I felt aban­doned again last year. Heather was spend­ing less and less time with me, even though she had more time than ever¹. I start­ed cook­ing for myself, learned how to cook for her, took on as many chores as I could han­dle, but assum­ing addi­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ties nev­er seemed to trans­late into any mean­ing­ful time togeth­er; it seemed like she was pulling even fur­ther away.

Then she stopped check­ing in entire­ly. Months passed with­out a ques­tion of how I was doing or feel­ing. She would lat­er admit that van­i­ty, per­fec­tion­ism, and inse­cu­ri­ty made her pan­ic and freeze up. Even though she could tell I was unhap­py about our rela­tion­ship, it was eas­i­er to hide from the mon­ster she felt like and avoid fac­ing the pain she caused.

I just wish I was­n’t the one who paid for that cow­ardice, espe­cial­ly when I had already reached my break­ing point a year ear­li­er. There was no desire to com­mu­ni­cate on my end when it felt like she no longer cared, and know­ing that this would make her even more dis­tant — like some kind of neg­a­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion feed­back loop — was ter­ri­fy­ing. I asked my ther­a­pist for advice, and he brought up the idea of a heal­ing sep­a­ra­tion.

This was a great sug­ges­tion. Feeling resent­ful of Heather when she could­n’t meet my needs meant I had fall­en back into the mind­set of think­ing she was respon­si­ble for my hap­pi­ness. Some time apart is exact­ly what I need­ed to gain some per­spec­tive on the rela­tion­ship and reset those expec­ta­tions. Some time alone would also give me a chance to heal, so I could even­tu­al­ly be a sup­port instead of a bur­den dur­ing the times my part­ner is unre­spon­sive or unre­li­able.

I was pleased to know that this would be an oppor­tu­ni­ty for her to do some grow­ing on her own too. The last time she was sin­gle was at 18, and she rarely took the ini­tia­tive to pri­or­i­tize her own inter­ests. The last thing I want­ed was for her to lose her iden­ti­ty to anoth­er rela­tion­ship. And she was so used to hav­ing some­one around that being alone could cause an anx­i­ety attack; exact­ly the kind of thing that she could only work on by her­self.

We agreed to re-eval­u­ate where we were and how we felt at the end of the year; three months seemed like a prop­er length of time to be apart from the most impor­tant per­son in our respec­tive lives. Chores would be divid­ed between us. I agreed not to pur­sue roman­tic inter­ests out­side our rela­tion­ship until until we worked out our issues², and she agreed to start her own ther­a­py. Despite how dif­fi­cult things had got­ten, I felt some­what secure in the knowl­edge that we still cared about each oth­er and want­ed the same thing — that is, for the rela­tion­ship to work and to even­tu­al­ly re-unite.

1. When she first start­ed work­ing, not hav­ing a dri­ver’s license meant a four hour com­mute by bus each day. The pan­dem­ic gave her all that time back. [↩]
2. Not that I was par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in dat­ing any­way. [↩]