To say my last break up was dramatic would be an understatement. Just after our two year anniversary, my boyfriend at the time lost his job, and our relationship took a nose dive, getting steadily worse for three months after. He was the type that would blame everyone and everything else for his problems before he’d actually consider he might have done something wrong. Obviously, we’d been together for two years, so this wasn’t new to me. But when he started to take out his anger on me and tried to make me feel guilty because I was doing better career-wise than he was, I started to seriously consider breaking up with him.
As we all know, breakups aren’t easy, but he took the split harder than most would. Luckily, he stopped short of actually hurting me physically, but he was suicidal, he harassed me with hundreds of calls, texts, and emails, and he even managed to log into my social media accounts and change a bunch of stuff. He finally went too far when he sent text messages to his friend saying that he wanted to kill me and himself, and his friend’s wife called the police. He was charged with criminal harassment and making death threats. Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting to leave that relationship with a restraining order against him.
Here’s what I went through after this nuts ordeal:
- Total shock. I knew he wasn’t going to take the breakup well, but I never expected him to go as far as he did. He turned into a completely different person from the guy I’d been dating for over two years, so it took some time to believe that what happened actually happened.
- Complete confusion. Since he never sent any threatening texts to me, I never knew what exactly he said. At first, I wanted to know, but after a little time went by, I decided it didn’t matter. I could have asked the police to see them, but I just didn’t want to.
- Extreme fear. Even though I knew he was most likely all talk, it’s still pretty scary to hear that someone actually said they wanted to kill you. You never really know what’s going on in someone else’s head and what they’re capable of when they’re pushed to the edge.
- Serious guilt. Obviously I know that nothing he did was my fault, but I did care about him at one point, so it’s hard not to feel guilty for hurting him. I wasn’t even the one who called the police. I just wish we could have found a way to break up without it turning into such an ordeal.
- Embarrassment. Since no one really knew what he was capable of, I had to tell everyone what was going on. That included my entire family, all my friends he had ever met and might try to contact, and even my boss at the time. Again, the situation was not my fault, but it’s still not something I wanted people knowing about. Unfortunately, I had no choice.
- Irrational concern. Clearly, as the victim, I shouldn’t have been wondering how he was doing. But that’s easier said than done. I really had no way of finding out how he was doing either. If only to feel safe going to sleep at night, it would have been nice to know if he regretted what he did.
- Intense anger. I might seem pretty calm and reasonable about the whole thing now, but trust me, once the smoke had cleared a little bit after he got arrested, I was pissed. And I had nowhere to put that anger because I couldn’t talk to him. Not that yelling at him would have helped, but it would have been satisfying at least.
- The never-ending court case. It was almost six months before anything really happened in court regarding his charges. It’s pretty hard to move on when I could find out any day that I might have to testify against him. But luckily that didn’t happen, and now I can finally start putting it behind me.
- Relief. Not only am I relieved that I finally mustered up the strength to break up with him, but I’m relieved that because of the restraining order, he’s legally not allowed to contact me. That means there’s no chance of him late night booty calling me, and no way he’ll ever be able to beg for another chance. It’s 100% over with no ambiguity, and that has made the actual break up easier in a way.
