Drive

Today was a long drive day on our holiday trip. Even though the distance was only 280 km, it ran through a coastal highway under construction and then through jungle roads full of hairpin bends. It took the full 8 hours Google Maps had originally warned us about.

Those 8 hours gave me more than enough time to think. I kept replaying my past, the decisions I’d made, where things had actually failed, how I could do better. A handful of things surfaced, all worth writing down so I can sit with them a bit longer.

1. I’m an eternal optimist. I generally believe things will work out. In that process, I’m usually fairly transparent about setting expectations for others, but I often fail to set my own expectations right.
2. I always try to be honest and fair, with a heavy dose of responsibility for everyone else. The moment something doesn’t go well on a given day, it plants doubt in me about seeing things through. Instead of leaning on faith, I transparently broadcast my own self-doubt, my inability in that moment to carry something to the end. Because I’m action-oriented and unwilling to just give things time, the first hiccup is enough to throw me completely off course.
3. Because I’ve never had a real support system, no neutral third party to bounce things off of, I take on all the pressure myself and build it up tenfold. I end up feeling responsible for everyone until I finally break, and only then do I feel this strange sense of freedom, once every commitment has dissolved.
4. Finally, I need to decouple things. I make my own reasoning far more complex and intertwined than it needs to be. The reason I decided to separate last time wasn’t because someone else had entered my life, and yet that became the reason anyway. Once that someone was gone, the whole process of separating lost its meaning. They were always two separate events.

One thing that’s stayed with me from one of her blog entries is the distinction between “ease” and “compromise.” A real relationship deserves the kind of ease she described. All I ever really asked for was compromise, without offering legitimacy or ease in return. How is unconditional love supposed to compete with love that’s already divided? This either needs to change, or it needs serious thought.

I have people I love unconditionally. Their call comes first, always. I can’t promise that ease, not outright, not until things are sorted out on multiple fronts.

I have to decide whether I actually want to separate and go actively seek out love that fits my own mental model. If I’m not willing to do that, then the person in front of me doesn’t matter. Doing the same thing again and expecting a different result is just stupid. If I’m ready to leave, to be on my own for the rest of my life with no plan and no one waiting, this might actually work. If I’m not, it won’t.

So it matters, before I ever find someone willing to share their love with me, that I’m able to walk away from what I have with real conviction. Trade the comfort of the known for the uncertainty ahead. That’s the real litmus test. Until that happens, until the dust actually settles, nothing else gets to happen.

After that, I need to accept that the norms of any relationship I build are going to look different from anyone else’s. I can’t offer the kind of ease someone might want, and they need to know that going in. Whatever relationship comes after has to be built on trust and transparency, not the transparency of the process of detaching, but the transparency of my own constraints. Only that can actually hold a foundation.

That will also answer the question I keep circling: whether this pull, this sudden deep ache for a person, is a passing tremor from the absence of physical connection, or something real.

All of this is fine, as long as I’m genuinely okay spending the rest of my life alone.

Am I? I think time will tell. I need to sit with this and actually plan, figure out what my next steps look like. I don’t need to visualize the ending. I need to just start, and operate on faith. The process will be hard. It will change me. Maybe it turns me into someone I won’t even recognize in a year. But maybe it’s still worth starting.

The other option is that this choice gets taken out of my hands entirely. It’s the path my mind seems almost convinced is the sure thing, the guaranteed way to reach the end. That’s probably why it flipped the situation at work in my dream. Instead of me taking a leap of faith, it showed me a version where the decision gets made for me.

During today’s drive, my wife was handling things on my phone, like she usually does, and she saw a WhatsApp message come in, a culture test report. I watched her flinch. For most people, a message about a medical test would read as perfectly normal. For someone like me, who has zero friends whom I talk to regularly, I’m sure she’s wondering who exactly is oversharing their health updates with me. She recognizes that number. She doesn’t want to talk about it. The first time she saw that name recenly in my message list yesterday, mid-drive, her whole body tightened. She put down my phone, looked ahead into the void and patted her bag twice, the way she does whenever she’s reconciling something hard in her mind. I have seen this. I think she knows we’re talking and she knows her number. She doesn’t know the context and she doesn’t want to snoop to see what we are talking about (only regular and normal stuff to be honest). She’s probably seen messages before, I believe that more strongly now. Today, she wasn’t exactly shocked, but she was still visibly sitting with it. And strangely, I wasn’t anxious the way I use to be earlier. I felt something closer to relief, like the choice was quietly being taken out of my hands. Though honestly, I wouldn’t want it to happen that way.

We’ve spent more than 20 years of our lives together. I owe her a real conversation about where we stand, once again. I don’t know how I’ll help her understand any of this, how I’ll answer the question that’s coming: “How could you do this to me? What am I supposed to do without you?” There’s no way around it. It has to happen. Before I get there, though, there’s groundwork to do: financial planning for both of us, and an honest answer to whether I’m actually willing to walk this path for myself, and not for anyone else.

I hope I find the answer, and the courage, soon.