My Story aka Why I Decide to Write This Book For You… and Me

I thought I’d met the one. Everything he did seemed to point to him being a great man – my perfect match. He was established and happy in his career. He asked me twice to be his girlfriend. He intimated moving in together. He looked for solutions to our problems. He said things to me like, “I don’t care what anyone else would ever say, I know I love you, and I want you.” He wrote me love poems and got up early on Sunday mornings to make me tea in bed.

It was all going so well… until it wasn’t anymore. Little by little, things began to change without explanation.

He stopped coming home excited to see me. He spent time on his phone and alone in another room. We weren’t laughing or playing together. We hadn’t had sex in weeks. And as all of this went on, I began feeling more and more nervous as the tension in the air gathered between us. He was tired all the time and acted indifferent to me. I could feel him emotionally and physically withdrawing from me. Any affection felt forced. He was irritable, and I was walking on eggshells.

I didn’t know how to (or that I could) express this intangible tension I was feeling. I had nothing tangible to point to, like cheating or abuse. I was confused, muted, and miserable. What had happened? What changed? He courted me and fought for me… what was going on? Was he not sure about me – again?

I would stay up till 2 am, curled up in the fetal position, crying on the living room floor because I didn’t understand why he was pulling away. My throat closed up, and I struggled to breathe. My mind clouded, and I couldn’t think. I felt powerless and hopeless. I subconsciously believed that I had to protect myself and prepare for the other shoe to drop, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

One day the other shoe dropped. No amount of dress rehearings and waiting for the other shoe to drop prepared me for the pain I experienced when the relationship ended. 

He point blankly said he’d packed up all his stuff from our apartment and didn’t want to be with me. He went as far as to say, “I never really thought about marrying you. You’re not the one.”

It felt like I’d been physically punched in the chest. This man who’d proven that he’d fight for me time and again was now telling me that he didn’t want to be with me. I felt blindsided. On the inside, I was crumbling. I felt angry, sad, hopeless, and worst of all – to blame.

I felt things were happening to me, and I had no control over them. I was miserable, in love, and stuck. I lived in fear that he would leave me, and now it was coming true. I didn’t know what to do.

When he broke up with me, I stayed calm and collected outwardly, but on the inside, I was still looking for a way to make him want me.

I approached him like I approached any problem in my life that needed to be solved and handled. I put the lab coat on and got to work with my charts and measuring instruments. What was he thinking? What was he feeling? What was he doing? I tried analyzing everything to make sense of him. Even after those grueling hours of lab work, I wasn’t any closer to a solution. In fact, I felt even further away from him than I’d ever been. 

 Then I realized something: I was chasing him. I was hiding my feelings from him.

A connection couldn’t exist because neither of us was willing to put ourselves out there. Neither of us had healed or dealt with our shame. We were too afraid to show each other our baskets filled with fear of rejection. Neither of us could open our hearts, so no matter how often we told each other we were in love with other, it wasn’t really true. 

It’s when I’d finally hit rock bottom, in my darkest times, when I realized that what I’d been doing was the definition of insanity – “doing the same thing and expecting different results.” At the bottom, there really was nowhere to go but up. 

I stopped dead in my tracks and dropped doing things completely. I pulled my energy to myself and worked on my happiness. I decided to live in the arena. If this relationship had any hope, I had to look internally at all of the barriers within myself that prevented me from love.

When I finally stopped trying to show off what a catch I was… When I stopped trying to convince him I was the perfect woman… When I stopped all chasing behavior towards him… When I stopped trying to earn affection and love… that’s when it all turned around, and incredible men started hunting me like I was the only gazelle within a 10,000 radius of a wild lion reserve.  

I gave myself credit for everything that I’d been through in life. I’m resourceful. I’ve bounced back from losing everything in my life multiple times. I knew in my core that no matter what he decided, which I couldn’t control, I wouldn’t just be alright. I would thrive. 

I believed so fiercely in the beauty and inevitability of my remarkable life, even if he didn’t end up being the one.

I realized that doing my self-care routine and focusing on my happiness wasn’t enough. I was attempting to “fake it til you make it.” I was pretending I would be okay while still secretly, desperately wanting him to choose me. This man knew me. He saw and felt my desperation, making him want to recoil more. 

So then I asked myself, how can I truly feel and know that I would thrive (no matter what he decided)? What more could I do than self-care? More than social events with my friends? More than growing myself and my career?

I cared about our relationship. I wanted to be married to him. But.. I didn’t need him. I knew that I would be married. I internalized that I am lovable, the prize, and a man who wanted to be with me needs to show me that he is capable of giving me what I desire in life. 

My energy shifted from avoidant behavior and not saying anything to rock the relationship boat to having the confidence to express what I wanted and what I felt because it was the truth. 

If he was going to get out of the car and futz around on the side of the road, I would stay in the car with my map. I knew where I was going and that I would eventually get there, whether it was him driving or another man. 

If we didn’t want the same things in life, I would be okay because I knew what I wanted. I wasn’t going to keep trying to force it. I decided that what I wanted more than him was for me and him to have the best partners for us. If that wasn’t each other, that was okay because, in the end, I would still have my happily ever after with a great man who could and wanted to give me all of the things I wanted. 

When I thought I had already worked out all my kinks and I was ‘healed,’ I intellectually knew what to do, but I still didn’t feel worthy exactly as I was. 

When I finally shifted my reality, he came back to me. He begged to come back and spoke sweet nothings into my ear: “I want you, I want all of you.” He wanted to work on our relationship.