It was nearly three months in quarantine when I decided to end an 11-year relationship with my partner. Hearing the words roll out of my mouth was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had. It was as if I were both inside and outside of myself watching it as it happened.
At the time, it felt spur-of-the-moment and possibly accidental. I worried if I was making the right decision. But two months later, it’s turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for myself.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
Living during this pandemic has shown us all of the aspects of our lives that are strained — what we need to give more attention and what we need to cut out completely. Relationships are no exception.
Many may think the reason for the breakup was because we were long-distance for the last three years or the fact that he hadn’t yet proposed after so long together. I may have thought that too. But now I realize, while those may have contributed to my decision, it was deeper than that — I was entangled in him. I needed someone else to make decisions for me, because I was afraid to make them for myself. When I finally realized that, I came to the conclusion that a relationship, like life, is what we make it.
Our life together started after we met in college, falling deeply in love within a short amount of time. We started making plans like every other committed couple, sharing our dreams, fears, and everything in between. Eleven years of triumphs, trials, challenges, and overcoming them. Yet, somewhere along the way, we got lost in the expectations of family, society, and, worst of all, the normalized cultural phenomenon of becoming each other’s everything.
I’d like to say it was bound to happen — we were 19 when we met, had never been in love, and were completely honest and open with each other. We had no secrets and lost all sense of boundaries because it felt better to be completely entangled within each other. It wasn’t until I graduated from college in Oakland and moved back to Los Angeles that we figured out this would be extremely difficult to maintain. So, we made plans to look for jobs that would allow us to be together, whether that be in the Bay or in Los Angeles. I wanted to go to grad school, so I applied and accepted admission into University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. I completed their two-year program while maintaining a long-distance relationship. Within three months of graduating, I landed a job at Twitter and was able to move back to the Bay Area in 2015, where my partner was finishing grad school in Berkeley.
So much has happened over the last five years.
I turned 30 in March. Something about hitting a new decade when the world shifts into pandemic mode makes you reevaluate your life choices. I became rededicated to continuing along a path of putting myself first — health-wise and happiness-wise. I shifted my diet and ramped up my fitness.I tapped into how I was truly feeling about my actions and interactions with others. I started paying close attention to what made me feel seen, heard, and restored. And it was in paying closer attention to all of this that I figured out I was no longer happy in my relationship — and that it was because of my own doing.
When we don’t prioritize ourselves, if we don’t give ourselves the space and patience to explore that, we can lose sight of everything that makes us who we are. We can lose sight of how to love ourselves and how to be loved. Because when we become so completely entangled within our significant others, we often can no longer see ourselves.
Before the pandemic, we got used to focusing our attention on living busy lives and ignoring our problems, says Sherita Nelson, a licensed marriage and family therapist.
“Now we are forced to have difficult conversations that we would normally avoid,” Nelson said. “We’ve noticed our own anxiety and self-defeating behaviors that were nonexistent in our minds due to the ‘busy lives’ we had created.”
Eventually, my partner and I lost our ability to be present. We’d completely lost sight of ourselves as individuals, which impacted our ability to be there for each other. Sure, they were the result of situations both within and outside of our control, but neither of us could shake them. It’s like we started to drown in the planning. If we’d been completely honest with each other, I think my partner and I knew that we had been growing apart.
Trying to be each other’s happiness during a time like this showed us that we were operating from a place of lack and fear. When you’re trying to be someone else’s everything, it leaves you empty. For us, being in quarantine made us realize we’d been so focused on planning our future — careers, engagement, marriage, and the rest of our lives — that we weren’t really living in the moment. Nelson says that for some, the ways we’ve had to change our lives to adapt to Covid-19 is a blessing in disguise, and for others it has been a nightmare.
“I encourage my patients to put things into perspective three ways: 1) Change your situation, 2) change your response to the situation, or 3) accept the situation and do nothing. This allows you to respond how your emotions and cognitions need from you during this time… unapologetically,” she said.
Time got the best of us in so many ways. Being together for so many years made me feel like I didn’t have any options — until I realized I did. So I decided to start fresh, live in the now even if that meant on my own during quarantine. The last two months have been tough. When loneliness creeps in, I remind myself that this is the first time in my life that I’m actively and knowingly prioritizing myself. Reminding myself of this doesn’t always help the feelings go away, but it helps me keep in mind why I made my decision. I want to take this time to relearn myself, to explore who I’ve become, to determine what I want to cultivate and what I need to heal.
Quarantine has proven to be extremely lonely for a lot of people. And some may think that because of that, ending a relationship right now is cold or foolish. I might have agreed with them years ago, but time has taught me that waiting until things are “better” before making decisions isn’t what’s always best for us. As far as the future, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I know that I want to be more secure in who I am, to trust myself more, and to become confident in my ability to take care of myself, make decisions for myself, and thrive on my own.
This doesn’t mean that I won’t welcome new experiences or relationships. It just means that I will be navigating them from a space of knowing that I am more than enough and that I come first. I’ve learned that trusting myself is what makes me happy. That means embracing transformation and taking the leap of faith. It’s what centers me, it’s what reminds me of my power. That’s my plan: to center myself and ride the wave.
