My First Heartbreak After Divorce

This hurts more than ending my marriage.

In no shock to anyone who reads my writings, my relationship with Jeremy is over.

What’s shocking is that he dumped me. I haven’t been dumped since I was 15 (yeah, what a fabulous flex).

The signs were on the wall but I stupidly thought that if we rode it out long enough then he’d fall too hard for me to leave. That was a dumb gamble. Jeremy told me last month in a drunken meltdown how he didn’t see it going long-term. But when sober, he simply apologized. I wasn’t sure what to think since he also talked about love and how great we are.

Jeremy was off the grid for two weeks as a chaperone for a high school trip along the coast in another country. When he came back, I cut him slack for his lack of messaging because I knew he’d be swamped with work.

He asked me Thursday if I wanted to hang out on Friday. I was elated despite that my entire weekend was dedicated to playing catch up for a major project I’ve been slacking on. I spent hours cleaning my house, dolling myself up, grocery shopping, and preparing appetizers.

Jeremy arrives shockingly on time at 6:30 pm. He has a bag full of a product that he’s handing out as a promotion and I made labels using my Cricut crafting machine. He told me he couldn’t spend the night, which should have been the first red flag I missed.

I help him with the labels while eating and drinking. We decide to go out for dinner and we swing by an eatery with an obnoxiously loud cover band. I’m over the moon happy. We’re talking nonstop. We’re having fun. All is well.

Somewhere in our talk, I mentioned that if things end, I’d get a cat. It was a passing joke but Jeremy became hyper-focused on it. That was the second red flag I missed.

We get back to my place and he offers to hang up a picture that’s been sitting on my table for months. I insist he doesn’t have to but home improvement is his jam. Looking back, I think it was out of guilt that he did that.

Jeremy begins the I-need-to-get-going talk and I tell him there’s no way in hell he’s leaving without getting naked. We get on my bed and I straddle him. He tells me how he doesn’t have time and I get in seduction mode, taking my top off which gets him riled up.

Somehow I end up naked, he’s fully dressed, and he’s using my sex toys on me. He insists there’s no time for sex despite a solid half-hour of this sex toy action. I thought maybe he jerked off earlier that day and couldn’t perform. That was my third red flag.

I throw on clothes and we head to my entryway. Jeremy says in passing that I need to get the cat since this relationship is ending. I give a passing “ha ha Mr. Funny Guy” for a solid two minutes before I realize he’s serious. The blood drains from my head.

We sit on the couch and I immediately say that I’m not in the business of convincing anyone to stay if they don’t want to. I tell him that it doesn’t make sense because we get along and have fun, why would things end?

Jeremy tells me how he doesn’t see it being long-term and it wouldn’t be fair to me. I tell him how he never planned anything beyond twenty-four hours, why would he not tell me that the future was on his mind and talk to me about it?

He says he would feel bad if we dated for a while and then if things didn’t work out, he wasted my time. I told him that was for me to decide. Somewhere in there, I start bawling and my stupid mascara is not holding up. As I wipe the tears, they’re smeared black.

Getting off the couch, Jeremy kneels in front of where I’m sitting. “Listen, you need to know you’re amazing. You’re sexy and so fucking intelligent. I don’t see how any guy could ever say you’re not smart, that makes no sense. And you’re beautiful. I’m serious. I need you to believe this.”

I continue crying and tell him that all those things are meaningless and contradictory given that things are ending.

“I never gave any indication about us moving in together or pushing to go forward. Did I ever talk about us moving in together and getting married?” I stammer.

“No, you were great.” He replies.

“I have my own house, I have a solid job, I didn’t need anything from you except you,” I say. Eventually, I could only cry. I can’t look Jeremy in the eyes but he’s crying too.

Jeremy offers to spend all night holding me if that’s what I need. I’m wishing that I could hate him but I can’t. “This wouldn’t be so hard if I hadn’t fallen in love with you,” I babble while hunched over sobbing.

He told me that if I needed any home repairs, I can ask him anytime. “Why the fuck would I do that?” I reply. “I’d pay a handyman for that,” Jeremy replies that I shouldn’t because we’d still be friends.

I made an audible snarky sound. “There is no friendship here,” I tell him. “I hang out with my friends and support their relationships. I have no desire to stick around and watch you date.”

Eventually, I get my wits about me. This isn’t High-Value Woman behavior. I’m not going to beg or convince anyone to be with me. And while I don’t want him to leave, I know the longer he stays it’s dragging out the nightmare.

We get to the entryway and I lean into his chest. Jeremy hugs me. I break down again, sliding down the wall and onto the floor. Did he get on the floor to hold me? I don’t remember. It didn’t last for more than thirty seconds because I remembered when my ex-husband Joseph curled up on the floor sobbing and it was awkward. I’m not going to look like a pathetic little bitch on the floor crying.

I stand up, give him a final hug, and push him out the door. Curled up on my rug, I listen to his truck starting in my driveway. I pray he’ll shut it off. I pray he’ll come back. I’m crying at the top of my lungs.

When I hear silence, I run to my son’s room to look out the window. Maybe Jeremy turned off his truck so he could contemplate in my driveway. Nope; he left.

It’s military mode time. I have a small window where I can throw out memories and delete photos before I reach the point where I longingly stare at them and cry. I throw out all the beer I bought. I clean up all the food and plates. He gave me a ton of the promotional product that I made labels for but that’s too expensive for me to throw out. I put them in an opaque bag and hid them in a garage cabinet, figuring one day I’ll be over him and I can use them.

I almost threw out the wine-closing machine doodad and mini heater I received at Christmas. Instead, I put them in a box full of Halloween decorations. I figure that by October I’ll feel better.

Next, I tackle digital memories. I delete his photos off my phone then went to the cloud and deleted them there. I almost deleted our entire chat history and stopped. Instead, I deleted enough to push his name down the list of messages on my phone that aren’t visible.

I have two quiches in my freezer left over from the last time Jeremy spent the night. Those need to be tossed. He also gave me an expensive freezer ice pack that he wanted me to work my crafting mastery on to create labels and that’s still in my freezer. I held off because I’m genuinely curious if the labels I made will stay on. After verifying the label’s integrity, I’ll throw it out.

My daughter had taken one of the labels and slapped it on the back seat of my car. I grab my keys and take that sucker out. All that’s left are clothes that I’ve only worn around him. I’ll keep those in the bottom of my laundry hamper and eventually wash them when I’m ready.

Dammit, Jeremy gave me a fancy Dyson hair system and I can’t go months without ever blow-drying my hair. I’ll deal with that later.

I have Arlo and Ring security cameras. I want to see what happened when he left my house. But then I discover my Arlo base unit in the house was disconnected for a week and I never noticed. When I look at the Ring camera, it’s crazy: the video skips from his truck being in my driveway to not being in the driveway.

That damn camera will record a dog down the street but it didn’t capture his departure. Out of three cameras, none of them recorded him leaving. It’s probably a good thing; one less thing for me to delete. I consider deleting the videos earlier of him and I going in and out of the house before going to dinner but they autoplay, which is something I want to avoid seeing.

To ease my brain, I turn on my bedroom TV and watch Succession. I know I need to get up and wash the makeup off my face. My brain is begging me to sleep so I can get a reprieve from the pain. “I can shut my phone off completely,” I think to myself. “Then I won’t wake up from any text buzzing tomorrow morning.”

As the Succession characters yell at each other “Fuck off!”, I finally change into PJs and wash my face. I barely brush my teeth and crawl into bed.

Except…I can’t sleep. My heart is pounding, my anxiety is through the roof, and my brain refuses to grant me sleep. I’m still awake when the sun rises. It dawns on me (delightful pun) that he didn’t have sex with me because he probably boned one of the moms who chaperoned on the trip. Everyone loves Jeremy. He’s the hot soccer dad who makes everyone feel good.

Now I’m pissed. If Jeremy wants to be with other people, he should have told me that. If he thinks shared interests are a problem then why do we always have a blast when we’re together? If he knew this was going to happen, why did he spend the night having fun only to say “Peace out!” at the very end?

Fuck it. I can’t sleep anyway. I turn my phone back on and construct a text. I address it to myself so that I can get the words out of my head without the fear of sending it. I tell him the things I wrote in the previous paragraph. I also say that wasn’t considerate to tell me any of this outside of a one-night drunken ramble.

Deep down, I want to undo this. I know Jeremy is full of words of affirmation. I slide in compliments without being obvious. I end it by asking if he’s truly 100% certain this is the right thing for him because if so, I’ll begin the steps for us to be out of each other’s lives.

I read it. I re-read it. I edit it. Fuck it. I send it.

With no expectation of a reply within the next few days, I try again for sleep. My brain is still a total dick and wants to ruminate instead. Two hours later, Jeremy’s reply pops up.

He apologized for his behavior throughout this entire drawn-out breakup I didn’t even know what was happening until the end. For the reply to the 100% certainty question, he replied that he wouldn’t feel as bad and stupid if it was. “But I was feeling like a jerk being in something that I couldn’t see having a long-term happy ending, which meant I wasn’t in it 100, which I felt wasn’t fair for you (or me).” The last paragraph talks about how I need to give myself more credit for my awesomeness (paraphrasing).

I’m livid. Don’t give me the “not fair to you” bullshit. I’ve used that line in dozens of breakups. My rage goes on full blast, fueled by the delirious lack of sleep.

I go on a rant about how I’m incensed that Jeremy dared utter what was fair to me. If he’s not feeling the relationship vibe anymore or he wants to fuck other women, then so be it. But don’t lie that any of it was done out of fairness to me.

If things were fair, I would have known about his concerns. If things were fair, Jeremy would have talked to me so we could see if his issues were solvable. If things were fair, he’d have granted 1% of effort to talk to me so I could speak my thoughts.

The beauty of being a writer is that I write great zingers. I take great pride in writing “You slapped a muzzle on me and told yourself it was benevolent.” Damn, I’m good.

I end it with “You can feed the BS lines to yourself, just spare them with me. You just didn’t want it anymore, which you’re entitled to feel, but at least be honest with me. Done rambling but still incensed. It is what it is and I’m not in the business of convincing anyone that they should try to make something work if they simply don’t want it.”

I throw in another text saying that I’m still in the denial step of the breakup and that if he replies it’ll give me hope that he’d still want to talk to make it work. “Geezus fuck heartbreak hurts like a bitch”.

Jeremy replies in record time (shocking that he’s able to do that given his track record), “I feel both terrible myself AND that I am the biggest jerk on the planet.”

Yeah, bro. You deserve to feel like trash.

It’s 1:15 pm. I still haven’t slept yet. I’m not in the mood to text my friends the news because I have different friend groups and I don’t want to deal with the bombarding of oh-em-gee-what-happened messages.

Or maybe it’s my denial and I hope he’ll realize it’s worth working out.

I dated more people since my divorce than most do in a lifetime. I can’t even imagine going back to that but I’m in my late forties and I work from home. I can’t go back to that sea of endless online dates even though I ache to be in love and in a committed relationship.

Yes, I’ll eventually get over this. But that’s like saying I’ll walk after a year of intense and painful therapy. I’m not worried that I won’t get over it.

I’m worried about the endless pain I’ll feel until I get there.