u/Anxious-Status6701 — reddlx

i just went through one of the most traumatic incidents of my life which is my first heartbreak. i’m a 20 year old girl who fell in love with her coworker at her first internship a year ago. i know i broke the very first rule in the corporate rule book but i was young and never had experienced true love or relationship before that, so i thought what do i have to lose? how dumb of me lmao. The man i fell in love with was everything i wanted in the beginning, he was kind, he was sweet and an incredibly pure soul. He asked me out a month after we started talking and we quickly got really dangerously close to each other. He wasn’t just a part of my routine for the past 10 months, he was my routine. He would wake up 40 mins early just so he could come pick me up in the morning even though he lived closer to our workplace. He would drop me off every evening after work and we would also have lunch together in his car. Our favorite thing to do was sleep with each other, not sexually or anything, just both of us in each others arms sleeping peacefully. Life felt a little less heavier when i was in his arms.

Problems in our relationships started arising as early as during the second month and we even broke up just for us to get back together after 20 mins and i think that was our biggest mistake. The problem was that he was raised in a very conservative muslim household and while i was muslim too , my family was a lot more open minded and my mother always wanted me to excel in life in ways that she couldn’t. My parents had a terrible marriage which made me more wary of marriage and love and i promised myself if i fall in love id choose someone who was the opposite of my father. My mom was forced into a marriage at the age of 18 and had me at 19 and later my brother after 4 years, she was severely physically and verbally abused often in her marriage and she couldn’t leave because she wasn’t educated enough to get a job and her family would never take care of us. So she had to stay in that marriage for the past 21 years and she’s still married to him and is waiting for my brother to graduate high school so she can finally leave. So i was raised by my mother to be strong bold and independent and focus on myself and my career first and foremost, and i did what she said because i felt that was the least i could do, i excelled academically, i started doing acca right after high school and even started working at the age of 19.

But my ex was raised totally differently, he was the eldest son of 4 kids and had 3 younger sisters, he was raised and taught that men are the providers and are supposed to serve their women so the women don’t have to go work. so two months into the relationship we talked about this and we disagreed and we both agreed to break up but it was too heartbreaking that i called him and i told him that we can find a middle ground and said that we both can work together and build something of our own and to which he agreed.

later on more problems started to arise, i had a lot of male friends which he was aware of before we started dating and he knew exactly what i was and i made sure he was okay with it in the beginning of everything but slowly slowly he started having problems with my male friends which was kind of understandable so i got rid of them , then he started having problems with me posting stories on my account and said that he doesn’t want another man seeing his woman like that so i removed all of the guys in my account and only kept cousins to which he also had a problem so we fought everytime i posted a story. later on he said he wants to get married early when i was 21 and he was 25 which took me by surprise because i never wanted to get married early, i wanted to marry when i was well into my late 30s but he convinced me to it and i agreed, my whole family knew about this man and even loved him.

except for the over possessiveness and slight controlling tendencies he was everything. He was my best friend , we spent 6/7 days a week together, we did crazy things , we truly enjoyed each others company. and things were going well for a while but we still had disagreements and we broke up really often, but after our 4th or 5th breakup he really changed, he became more patient and kind with me and it was so nice for a while because we didn’t disagree or have arguments like we used to , till the next month. I told him i wanted to leave the company because i wasn’t getting paid well as an intern and i wanted to try out other new things because my work was getting boring and repetitive and that was our breaking point i think.

he argued with me and we both fought really bad and we agreed to break up again. but the thing about our breakups is that, after every single one we had, i would always go back to him and beg him to take me back because i was so afraid of a life without him, i was afraid to be lonely again because i didn’t have much friends so he was my everything. and because of that i went back to him again after the last breakup, but he sat me down and he told me clearly

‘ you are meant for great things my love, you are not meant to be merely someone’s housewife , you are meant to be a strong independent fearless woman who relies on no man, and with me you will always be known as my wife and i don’t want that for you, i see you adjusting so much and i don’t want you to do that anymore. Your dreams and goals matter and you are meant to achieve all of it, whether it’s with or without me. I can never marry you because i know i would be roadblock in your journey and i know myself to know that i will hold you back unintentionally, so i want you to choose yourself and let go of us’

i remember his words so clearly because i cried in his arms after, i told him that i don’t want a life if it wasn’t with him and he told me to stop being silly, but we both agreed to just date for that whole month because it wad my birthday month and i didn’t want to spend it alone. and we did stay together for that month but we argued and fought so much that we both lost hope. but during the week before my last week we both just mutually agreed that we had to break up and we’d only stay together till my last day at work, and that whole week we both cried and laughed and replayed all our fondest memories and held each other tight, because even though we weren’t compatible we had an insane amount of love for each other, we had the sort of love that i only read in the romance novels i read , it was so consuming and intense and passionate that it felt like self sabotage letting it go. but yea today was my last day and he cried so much in my arms and it broke me, i’ve never seen him cry so much, he cried so loudly and held onto me so tight and couldn’t even breathe for a while but time was running out and i had to be home , so like that my 10 month old relationship ended with an i love you and a forehead kiss.

i don’t know how to move on from this, im doing my best but every time i close my eyes i see his face crying and begging me to stay. This relationship will forever haunt me and a part of me will always truly love him. It is gonna haunt him more than me because he still has to drive the car that saw us fall in love and he still has to go work in the company and get used to not seeing me there, he has to get used to not picking me up or dropping me off.

I pray that he heals and i pray i heal too, and if or when the time is right and we’ve both grown into who we were meant to be , i hope we find each other again. Till then i will slowly try to move on and build myself up again and pray for him everyday