Don’t Regret those Closed Doors Behind You
Instead, remind yourself that you wouldn’t want to go back
My daughter is heartbroken. She is twenty-one years old and recently she learned that her first serious boyfriend — the boy she dated for four years and who was also her best friend, the boy she leaned on for company and Zoom chats and endless giggling phone calls throughout the Covid-19 quarantine, even though they had broken up six months previously — has found another love.
She knew back in the spring when she ended their relationship that although he is lovely, he is not the man for her. Her life is in London while he wants to stay in the North; and after the uni years, neither of them wanted a long distance life. He likes beer, she likes brunch. He wants to marry young and to have a family soon after; she doesn’t feel ready for any of that. For these and so many other reasons, she knows that they should not be a couple.
And yet, she is freshly heartbroken by his new romance. At night she flicks through his social media pages, scoring tiny cuts on her own soul with each scroll. She has crafted and deleted a thousand messages to him. “I’ve lost him,” she sobs to me. “I’m scared that made a mistake when I dumped him. Right now I’d give anything to have him back.”
