The Opposite of Love

I just finished reading The Opposite of Love by Julie Buxbaum and I am completely, 100% creeped out.
Nevermind that Emily decided to break up with Andrew under the same circumstances I decided to break up with MFL.
Nevermind that she couldn’t explain to anyone, not even herself, why she decided to end her perfectly happy relationship.
Nevermind that Andrew is the name of MFL (which is why I refer to him as A in my earliest entries).
Nevermind that they dated for two years, just as we had.
Nevermind, even, that the first time Andrew (from the book) ever said “I love you” was while they were watching an action movie in a movie theatre – exactly the same circumstances under which Andrew (from my life) first uttered those same three words.
Nevermind that Emily could not say the words back.

Are you a little bit creeped out yet? Because I am.

After reading the jacket of the book, the similarities were what led me to take out the book from the library.
“When successful 29-year-old Manhattan attorney Emily Haxby ends her happy relationship just as her boyfriend is on the verge of proposing, she can’t explain to even her closest friends why she did it.” – I have been asked a million times why I broke up with MFL and I have never been able to give a real answer.

But I was not ready to read about my own love story – my big mistake – which is why I returned the book without ever getting past the first two pages. But a few weeks later, I took it out again. This time, it took me until the end of my loan period to finally read the book.

Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop.

Because this book, by an author I have never heard of but graduated from Harvard Law School (the same path I plan to pursue if I am lucky), tells with uncanny accuracy the story of MFL and I. If you are curious about how we broke up and then how I fell apart, you should read this book. There is stuff in here about what happened to Emily after she said “It’s over” that I haven’t even blogged about. It is almost as if I confided my story to Julie Buxbaum in deepest confidence, and then she went and wrote a book about it. But that would be ridiculous, right?

There are some generic parallels between my story and this work of fiction. Feeling like I wasn’t “ready for an Andrew,” this perfect specimen of a boyfriend who wanted to commit to me for good; seeing evidence that he still cared for me; not reacting emotionally to the breakup, and then over-reacting emotionally to the breakup; contemplating whether I made a huge mistake but not feeling like I can fix it. These are all similarities that I can handle. It’s the details that freak me out.
Like their names, for instance. The length of their relationship. The way Emily felt when she decided she wanted to break up with him (“I don’t even want to spend the rest of my life with me. How can Andrew?”). The way Emily felt when she started to realize why she did it (“I was afraid of losing him. I wanted to end it before he could stop loving me.”¹). The way she tried to tell him how she felt by writing a short email with only three points (“I miss you. I love you. Let’s try again.”).

I wrote something like this once myself. I was thinking about MFL as I tried to fall asleep one night, and it suddenly became clear as day to me that I still loved him. So after some tossing and turning, I got up, grabbed a pen and a pad of paper and jotted down the following:
“There are only three things I want you to know:
I love you.
I will always love you.
I want to marry you.”
At the time, I wanted to write it down because I knew I would forget the next morning. Looking down at the three lines on the paper, it seemed silly that I might forget something so short and yet so important. But I knew I would. Not forget so much as not remember. As if my subconscious was trying to protect me, as if remembering would poison the start of my new day. I suppose being confronted with the fact that you screwed up your own happiness is a pretty shitty way to wake up. Some part of me still believed I needed to cut my losses and move on. “MFL was great,” the voice said, “but there are other fish in the ocean. He can’t be the only one.” Either to defy that voice or to succumb to my other voices, I thought it would mean something if I wrote it down. Like a resolution that I needed to act on. But the next morning, I promptly stuffed the piece of paper under a pile of other papers and forgot about it. When I did come across it again weeks later, telling him these things seemed so ridiculous that I threw out the piece of paper immediately.

Then there’s the part where Emily doesn’t leave her couch for a week, vegetating in front of soap operas and letting herself go numb. I did the same thing when I started to feel overwhelmed with confusion over MFL and stress from other commitments. The worst part about this scenario is not that we (the heroine of this book and myself) let ourselves vegetate but that we knew exactly what we were doing – to make ourselves feel nothing – and saw nothing wrong with it. We had absolutely no reason to stop it from continuing. At least Emily had a friend to rescue her from this desperate situation, whereas I had to just pull myself together at one point and face the music.

Finally, at the end of the story (spoiler alert – although I’m not sure if knowing this really spoils anything because you kind of see it coming), Emily does what she needs to do and confronts Andrew face-to-face, and they get back together and live happily ever after. That ending hasn’t come for me (yet) and I don’t know if it will. In a lot of ways, Emily is luckier than I. She has the benefit of time. The time between her breakup with Andrew and her realization and confrontation cannot be more than a year. 12 months. My realization took twice that long. And my confrontation, if it can be called that, took three years. In three years, a lot can change. Andrew may not have been seeing anyone else in the one year it took Emily to come to her senses, but in three years, he could’ve been engaged and married already. Not that MFL is married, but you know.

So how does the story of MFL and I end? I sure as hell would like to know. Should I follow the courageous footsteps of this heroine and show up at his door, risk everything, and tell him how I feel? I’ve thought of this before, but always chickened out. It sounds like madness to show up and say those things. And yet, they have to be said. Or do they?

The thing is, MFL never cut me loose. When I told him I never wanted to speak to him again, he complied, until a year later, when he told me he wished we could be friends again. After that, my emotions took me on a roller coaster ride. And I never found the strength to tell him that I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be friends with him. Because after everything, he is still great to me.
I have wished, more than once, that he would be the one to let me go. Even though I was the one to break his heart, even though I was the one to break us, I can’t be the one to let him go. I wish he would just tell me, like the Andrew in the book, to leave him alone. I have witnessed these situations before, in other books and movies, where the girl is sobbing hysterically and crying out something like, “How can you be so cruel? How can you not want anything to do with me at all?” And the boy would be indifferent to her hysteria, because he no longer loves her and that’s what the opposite of love is: indifference. Sometimes, I have felt empathy for the girl. But now, I realize that the boy is not being cruel at all. In fact, by cutting her out, the boy is doing the kind thing. It forces her to move on. It is better than what a therapist could do.
What MFL is doing to me is the cruel thing. To let me perpetually debate between love and its opposite. To let me lose both sides of this battle, all on my own.

1. Not a direct quote – I can’t find the actual one but I read it in there somewhere. [↩]