When you find out you were the villain

I had someone say to me once “if you’ve never had a psycho ex, odds are you were the psycho ex!”

Now I’m going to say straight up, that I’m not a fan of labeling men or women psycho. It is often used to minimize issues or make out that one party shouldn’t be listened to. I have, however, had my fair share of bad relationships.

There was the girlfriend who got me to pay for her airfare home because she missed me and then she left me the next day. Or the one who slept with her ex-boyfriend then told me about it, and then told me I was being too possessive. Not to mention the one that wrote a list of the 23 things she hated about me.

I struggled with depression and low self-esteem for most of my adult life. There were a variety of underlying causes, but I’d be naive to not include my failed relationships in the list.

I spent nights crying, days moping around, and all time in between ruminating (even though I know people that hate that word) over this lost love. I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong, and my friends convinced me it was them not me. I accepted the mantra that “everything happens for a reason”. What I didn’t accept until very recently is that sometimes that reason is that there were things I could have done better. In fact, in some relationships, I was the one at fault.

When someone is suffering a heartbreak, our instinct is not to jump on their already broken heart and look for the things they did wrong. Instead, we find fault with the other person, we want to make those we care for feel better. We tell them that we can’t understand why the other person has broken up with them. We tell them that the other person is silly to have let you go. We manifest the belief that the other person is at fault, and we are a good people.

I can only assume that my ex-girlfriends had people around them telling the same story. This means we end up with two people thinking they were the one that has suffered at the hands of the other person.

Not long ago I ended up speaking with an ex, I hadn’t spoken to her in over two decades. When we broke up, I was shattered. I had carried around the belief that she had acted selfishly, that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way and that she was the bad person. It turns out our memories of the time were vastly different.

I had met her through her brother who was a good friend and my flatmate when we first met. She was five years younger than me, good-looking, and way out of my league. But we hit it off, and then one night when she was staying at our place after a night out, we shared a kiss. Her brother was protective of his little sister, so I asked her to keep it a secret from him.

This was the first part where our memories diverged. I thought that she had suggested we not tell him, but she reminded me of a conversation where I said it would be better not to let him know. She took that to mean I was embarrassed by her, when in fact I think, I was just trying to start a relationship without having the added stress of a big brother.

The more we talked the more I realized that things I had done made her feel like I wasn’t serious about her. She never met my parents, although part of that was me trying to prevent my mother from scaring her off. When I was looking for a new flatmate, I didn’t ask her to move in, instead, a close female friend of mine moved into the other room.

At the end of our chat, I was feeling quite bad about the way I behaved. She reassured me that she’d moved on and was now married happily. It’s sad to make the realization that you behaved badly, much like the John Cusack character in High Fidelity I find myself looking at all those lost relationships through a new lens.

I learned things about myself, I’m not dwelling on the past, just making sure that I take those lessons to become a better person now.