I was so wrong. Seriously.
I have thought a lot about the things I said to you, and I don’t think I have ever fully come to terms with the fact that I could love someone as much as I loved you and still be capable of hurting you the way I did.
That is a hard thing to admit about yourself. It is easier to remember how hurt you were, how frightened you felt, how badly you wanted to feel secure, and all the reasons you reacted the way you did. It is harder to look at someone you loved and acknowledge that, sometimes, you became a source of pain for him, too.
I am sorry.
I am sorry for the things I said to you when I was angry. I am sorry for the times I took things I knew were sensitive to you and used them against you. I am sorry for the insults, the accusations, and the moments when I seemed more concerned with making you feel the hurt I was feeling than with understanding one another. You did not deserve that from me. Whatever was happening inside me, I wish I had found a better way to express it.
The truth is, I don’t think you always understood just how much you meant to me. And I don’t think I always knew how to show you without letting my fear get in the way.
When you came back into my life, I was happier than I can explain. I had spent so long believing that chapter of my life was over. I had tried to accept it, even when some part of me never really had. I remember how it felt to hear from you again, to realize that perhaps the story I had thought was finished wasn’t finished after all. I was genuinely happy. I had hope again. I could imagine a future with you, and I wanted that future more than I think I ever knew how to communicate.
I loved you. I was attracted to you. I wanted you. I wanted a life with you. I wanted to feel that we were choosing each other, that we were building something that would last, that I could finally stop wondering whether the person I loved would one day decide he no longer wanted me in his life.
I think that last fear followed me more than I realized.
When someone has left your life before, it can be difficult to trust that they won’t leave again. You start looking for signs. You read into silences. You become sensitive to changes you might otherwise have let pass. Sometimes you start protecting yourself against something that hasn’t happened, and in doing so, you create pain in the present because you are trying to prevent pain in the future.
I can see now how much I struggled with that. I wanted reassurance, but I didn’t always ask for it in a way that made it possible for you to give it to me. I wanted to feel chosen, but sometimes I expressed that need through anger and criticism. I wanted to know that I mattered to you, yet there were moments when I treated you in ways that failed to show how much you mattered to me.
And the irony of that is not lost on me.
I was so afraid of being hurt by someone I loved that, at times, I became willing to hurt you myself. I don’t say that to make my behavior sound understandable or to excuse it. I say it because I need to be honest about what I see when I look back. Fear may explain some of my reactions, but it does not make them fair to you.
I have thought about the things I said about you, particularly the things I knew would hurt. I need you to understand that those words did not reflect the way I truly saw you. I did not think you were the things I called you. I did not stop finding you attractive or stop seeing the qualities that made me fall in love with you. I knew your insecurities, and in moments of anger, I used that knowledge carelessly. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had understood, in those moments, that there is a difference between telling someone how deeply they have hurt you and trying to make them hurt just as deeply.
I know that saying I didn’t mean those things doesn’t erase them. You still had to hear them. You still had to decide what to do with them. I cannot expect you to know what was in my heart when my words gave you reason to question it. I can only tell you that I regret them, and that I wish I had treated you with more tenderness than I did.
I think one of the hardest lessons in life is realizing that loving someone and knowing how to love them are two different things. We can feel something genuine and still handle it badly. We can want a future with someone and still make the present harder than it needs to be. We can be hurting and still be responsible for the hurt we cause.
I wish I had understood that sooner.
I wish I had been able to tell you when I was scared instead of getting angry. I wish I had been able to say that I needed to feel closer to you, that I was struggling with uncertainty, that I wanted to know we were moving toward the same future. Those things were vulnerable to admit. It was easier, sometimes, to be angry than to let you see how frightened I was of losing something that meant so much to me.
J you were not responsible for making every fear disappear. You were a person trying to navigate our relationship, too. You had your own feelings, your own insecurities, your own limitations. I wish I had made more room for that. I wish I had been more curious about what you were feeling instead of becoming so consumed by what I was afraid you might be feeling. I wish I had listened more and assumed less.
I also know that I cannot look back now and pretend I know exactly how everything would have turned out if I had been different. Maybe some things would have changed. Maybe some things would still have been beyond our control. A relationship is not the responsibility of one person alone, and I cannot take ownership of every decision, every hurt, or every part of what happened between us. But I can take ownership of myself. I can acknowledge the ways I made things harder. I can regret the times I hurt you without turning that regret into an argument about who hurt whom more.
I don’t know what you think about me when you look back on our relationship. I don’t know which moments you remember most or what you have had to work through yourself. I can’t tell you how to understand our history, and I don’t expect this to change anything for you. I only know that when I look back, I see someone I loved very much, and I also see moments when I did not treat you with the care that love should have inspired.
That is what I am sorry for.
Not simply that things ended differently than I wanted. Not just that we lost the future I imagined. But that, in the middle of everything we were trying to figure out, I sometimes made you feel worse when what I really wanted was to feel closer to you. That I said things I wish I could take back. That I allowed anger to speak for me when the truth underneath it was so much more vulnerable.
I wish I could go back to some of those moments and be gentler with you. I wish I could tell the version of myself who was so frightened of losing you that she didn’t have to fight so hard to be loved. That she could ask for what she needed without attacking the person she was asking. That being afraid did not mean something terrible was about to happen. That love was not something she could secure by arguing hard enough, demanding enough reassurance, or making the other person understand how much she was hurting.
I cannot go back and tell myself those things in time. And I cannot go back and spare you the things I said.
All I can do now is be honest about them.
I don’t want to look back on our relationship and make myself the victim of every painful thing that happened. I don’t want to make you the villain, either. I want to be able to remember what was good without denying what was painful, and to acknowledge my own mistakes without pretending they were the only mistakes. I want to be mature enough to hold the whole truth, even the parts that are difficult to live with.
You were someone I loved long before we became parents together. You were someone I had imagined a future with, someone whose return into my life brought me a kind of happiness I had almost stopped allowing myself to hope for. Whatever happened afterward does not make those feelings less real. And the fact that those feelings were real does not make the ways I hurt you any less real, either.
I wish I had done better by you. I wish I had protected the good between us more carefully. I wish that when I felt hurt, I had remembered that you were a person I loved, not a person I needed to hurt back.
I am sorry for the times I forgot that.
I don’t expect you to forgive me because I have come to understand myself better. I don’t expect you to see the relationship the way I see it, or to feel anything in response to these words. You don’t owe me that. I just don’t want my own discomfort with what I did to keep me from acknowledging it plainly.
I loved you. I cared about you more than I always knew how to show. And I am sorry for the times my actions made that difficult to believe.
I cannot change what I gave you in those moments. I can only wish I had given you something better.
And I can try, from here forward, to become someone who knows how to love without letting fear turn into cruelty, who can be hurt without trying to wound someone in return, and who understands that another person’s heart is not something to handle carelessly just because your own is hurting.
I wish I had learned that sooner, with you.
I am truly sorry.
Always,
The biggest heart that managed to fail over & over