I Lied To You

I lied when I acted like I was okay with keeping things casual. I was never satisfied with being just a friend to you. I wanted to be your girlfriend. I wanted a label. I wanted to hold your hand in public and swap kisses on the lips even if there were other people around to watch.

But I was never going to tell you that. I didn’t want to come on too strong. I was scared of chasing you away by bringing up commitment. I sensed a relationship was the last thing you wanted and I wanted you too badly to risk screwing things up.

That’s why I acted like we were on the same page, even though the situation was killing me inside. I hated that you wanted to keep your options open. Every time you mentioned another girl, I wondered whether she meant more to you than I did, I wondered whether you treated her the same way you treated me, like a girlfriend but not a girlfriend. I became paranoid. Skeptical. Cynical. I developed trust issues and abandonment issues.

Our relationship brought me more stress than happiness, but at the time, I figured it was better to be something to you, anything to you, than to have you walk away from me because I wanted a relationship and you only wanted a fling.

So I lied to you. I lied about how much I liked you. I lied about what I wanted from you. I lied when I told you that I was okay.

The truth was that nothing about what you were putting me through was okay, but I felt like I couldn’t blame you, because I was an active participant. I knew you were never going to date me but I stayed around anyway. I made a choice to put myself through pain. It was my own decision.

I think you knew I was lying, though. You must have heard the way I talked about you. You must have seen the way I looked at you like you were the center of my universe. You must have realized my feelings for you were deeper than I let on.

You let me lie to you, you welcomed those lies, because you didn’t want to play the part of the bad guy. Deep down, you knew you were breaking my heart, but you told yourself it was okay because you kept asking if I was on the same page as you and I kept saying yes. In your mind, you weren’t doing anything wrong because you kept checking with me and I kept telling you what you wanted to hear.

You didn’t want our relationship to end either. You wanted to keep me around. You wanted to keep using me.

That’s why I lied to you. I lied because we both knew the truth anyway. I lied because everything would have changed between us, everything would have ended between us, if I was brave enough to say, “I love you.”