When it's over

It's February, the month of romance! And what better time than now to share the news that my boyfriend and I have broken up?

Sorry. I know a lot of you liked him. I liked him. I still like him. He still likes me. Do we have irreconcilable differences? Perhaps. Will we give it another try? Maybe later. But right now we're respectively and officially single, which has given me a lot of time to mope in the darkness and think deep thoughts. I was going to save them for my annual Bitter Valentine's Blog, but I just couldn't keep silent any longer. Besides, I'm sure that I'll have come up with something magnificently bitter by the time the 14th rolls around.

So, here are some thoughts that have been floating around my tortured head lately, including some musings on my current situation as well as some more general aphorisms that deserve a place on anyone's quote wall.

For example, Isn't it funny how when your heart breaks, it's your eyes that hurt?

Hahaha, good one. In case you haven't guessed, I've been crying a lot. There was a point a week ago (fortunately I think I'm over that period) when I was so grief-stricken that I was haunted by sadness even when I wasn't thinking about it. I would wonder things like why my favorite foods didn't taste good, or why I was having so much trouble swallowing, and then I would remember. "Oh, my heart is broken."

When I'm not outright mourning, I'm overthinking things in bizarrely mathematical terms. A friend told me by instant message that I shouldn't be taking it so hard because "you > Rico." I appreciate that sentiment, but I think it still stands that "me < me + Rico." Unless Rico were a negative quantity, which is not the case. So I'm feeling somewhat...fractional.

I'm also wondering how you can quantify love. How good does a relationship have to be before it's "good enough?" On a scale of 1-10, I would rate my relationship with Rico about a 7—lacking in 3 sort of major ways. When I told my friends about some of the things I was unhappy about, they pretty much unanimously told me I needed to get out! But is it reasonable to ever expect a perfect 10? Looking at it arithmetically, there were 7 major good points going for us. Were those really not enough? I think I would have preferred to try to address the three problems we did have and maybe work our way up to a solid 8.5, rather than starting at 0 again and looking for someone new. Rico didn't seem to see it that way.

The hardest part about this situation may be that we are trying to stay friends. This means we keep seeing each other and I keep being reminded of how many things I like about him. When you see someone at a casual gathering, you only see the good things about them, not the things that drove you apart when you were alone. The other thing about it that's hard is that, in my experience, usually being "just friends"is the first step to not being friends at all. Part of me wishes that we could have just had a rabid, screaming fight, and left never to see each other again, simply to avoid the protracted, painful death of our relationship as we slowly grow apart. But the other part of me clings to the hope that we will succeed. It's happened before.

On the plus side, being suddenly single has done more for my social life than I ever imagined possible. I decided that I should make an effort to meet people in the real world this time around (as opposed to the online venues that are my usual date-getters), and consequently I've been going out and doing things and generally acting like a normal person! I might even be getting over my fear of parties! ...Well, let's not be too optimistic.