The untangling.
How we spend the hours and days and weeks after what I am going to call—the breakup. Now I realize you might call it something different in your world. And maybe you do that because you’re still in school and just starting to figure out your love story. Or—maybe you’re coming out of a ten- or twenty-year marriage with someone you thought was your grow old together person. Or—maybe you’re healing from someone you’ve known your whole life, and you’re much older than you’d ever thought you’d be—doing this whole starting over thing. So because of all those reasons, I get that the word breakup might seem so incredibly small in comparison to what it does to us. To you. Your word might be divorce. Or separation. Or growing apart. But—no matter who you are or what you’re navigating—and no matter what you want to call it—we all have to do this part, love. Want it or not. Ready or not.
We have got to untangle.
And so what does that mean? Well—untangling is the days we don’t really talk about and aren’t good at. The place where so many of us cover up how we feel with avoidance and isolation—slumping into a lonely place where we swipe even harder on dating apps and throw ourselves into fitness and do everything we can to avoid the feeling of feeling. It’s the place where we give in to the fact that we’re alone and it’s our fault and there is just something wrong with us because this keeps happening. It’s the place we swirl around in, dancing with all the things that remind us of a life that isn’t ours anymore. The place where we honestly knew it was broken but still want to go back to—because loneliness is scary. And endings are scary. And a future we’ve never met and can’t see any part of is much scarier than anything we had in our past.
And that is the place I want to bring a little light to.
And I’m going to write this book as I navigate it—so it’s real. And I’m putting more out there than I ever have before because the way I see it—vulnerability is the only foundation we can ever really build anything solid on. It’s what we all hesitate to do—to give—because, well, vulnerability is just about as scary as it gets. And vulnerability gives other people the chance to have opinions about our truths. And that means we can get hurt. Again. Just by putting who we are out there.
So this is the story of how we do a part of life we have to do but never wanted to. This is the story of what we learn from experiences we never thought we’d have and lessons we never knew we needed. I know it’s going to hurt—but I also know that pain is often what teaches us most about what matters in this life. One day, you will be certain of that, too.
Time is an incredible lens. And until it shows you why things had to happen like they did—just trust that these parts you’re living now are all just a powerful way this life is choosing to steer you. As it teaches you, slowly, the beautifully complicated art of untangling your knots.
**
2. “This Cannot Be Happening.”
When it all comes crumbling down.
Things had been different for a few days. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. You know—I’ll just say it came from completely out of the blue. And from where I sat, nothing had happened. We hadn’t been fighting, there were no big life events plaguing us, we didn’t have things we were “working through,” there was no—anything—that would explain what had changed. Or why. And to be honest, the change wasn’t anything I could quite put my finger on, exactly—I guess you could just call it a change in energy.
Now, side note—I’m firmly convinced that some people can just sense things. Call it a gut feeling. Call them empaths. Call it plain old intuition. But whatever it is—sometimes it’s a helpful superpower. And others, it’s just not. When you feel things like that, you can often sense something happening before the person feeling it is even aware they are feeling it. And trust me, that is not always an easy thing to wrestle with. You flip-flop back and forth between talking about it and making it real—or not talking about it, and letting it eat you up inside.
But anyway, something about how his eyes caught mine just seemed—off. Like he was hiding something. And what seemed crazy to me, is this change appeared right after some of the best times we’d spent together. When the rest of the world disappears and it’s just you and that other person standing in time. When words are said that bubble up feelings of yes and trust and maybe this is how it’s supposed to be. Those are the times you can’t see it coming. Endings. Because your eyes are completely clouded with the beginning or the middle of what you hope and pray is your incredible love story.
I thought we had been really good at communication, and so I figured he would let me know when he was ready. So, I gave him time.
He pulled back slowly. First it was the delay in responding. Then it was the wishy-washy level of commitment that settled more in the maybe zone than the outright yes or no zone. Then it was his tone. I remember asking him over the course of a week or so if everything was alright. And rather than opening up about whatever it was that was bothering him, he started to snap a little.
“You always ask me that. You always think something is going on.”
Now, just another little side note here: I’m also firmly convinced that when people use the word always, there is usually always something actually going on. Always is a word that comes from a place of frustration. A word we use as an amplifier—to strengthen and intensify a point we are usually trying way too hard to make.
Anyway, him pulling back, coupled with the lack of any substantive communication about why, is where I knew something was really wrong.
And I guess that’s the place we all start measuring, isn’t it? Once we feel that something is happening—especially in the absence of any concrete information telling us why—we start hyperfocusing on every single little detail. And we collect these details from every interaction we have—or every lack of interaction—while we try with everything we’ve got to figure out what is happening before it actually happens. We start paying attention to how long it takes that person to respond to messages they used to immediately respond to. Whether they answer on the first or ninth ring. Or not at all. We are constantly sensing whether the connection is still there that used to carry us. And the longer we go without those things—or with fundamental changes in those things—the more we get in our own heads.
And overthinking is a dangerous game. Because that’s the place the chaos starts.
When we get into that spin of overthinking and overanalyzing, then we also change how we act in (or react to) a situation. We don’t see that part happening, of course, because we’re just focused on what the other person is doing. And how that is affecting us. But when we change how we act; they change how they act. And it’s a vicious cycle. Where one side is contributing to the other, and the spinning just keeps getting faster and faster and faster until we have each created a story about what is happening, and why.
A story we haven’t communicated to each other.
A story that is likely very far from the real truth.
A story that, with each word we write, cracks a little more of the foundation we have spent so long building our love story on.
Anyway, the point came where I couldn’t wait to figure it out anymore. So, I called him. I was kind. Genuine. Not argumentative. And he was—immediately cold. Like, cold in a way I’d never seen in him before. Still thinking this was something we could work through, I explained that things had felt different, and I wasn’t sure why. I asked if he felt it too. I tried to get him to talk to me—I mean, we’d spent hours and hours talking about everything we could in this life. Even communication itself, and how incredibly hard it could be when things actually did get hard.
“I guess so,” he