It’s good when it works out without bloodshed, this breaking-up thing. I’ve had experience. Several. Some went better than others. I am unafraid of calling a timeout when the trajectory of the partnership is going south. There’s no time to fix each other.

We fix ourselves. We learn to show up. The old patterns from younger relationships, youthful mistakes, have been taken down, examined, and set ablaze in the name of new beginnings.

You try this in a relationship, as it begins to veer off course. Set new goals. Agree to new boundaries. Retreat from expressing any doubt or frustration. That does not work. You can’t bottle up love, you can’t restrain past hurts by ignoring them, or trying to snuff them out. It takes time. Time is the balm.

As the past partner fades into the rearview mirror, you can begin to rebuild yourself from the parts that you remember. Fortunately, this meteoric flight was little over thirty days. WTF?

I’m trying to decode the DNA of this woman, as I exclaimed to my best friend since first grade, “She’s the most amazing woman I’ve ever met.”

“But there’s an issue.”

Of course there is. I was hoping to skip the incoming suppression fire by being an outstanding partner. Stay in my lane. Not too demanding.

For the most part, our connection was solid if perhaps a bit “higher” than I’m used to. Sans drugs. Just love. Light. Magic. Hallucinations were all mine, and all natural. What is it, what was it, and how will I slow myself from making a similar mistake in my next relationship-building experiment?

Perhaps, I put too much pressure on the love of my life. Perhaps she’s not the love of my life, but merely the embodiment of several archetypes that I favor. Let’s see.

Petite. Fit. Smile for miles. Smart. Into me.

That’s the equation. And, I lost my goddamn mind. Blew through my own rules and gameplans. I would never have advised a coaching client to ignore such a red flag. I shouldn’t have bypassed my own wisdom. I cannot fix a woman. A women who is still married, separated for four months and looking great… No. Just the details to work out and then it’s complete. No.

There is no good reason to break that rule. Not love. Not sex. Not loneliness. I think mine might have been my desire to escape the dessert I’ve been tending for more than two years.

Coming out of the wilderness I was hungry and hot for experience. We slipped through the eye of the needle into the hurricane of her chaos surround her unfinished divorce. The “he just left me” repose. It hurt to hear her say it. Each time.

You want to ask, even after they’ve told you how terrible the relationship was, for 18 years… Good god, “Do you want him back?”

Yes, it’s true, my ex-wife and mother of my children asked for the divorce, went to see an attorney while we were still in couples therapy, fuck me running, right? So, in a way, she left me.

The leaving had been happening for years. In a repeat of our initial contact, she began having lunches with a younger colleague. She had been lunching and flirting with me for weeks before she gave me the terrible news.

“I’ve got to go see about this other relationship, before you and I go any further.”

Good for her. Yet, she shouldn’t have been flirting, texting, and lunching with me if she was still living with a man. I mean, woman, what was the plan?

Sure, she wanted a baby. I did too. That was fortunate for both of us. Then, in a single hug, in the parking lot of Sweetish Hill, I lost my fucking mind. The smell of her perfume lingered on my neck the entire Easter Sunday afternoon, as I was at church with my mom and my sister. I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

We’d known each other in high school. She was in my typing class in 8th grade, the year I escaped temporarily. She was beautiful. She still is. I was hungry. A year off from my divorce from a clinically insane starter marriage. I wasn’t really ready to be a good judge of character. I fell tits over ass for her. By the time the dear John luncheon at Mother’s in Hyde Park happened, I was madly in love.

Love is a fleeting emotion. The work of a relationship is cultivating the loving feelings, the safety, and the emotional trust of both partners. Love doesn’t flourish under pressure or with harsh boundaries. It certainly can’t grow and evolve when one of the partners is still in the process of killing a previous lover from their heart and house. It cannot happen. It cannot work out. It will not be healthy.

It was warped.

She was in charge. I did that on purpose, hoping to stay within my mantra of “going slow.” We didn’t. And as the fire of our chemistry was burning away my doubt, it was beginning to get a bit toasty for her. She was still responding to letters from her ex, letters from her lawyer, advice from her ailing father, and concern from all of her supporting cast members.

I kept the depth of my delusion to myself. I spoke with friends, but kept my own love-drunk actions on the down low. I didn’t want to share with my best friend, an 81-year-old father figure, that I was sleeping with her, already.

I was going slow. Right?

No.

Again, my mistake. I take full responsibility for not following my own advice. Blowing into this younger woman’s tumultuous life with my romantic lovey-dovey bullshit. I overwhelmed the system.

A week ago, she asked me to take all of my things back out of her house. I had brought over a guitar, and we were talking about writing a song together. Okay. I did my best not to get angry about the balk. I asked a few days later, “Where did the idea come from to ask me to take all of my things back out of your house?” She was vague. There was no answer. Meanwhile much of her not-yet-ex-husbands stuff was still in the garage, and two bikes were leaning on the side of the house, in the weather. She needed to move his stuff out of her house, yes. I think I got caught in that desire. She exercised the wrong man.

When we got in a fight about the fact that she had never once stepped foot in my house, met my cats, or seen the rest of my landscape. I rolled with that too. Even as I was making room in my garage for the first second car in my five-year history here.

What does it take for a fairly competent partner to rush into something so toxic? To make excuses about the red flag. To keep diving deeper with each fractured exit.

The eyes glaze over. Something I said.

“Wait, wait,” I would say in the moment. “What just happened? Where did you go?”

Glassy stare.

“Can you come back. I’m sorry, if what I said made you mad. What can I do?”

The real answer, the answer I didn’t want to hear, was, “Get the fuck out. Let the woman process her divorce and her pain in peace. Let her feel the loneliness she has to feel. She must reboot all of her life. I was a short circuit. A short cut.

There are no shortcuts. None.

I tried for one.

I hope I learn and evolve into a better man. I hope that I can learn from this experience.

Real love is hard to find. I tried to hold a flaming hot gem. I got burned. I probably damaged the jewel in the process. I am sorry.

I am learning to leave quietly and without drama. The previous relationship of three years was a non-dramatic breakup. Well, once she was able to get past the disbelief that someone would break up with her.

I broke up with her in August, after returning from a trip to Upstate New York. I broke up with her before I left, but she was hanging on to the possibility of my return. I was not returning to be with her.

It was a painful scene, the second breakup. In the end, it fell compassionate and clean. She would probably tell the story differently. She would say, I was aggro, that she came to see me in January, and I was cold and distant. She recalled that I said, “You’re going to make someone very happy. You are a great catch.”

She was heading to San Diego the next day to be with her kids. Apparently, she went back to her house and destroyed all of the photos of us in her house, and shredded a Ferrari F1 jacket that was left in her closet. She burned the boats.

Last summer, she moved back to San Diego.

I learned a lesson from her that I carry forward. She was devoted to our partnership. I never felt she was going to leave me. She didn’t threaten. She was actually a little too sure of it all working out. She was not growing or stretching to be with me. I was doing most of the work to fix and heal our partnership.

Yes, we tried Brené Brown-ing, we tried reading books. She got a therapist. She got stuck in a rut. Stood her ground, demanding to be loved just as she was.

She didn’t know how to fight fare. We couldn’t discuss or work things out. It exploded. Trying to just be quiet and get alone, does not work. It didn’t work for us. And it didn’t work in my last blazing adventure. I might need to get a tattoo: go slow, don’t break things.

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