At the end of my relationships – and I mean the very end, the time AFTER you break-up and make the decision to stop swinging back and forth between being out of it and being in it – I’m always hit by some of the profound changes that didn’t seem to take any effort at all to facilitate. In what seems like a moment, you can flip the switch from believing that you will get married, have children and grow old together to not even talking and to be filled with excitement at the thoughts of starting again with a stranger. You can just wake-up one day and be done.
Then the stuff begins to change. The excitement that used to fill your belly when you see them is replaced with an angered arousal that spikes rage and not lust. What used to be a soothing presence is replaced with anxiety. The once welcoming stare has been wiped of off both faces and is replaced with a flat emptiness, a void that seems to say “I know you less than someone I’ve never meet.” You sense an unwelcome-ness in each others eyes, a suspicion further confirmed by the dark energy emanating from false smiles and fabricated body language. You stiffen and lean against the flow of the world, choosing to fight the once natural bending and going with it.
What was your bright and exciting future becomes a stained memory tinted with bitterness, disappointment and all the other stuff that was manufactured during the break-up process to get you to change your mind.
It’s all made up though, it’s all a choice that we engage in to move us past the relationship and into the mind set of a single person. Intuitively we know that we cannot restart with someone else when we are in our mind still going with the old partner, so we create the break-up experience to allow us to start again, with a few new lessons and a clean slate, free from dueling thoughts of how good it could be with the new and the old. You may very well hate your ex, but they haven’t impacted you in a long time so the magnitude of the contempt is disproportionate to the actual physical impact they have on your life.
In her eyes you see nothing, and you shouldn’t. You need to obliterate your outdated understanding of the world that has them being a part of yours. And there’s a good chance that it needs to be this way. When someone is in our life for a long period of time, we normalize them being in our life. They become our habit. Unless you take drastic action to break the habit, you will allow yourself to see some reason to stay when you look into their eyes, unless you see nothing.