Sooner or later, love is gonna get ya

Two weekends ago, four days shy of a year after our first date, we made a peaceful, level-headed, and final decision to end our relationship. I don't plan to say much about it here, due to obvious privacy concerns. If that means I have to settle for a blog post like this that's somewhat dull and abstract, instead of publishing the more vividly revealing thoughts in my head, then so be it.

I have an unfortunate tendency, which I'm sure is very common, to obsess after a breakup over all the things that seemingly went wrong. A couple different kinds of regret are inevitable, but important to transcend: (1) feeling bad about all the things that, in retrospect, were wrong with the relationship (how could I have been so blind to how deeply problematic factors X, Y, and Z were?), and (2) feeling bad about how good things used to be (how am I ever going to find such a perfect match again?). It's like Woody Allen's lame joke in Annie Hall: relationships are the restaurant where people say, "The food at this place is really terrible ... and such small portions." In response to point 2: I know, and I try to remember, that you can never get back the past. It doesn't matter whether you'd like to or not; you won't. (This is true of relationships in general, not just breakups.) In response to point 1: I'm reminded of some wise words someone told me years ago:

If you make sure that nothing bad ever happens to you, you'll also make sure nothing really good ever happens to you either.

I wouldn't trade the mix of good and bad times (mostly good, by far) that we had together over the past year for anything. They were flawed and beautiful. No one other than two people will ever know about them; I simultaneously relish and cringe at that fact. 2009 may have been a pretty dismal year for the country as a whole, but it was a great year for me. At the same time, I have to believe there's someone better out there, for both of us. It's popular and palatable, as a single person, to claim you're "not looking for a relationship." I'd love to say I'm totally self-reliant and don't "need" someone else. But it's not true. I just don't know who it is yet.

For now, I'll be reflecting on how I can fine-tune "what I'm looking for," consciously doing things we used to do together and accepting that they're still worth doing, overinterpreting every love song playing in the background...