A lot of us have experienced this, but...

Has this happened to you?

You are in a relationship.
You are in love.
The other person breaks up with you, and you never saw it coming.
You feel devastated.

And so, you listen to music, and you drown your sorrows in sad love songs, with lyrics like "my heart is broken" or "how can I go on?"

I have. I bet many of us have.

But it never occurred to me, until recently, to think about those songs and imagine someone listening to them in response to the hurt that I caused her!

I posted here a while ago about an old high school girlfriend finding me on social media, after a 50 year period in which we had not heard from each other. We had started dating toward the end of my senior year of high school. She was a sophomore. But when I came home from college for a break during the fall semester, I broke up with her, as I felt I had outgrown her.

Our recent interactions have been friendly, and we have had some very good conversations and exchanges of email. It has been a good experience for both of us. (No, she has not been carrying a torch for me all these years, and no she certainly is not holding a grudge! She has a full life, with a happy marriage, a wonderful daughter, and a fulfilling career. )

But one thing she told me, that I could not have known at the time, is that while I was dating her, she was being physically and emotionally abused at home. At the age of 16, she had been counting on me, her first boyfriend, to marry her and rescue her from all that.

I had no idea.

Of course, many 16-year-olds naively expect their first boyfriend to be "the one", but in her case the stakes were a lot higher than for many other girls her age.

While I do not feel "guilty" for what I did, learning what her reality was like at the time has gotten me to think more about what effect my actions had had on her. And I thought about the popular songs on the radio at the time (the year was 1970) which were of the type I mentioned at the beginning of this post. She must have listened to them.

They sound different to me now.

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Peppa · 31-35, F

Life can really give you some perspective.
I think as time goes on I'm learning the value of honest communication.
What would be interesting is had she told you, would you have stayed and tried to work at things? Would it have been out of guilt?

As lovely as it is to have insight now, your life could have taken another route one in which probably would have caused you both more pain and suffering.

DrWatson · 70-79, M

@Peppa I do think about that. I was a different person at age 18 compared to who I am now. And 1970 was a different era.

My only experience was with two-parent "intact" households. I assumed that all parents loved their children (even though, as a teenager in the rebellious 60's, I of course thought the older generation was often wrong about things!) Divorce was considered scandalous and was hardly talked about. My generation grew up on TV shows like "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best", with wise parents and children who learned from their parents.

So I am not sure if the phrase "parental abuse" would even make sense to me. I would associate that sort of thing with Charles Dickens novels but not with the world in which I lived. If she had told me what was going on, I might have just filtered it through my rosy view of the world and concluded that her parents were "strict", but nothing more. Or, if I did come to understand the depth of the problem, I might have freaked out and left, because I would have been in over my head.

Again, I was just 18 and she was 16. The reason I broke up with her is that I thought our relationship was something superficial and did not have real substance. So I probably would not have found any motivation to tough it out.

As for what you said about causing me more pain and suffering, she told me an interesting story about what happened many years afterwards. After she was married, her parents used forged financial records to try to swindle her and her husband out of thousands of dollars! Fortunately, she and her husband had the original records and as a result, her parents' lawyers backed down.

Wonderful people!

Peppa · 31-35, F

@DrWatson Its weird isn't it but i think you highlighted exactly what i needed to hear. when we are young we are so tunnel visioned we cant think beyond what weve experienced and know first hand. as a consequence i think young men are also not really taught how to recognise the warnings signs or just arent really in tune to it. so when they are presented with a person vulnerable they run for the hills. and whats funny is the more we develop the more affluent we become that is being passed on to our daughters too. women are so much more colder than their grandmothers were.
we are taught to recognise but not have an emotional connection, the more we progress the more we are removed from the humanity.
i keep saying this over and over again.
but im cynical, its possibly a good thing, because we are having children at later stages in our lives, hopefully that means experience and stability will allow us to pass on a more lived in experience with the educated rational perspective...
(here's to the future!)

DrWatson · 70-79, M

@Peppa Actually, there were times, when I was in my twenties, when I fell into the "codependent trap." I would be attracted to someone vulnerable, because I thought I could win her love by being her hero. That never worked, obviously. It was a sign of my lack of confidence in my ability to be attractive to a woman.

Peppa · 31-35, F

@DrWatson Im sorry to hear that... i think i have a touch of that....

DrWatson · 70-79, M

@Peppa I learned from the experience.