Why I Can’t Stay Friends With The Girl Who Broke My Heart

I’m not exactly what people would describe as a touchy-feely type of guy, and you know that. I’m six foot, one-hundred and ninety-five pounds, U.S. Army veteran, and work more or less as a ‘logger’ for lack of better explanation. In short, I’m pretty tough. But you know that, too. I don’t hold grudges long, I’m usually over any conflict before it starts, and this you know too. But recently you came to me to ask why we could not be friends after our breakup, after a year from the end of our relationship. It’s unlike me, I know, and you know, to be this stubborn.

I couldn’t put it into words then, I could only be stoic, stand-offish, and offensive. Wasn’t the best approach now that I think about it, but here’s why I don’t want to be friends with the girl that broke my heart.

I’ve broken hearts, and suffered hard breakups before. A couple times, actually, and those bothered me, but I got over them, much faster than I have than in our situation. I guess, you got to me, in more ways than I had ever let anyone else, I let you get closer than I had anyone else as well. I told you all of my fears, secrets, wishes, desires, everything — you know more about me and how I think than my own mother does. I held nothing back, and bared all to you.

And I fell, hard — harder than ever before for you. I fell for every thing you thought was wrong with you, I loved all of those things that you hated. I loved how tall you were, I loved the laugh you thought was “dorky” and the voice you described as “annoying.” Everything you were self-conscious about, I found perfection and adorable quirks that I won’t find with any other girl. I loved you in the morning in my shirt and your underwear; hair a complete wreck, looking like a tornado had touched down on your head. I loved you in the middle of the night when your body heat was too much for me and I had to search out cooler areas of the bed, and how it felt to feel your hand search out for me under the covers so you could scoot back against me. It was you looking for me in the middle of the night that made me fall, it was your fiery eyes before we went to bed, the passionate kisses in the middle of you crying in a fight about stupid things. Basically, you’re everything in a woman I could have ever wanted and more. You’re perfectly imperfect, and that was beauty to me.

That’s why I can’t be in your life anymore. I guess I’m still deeply hurt, because you promised you weren’t like the other girls before you. Because you promised you would stay. Because you said yes when I asked you to marry me. And because since we had all of these plans, made all of these promises, and I got to know you in every possible way inside and out, all of your fears, everything about you that made you unique, these things I learned about you are why I don’t want to see you fall in love with another man. I don’t want to know there is someone else out there that knows you cry when you’re under pressure. I don’t want to see you out with the man who learned how much you take joy in a simple foot rub. I don’t want to share these secrets with someone else knowingly.

I want to pretend to be the only man that knows these things about you. I want to be unknowingly selfish. That sounds silly. Maybe weird. But that’s how I’m coping with how you left me. It’s not that I don’t want you to be happy, it’s not that I don’t want you to fall in love again, it’s that I don’t want any knowledge of how you look in love with anyone else. I don’t want to see those blue eyes in a love look with someone else at our favorite restaurant accidentally one night with my friends or family. I’d just rather not know.

And that’s why I can’t be friends with you.