Romantically inclined singles tend to hate Valentine's Day. It's easy to liken the cold, biting weather to your cold, biting soul and fantasize about murdering, oh, everybody. It's especially bad for the newly single. Every breakup sucks, but the most recent breakup always comes back to sting. In my case, the worst dumping ever happened in 2008, when my boyfriend looked me in the eyes and told me he no longer loved me. Three days after I moved to another country to be with him.
After a multi-year long-distance relationship, with each of us going back and forth between Nashville and London (he was English), I had finally secured a long-term visa and hoped to eventually establish residency. I was accepted into a graduate program I didn't want to attend, took out $20,000 in loans I couldn't afford and high-tailed it over to Blighty so we would no longer have to be apart.
Not the cleverest of ideas! It turns out, he and one of his female friends had managed to fall in love while I was away for 6 months. That I had spent that 6 months living with my parents and waiting tables in a catfish restaurant so I could save money made it hurt just a little (lot) more. I would have really appreciated knowing about his romantic side project before, you know, I bought the plane ticket.
Rather understandably, I went a bit crazy. I gave him some opinions I had forgotten I had ("fat failed actor with daddy issues"), let him know what I thought of the girl he was leaving me for ("a boring, clomping Eddie Izzard look-alike — are you sure you're not gay?") and gave serious thought to burning his prized Doctor Who collection, because it genuinely would hurt his blackened little heart far more than he had hurt mine (I didn't do it, of course).
But it wasn't always thus! We had loved! We took wonderful day trips to museums, threw parties, had long and lovely conversations about nothing, traveled to Paris, France, (and Chattanooga, Tenn.), and spent many a pleasant Sunday watching bad TV and making up horrible puns. I was happy I had met him and sorry I had to end a good relationship with a nice guy to be with him. Oh yes, it's true. During moments of honest self-reflection, I realize he did nothing to me I hadn't done to someone else. In my defense, I didn't lie about it for months, but I'm not as good a failed actor as he is.
Could he have been more tactful and empathetic? Absolutely. But it's not as if I'm pining away because he's the One that Got Away. There are others. Men who are funny, handsome, smart ... Scottish. Besides, maybe he and Eddie were meant to be together, and I was nothing more than an amusing American hiccup in their otherwise legendary romance. These things do happen.
But if that's not true, then he's definitely gay.
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