place of fear crumbled, we were both left vulnerable and skinless.
In the past, if anyone told me that I love being in a serious relationship because my end goal is to just get married, I’d feel insulted. But today, if anyone told me that, I’d say, “Yes.” I am ready for marriage. I don’t know about all the married people out there but for me, having had commitment issues in my past relationships and clearly that bled into this one as well (another deeper conversation for another day), I had to be ready to take that step before I met the person I wanted to commit to because I’m beginning to understand that a successful marriage begins with a conscious relationship and will lead to one of the most significant transitions you’ll go through in life. And if you aren’t ready for that- well, you might just end up having a panic attack in the middle of your wedding planning when your fiancé suddenly tells you he wants a “break” because he is having a drawn out panic attack of his own.
