Forgiving yourself for leaving too soon

· 10 min read

The simulation runs on present need

The film you keep playing of the relationship you left is not memory. It is a composite, edited by the loneliness of the current month, in which the bad scenes have been trimmed and the good ones have been color-graded. A different month, with different loneliness, would edit a different film. The film cannot serve as evidence in the case against your past self, because the film is being produced by the prosecutor. Notice this. Notice when the film starts playing and whose need is in the editing booth. The noticing does not stop the film, but it does stop you from mistaking it for truth.

The fog on both sides

The fog of staying obscured the exit. The fog of leaving obscures the road not taken. Neither fog clears with time. The road you walked is the only one you can survey, and you survey it imperfectly, and the road you did not walk is permanently unmappable. To insist on mapping it anyway, to draw the cities and gardens you would have built there, is to treat the unknowable as knowable. The deepest humility, in this regret, is to leave the other road blank. Not "it would have been beautiful." Not "it would have been ruin." Blank.

What the body knew

The body often leaves before the mind does. You woke up tired around them. Your shoulders held a posture they did not hold elsewhere. Your appetite changed in their presence in ways you noticed only later. The mind, with its loyalty to narratives, may now produce reasons why the body was wrong. The body was not wrong. The body was reading signals the mind had agreed to filter out for the sake of the relationship. When you left, you were following the body's reading. To overrule that reading from the comfort of distance is to assume the mind knows more than the body knew. It almost never does.

The pattern that had not broken

If a behavior has been requested, discussed, promised, and unaltered across cycles, the data points are not random. You were extrapolating from a curve. The fact that the curve might, in some other timeline, have eventually bent does not mean the extrapolation was wrong. Most curves continue. People change rarely, slowly, and usually not because of the request of a partner. The leaver who reads the curve and exits is not impatient. She is numerate. The current loneliness has trouble with numeracy, because it would prefer to believe that any curve can bend.

The grief of constraint vs. the regret of choice

You may not be able to have the family you wanted at the age you wanted it. That is a real grief, and it should be allowed to be a grief, and it should not be collapsed into a regret. Grief mourns what was lost. Regret blames a past self. They feel similar in the chest but require different responses. Grief asks to be felt and accompanied. Regret asks to be argued with. The collapse of one into the other is what keeps people stuck for years, mourning what is gone by attacking the self who made it gone, when the mourning could be done directly.

The audition problem

Notice how the person you left gets recast in the script of your current life. In the version where you are lonely, they become the warmth you forfeited. In the version where you are exhausted by dating, they become the stability you forfeited. In the version where you cannot afford your apartment, they become the security you forfeited. They are not appearing in these scripts as themselves. They are appearing as the part you currently need cast. The real them, the one who would not have solved any of these, has been written out.

The friends who liked them

The hardest evidence in the case against your past self is often the testimony of friends or family who liked your partner. "We all thought they were good for you." This testimony is not nothing, but it is also not from inside the room. They saw the dinners, the holidays, the moments when both of you were performing the relationship for the audience that included them. They did not see the silences. They did not see the slow accounting you did at three in the morning. Their good opinion does not overturn your verdict. It just records what was visible from the seats they sat in.

The next relationship problem

If you have not yet had a relationship that surpasses what you left, the regret will use this as proof. It will not consider that the search itself is slow, that the pool changes with age, that you are different now, that the standard you developed inside the previous relationship may have been recalibrated upward by exactly the leaving. Absence of a better option later does not retroactively prove the option you had was the best. It proves that good options are rare, which was true before, during, and after. The rarity is the rarity. It is not a verdict on the past.

Sometimes you were wrong

Some leavings are mistakes. Honest accounting requires the possibility. If, looking back, you can see a specific blind spot that drove the decision, a fear you were running from rather than a problem you were running toward, name it. Name it precisely, separate from the rest. The naming does not undo the leaving. It does, however, give you data for the next decision, which is the only thing the past can still be used for. The regret is more workable when it is specific. "I was scared of being known" is a tractable sentence. "I ruined everything" is not.

The story your family tells

Families often have a single story about why your relationships do not last. The story is rarely accurate, because the family did not have inside access, but it is repeated, and over time it can become the voice in your head when you remember the leaving. Hear this voice and recognize whose voice it is. Your mother's view of why you left, your father's view, the sibling's, the well-meaning aunt's, these are guesses from outside the room. They are not authoritative. The authoritative voice is the one of the self who was actually in the room and made the call.

The forgiveness that is not certainty

You may never be sure you made the right decision. The forgiveness is not contingent on the certainty. It is the practice of treating the uncertain past self the way you would treat any other person trying to make a hard call with incomplete information. With patience. With the assumption of good faith. With the willingness to let her be wrong without revoking her membership in the species. The certainty you are waiting for to forgive yourself is not coming. The forgiveness has to be extended in the uncertainty, or it does not get extended at all.

Building the life that vindicates her

The deepest answer to "did I leave too soon" is not produced by argument. It is produced by the slow construction of a life in which the leaving makes sense, because the life is good, because you have grown into the person the leaver was making room for. Some of this is in your control and some is not. The part that is in your control is the only part you can work on. Each piece of that life you build is a quiet vote of confidence in the past self, not because it proves she was right, but because it honors what she was trying to give you the room to become.

Citations

1. Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. New York: Harper, 2006. 2. Johnson, Sue. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2008. 3. Gottman, John M., and Nan Silver. What Makes Love Last? How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. 4. Lerner, Harriet. The Dance of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 5. Lerner, Harriet. The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. 6. Gottlieb, Lori. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. 7. Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Oakland: New Harbinger, 2015. 8. Mellody, Pia. Facing Codependence. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1989. 9. Real, Terry. The New Rules of Marriage. New York: Ballantine, 2007. 10. Fisher, Helen. Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. 11. Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York: Guilford Press, 2012. 12. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.

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