I strongly believe in the fact that sometimes, when you love someone, you’ve got to let them go, even if just temporarily at times.
This has been an issue for me with a few friends, with my family of origin for years, and most recently with my genderqueer European ex-lover.
For me, grief is deeply intertwined with rejection and abandonment issues, which is probably why I instinctively turn inwards and even push some people away from me when I’m grieving. I need to find — to rediscover or reestablish — my own capacity to “make it through” by myself ultimately. When people are, or seem to be, unwilling or unable to let me do that, I cut communication with them, at least temporarily, as a means to protect myself, on the one hand, and also to find deeper or faster healing, on the other. I have been doing this for many years with my family of origin because they so often broke or disrespected or invaded my boundaries, my need for silence and/or distance. I literally had to block them on my phone.
When my genderqueer European friend left a month ago, I asked them to give me some time before being in touch again, about 4-5 weeks of “radio silence” for me to recover from our separation. They agreed, a bit reluctantly, and I believed I could trust them. So I didn’t block them on my phone. But they broke that promise.
I am loyal. I believe deeply in friendship, it has been maybe my single deepest and most important belief and goal in life since childhood. I truly believe in building, maintaining, and rebuilding friendships/relationships. But I also strongly believe in the need for breaks, for silence, for distance sometimes, when necessary. Sometimes it is necessary. It can hurt in the moment but I think it helps to heal things deeper & faster in the long run.
I turn inward to myself and/or reach out to “safe” friendships and exercise, nature, and work when I’m grieving. I temporarily turn away from the cause of my pain or grief, which often involves temporarily “turning away” from the person causing or involved in (whether willingly or not) that pain/loss/grief. But I come back. I do come back. And when I come back with my heart healed I can give so much more — more friendship, more compassion, more empathy, more love — free of anger.
It’s going to be harder for me to do that with my genderqueer European ex-lover now because of their having disrespected my request for “radio silence” a month ago. Their reaching out to me way too early and with mixed messages in their communication to me has sort of “set me back” by almost a month in my healing process — or that’s how it feels to me now. And for this I’m angry with them.
When I asked them for 4-5 weeks of “radio silence”, roughly until after the Labor Day holiday weekend, I knew from past experiences that that would allow me sufficient time to do most of the “heavy lifting” of the grieving both for my father’s death and for the forced separation/breakup from my genderqueer European ex-lover. Not having gotten those four weeks of silence from them is making me feel “far behind” in my grieving process because every communication with them feels like a renewed separation or breakup from which I have to recover over and over again — like one step forward and two steps back.
This hurts me but it also infuriates me because it makes me feel like I have no control over my own healing process.
Despite it having been one of the loveliest, deepest, and strongest love stories of my life, the relationship with my genderqueer European ex-lover for me was — or needs to be — a “summer affair”, a wonderful little bubble belonging to 2-3 months of the spring/summer 2023 but nothing more. I need that closure, those boundaries, in order to be able to heal and move on with my life. There is no future for us together, so I need to be able to move on with my life, with the life I have chosen to build & live here in Colorado. They went back to their “normal life” in Europe, at “home”, their home, with their stable partners there with whom they already have built or are in the process of building a concrete life in Europe. The months here in Colorado were a bubble, a parenthesis, for them, a temporary phase in their professional as well as personal life, a temporary phase of which I happened to be a part. But that’s it, that’s all. They’ve gone back to their “normal”, “non-temporary” life in Europe which they already share with two partners. I don’t belong to that life of theirs there. I belong here. And I need to rebuild my life here, where I have been left on my own (i.e. without other partners). I feel like I was left behind — to me, I was de facto left behind, with very little choice or power in the matter other than the choice/power of severing communication (temporarily).
The fact that even that last little shred of choice/power/control was taken away from me by them infuriates me.
What choice/power/control am I left with now?
The Little Prince and the Fox 