Everybody Knows It Hurts To Grow Up

The title to this post is from a Ben Folds song called "Still Fighting It" which, even though it's actually about a father/son relationship, has come to stand for the hell that has been my last week and a half.

I broke up with Joel, my boyfriend of five years, last Saturday.

Just typing that makes me cry.

It's so fucking complicated, and it's so hard. Nothing really changed -- he remained the sweet, funny, throwing-himself-headlong-into-everything person that he is, and I remained the thoughtful, English-geek, talkative person that I am. I just came to the end of two months of thinking which made me realize that I wasn't sure if he was the right person for me. That, in fact, I wasn't even even sure what I wanted, or who I really was apart from Joel.

Not surprisingly, after five years of going out, we'd been talking about marriage. And that made me realize I just wasn't ready to commit my life to Joel. Not because he's not a wonderful person, but just because he might not be the wonderful person who's supposed to be my husband.

So I told him that. And he cried. And I cried. And I spent the rest of the week wandering around in a daze alternatly leaping back into my (now very surreal) life of classes and QCF and friends, and curling up on my bed thinking "Why does it have to be this way?".

I know I did the right thing, but that doesn't make it any easier. It doesn't stop me from wanting to call Joel, to see if he's doing any better, just to talk to him. It also doesn't stop actually talking to Joel being a truly gut-wrenching experience. It doesn't stop the fact that I just organized a QCF retreat on 'Relationships' this weekend, an irony which will be hysterically funny in a few years. But not now. Ditto for the irony of me speaking at QCF next Thursday on the topic of 'love'.

I used to think that when breakups happened, someone had to have changed. That something had to be 'wrong'. That someone was the bad guy, and someone was the good guy. I used to think all that.

Everybody knows it sucks to grow up.