19 Things I Wish I Told My Fiancé When I Left Him

By Anna Lee Pearce

When I called off our wedding, I gave you a host of reasons. Here is everything else that I wish I had said at the time:

No one could make me feel like I was two-inches tall except you. No one hurt me the way you could. No one made me feel as terrible you did.

You complained that I was “skittish” around you. That’s what you called it. I was skittish. I would shy away from you like a startled deer. You just didn’t understand that it was you who had made me that way.

I used to be confident with you. I felt like I could do anything. I wasn’t a startled deer – I was a lioness, queen of my pride. But over the years, you knocked me down – peg by peg. You took little pieces of me until I didn’t know who or what I was anymore when I was with you.

You would always immediately dismiss my friends as people that you couldn’t get along with; even when I tried so hard over the years to become friends with your own group.

I often felt embarrassed by you. Your gruff attitude and lack of social skills that you inherited from your father were a detriment to me in my social circles. I was afraid of taking you to work functions because I didn’t think you could act appropriately.

I never liked your hair.

You didn’t start taking care of yourself until very recently. You didn’t care at all about your health or personal appearance. If you didn’t respect yourself and take the time to make yourself look good, how could you expect me to think that you did?

You possessed no ambition. I couldn’t stand being with someone who had no drive. It’s important to have the capacity to be content with where you are, but you also need to be able to have goals and strive for something.

You thought I had a hot body but you made me feel stupid. The girl who graduated high school and college with much better GPAs than you. The girl who got a scholarship to law school and was at the top of her game there. You made me feel like I didn’t have a brain and if I did, it didn’t matter.

I felt objectified by you.

I needed you to be more of a leader in our relationship. I needed a husband, and our future children would have needed a father, who could be the head of the household – not a passive observer while I cooked and cleaned and took care of the raising of the kids without your input.

All the jewelry your mom gave me as gifts was tacky and ugly and I hated it.

You are your father’s son. You would have ended up just like him and I wouldn’t have been able to stand it. You would have sat in your recliner every night and killed a six-pack while you stared at your laptop. No interaction at all.

I couldn’t imagine being with some of your family for every holiday and family dinner. They were bitter about everything. Never happy. It was draining to just be around them.

Being around them made me realize where you got it from. You were always negative. Nothing ever made you happy. Even when something good happened, you would pick it apart until you found something wrong and then you turned it into a bad thing.

Your negativity drug me down. I tried so hard to be happy enough and positive enough for both of us, but I couldn’t pull you up. You just pulled me down until I started to become like you.

Most of the time I dreaded your 5:30 phone call when you got off of work because I wondered if I would end up crying afterwards. The main reason I stayed in the library after class was so that I would have an excuse to not answer.

You never took any of my concerns about our relationship seriously. If I was upset about something you did, you were convinced that you did nothing wrong. Whatever you did was something that shouldn’t have bothered me – no matter what it was. That was just how you were and I should get used to it because it wasn’t changing.

You never said you were sorry. For anything.

But now I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry I left you. I feel happier than I’ve felt in years. I’m happier than when you proposed to me two years ago. I feel free.