I am a romantic, even with my societal and interpersonal issues (i have Avoidant Personality Disorder - not the same as avoidant attachment style), and i always made sure to live that when in a relationship - my ex-wife is still talking about the birthday where i filled our whole living room with helium balloons overnight to surprise her or financed her piano, and my presents were always well thought out and had both a practical and an emotional component. (She was always the one who made regular presents to her friends, but found her own ideas not creative enough)

I seek closeness, acceptance, the feeling that you can do anything together if you wanted, but also enough trust and distance that you are not forced to so. The times i felt love the most after a few years were when watching over her when she fell asleep after giving her a foot massage (that was somewhat of an guaranteed “off”-switch for her, she wasn’t able to keep her eyes open after a short while because it relaxed her so much lol). I could’ve watched her face for hours, even near the end of our relationship.

We separated because her feelings weren’t the same as before after a few very hard years marked by illness and me becoming addicted to my painkillers, even if i did everything i could to get away from them and came clean to her after a while, the damage of hiding and lying had been done. The addiction made me distance myself from her. She never had done any drugs except a few drinks in her life (while i have tried a ton of shit from weed over sniffing butane to MDMA, cocaine and finally my doctors introduced me to the “wonderful” world of opiates) so she wasn’t able to relate to the experience and the difficulty of letting go of a feeling that was such intensive bliss, switching off all my insecurities by falling into an warm void, that nothing compared at all.

We are still in contact and i still have a lot of feelings for her, which makes it harder for me to keep communicating, but I know that things will never be the same again because i betrayed her trust, willingly or not. This in combination with my sincere wish that she has the good life she deserves made it easier for me to let her go, which is rooted in my romantic disposition.

This became much longer and much more personal than i thought it would be, but i stand by what i wrote. Romantic love gave me over a decade of loving relationship, the pain of losing her, and the resolve to make sure she can live the life she deserves.

“It’s better to have loved and lost, then to have never loved at all.”