Love Advice: And Then I Realized It Was Time To Leave My Lover.
And then I realized it was time to dump my lover. Make room in your life for something better!☝️. I went into his office for a minute, plopped down in a chair, and waited while he was finishing writing something. Suddenly, an electronic photo frame turned on, and pictures started flashing. It was a new thing on the table; I hadn’t seen it before.
Here is my lover with his son near the school on September 1st; here is my son smiling next to pink balloons; the whole family against the backdrop of snow-capped mountains; here he is hugging his wife; his wife in a blue dress is blowing out candles on a cake.
That was the first time I saw his wife. I was nailed to the chair. And then I realized it was time to dump my lover.
It’s strange; I’m a blonde; she’s a brunette. I have long hair, she has a short haircut, she’s a little older, but how similar we are! The oval of our faces, the dimples on our cheeks, the wrinkles around our eyes when we smile widely. And we both loved him. I felt it in her gaze, the way she looked at my lover in the picture.
And I loved it. We dated for a little over a year. I regularly tried to stop, leave, and run away, but I didn’t have the courage. Every time he whispered so sweetly, lullingly, how he was waiting for me, that he missed me, that I was his destiny, and family was just a formality.
Now it was completely informal, and real people were looking at me from photographs. And I felt that I didn’t want to be deceived anymore. Yes, some men get divorced, but my lover seemed to feel comfortable in our Bermuda Triangle. It was no coincidence that he always refused to talk about the future.
The pictures started flashing for the second time, and I felt how my beloved turned into an enemy who lied to both me and her. And I didn’t need him like that: even if he left, even if we started living together, after these pictures, I couldn’t trust him anymore. Because he was so convincing when he lied to me. And he looked so convincingly and tenderly at his wife in the pictures.
Eyes filled with tears.
“Did you want something?” the lover asked, looking up from his papers.
I shook my head and quietly left the office.
I cried for several days in a row. Sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone, sobbing and quietly, regretting and furious. In order not to break down and call him, I gave my phone to my friend. I was all swollen from tears. On the fourth day of the wake for love, some kind of dull numbness of feelings set in. There were no tears left, no joy either, but I found a zero point inside myself.
A week later, I was flying to an exhibition at the same zero. I was waiting for a connecting flight at the Paris airport, and there were always crowds of people there. I looked at hundreds of men who were hurrying, drinking coffee, texting on the go, chatting, and being silent.
And suddenly I thought, “There are billions of men in the world, not even hundreds, but thousands, with whom I can be happy, so why did I cling to one and not let go? Why do I stubbornly believe that he is my destiny? What is destiny anyway?”
My curiosity was awakened. I was going to an exhibition where thousands of men from all over the world gathered. I closed my eyes and gently asked the universe to introduce me to someone who wanted an intimate relationship with one woman, who would want to share with me travels and after-work get-togethers, friends and bed, troubles, both in sorrow and joy—in general, everything that life throws at us.
