The lessons I’ve learned during my first relationship and the changes I’ve implemented

Intro

This post may stick out a lot from what I usually write, but I wanted to write it nonetheless. In the paragraphs that follow, I will describe the major event from my first romantic relationship. Not only because my girlfriend reads this blog, but because it is something that is important for me, I will do my best to be as honest as possible. I will then go into the lessons I learned and the decisions and changes I’ve made to better myself from them.

The Things That Happened

Romance is bittersweet—this was something I didn’t understand before I started dating her. The highs are high, and the lows are low. My whole life, I’ve look at romance like a fantasy—and at first it was. I know that all relationships are different, but I never thought that being in love would be anything other than perfect.

On a bright October day, I made the bold decision to actually do my laundry for once. So I gather my dirty clothes and make a 4 foot journey to the laundry room directly across the hall from my dorm room. As a walk in, I notice a girl putting her clothes in the washer. Too socially inept to look her in the eyes, I started up a conversation while focusing my vision on the buttons for cold, warm, and hot water. I asked her what she studied, to which she replied that she wanted to study civil engineering. When I inquired for the reason behind her choice of major, she responded with:

“Because I love concrete.”

Now, this can go one of two ways. Either she’s a class-act comedian—or—she actually likes concrete. I assumed it was the prior. It ended up being the latter. But, I speedily finished putting my clothes in the washing machine before her and said my goodbyes. As I completed my 4 foot journey back to my room, I closed my door with regret. I don’t get many strong gut feelings, but something deep inside me told me that she was special. So I went onto our floor group chat, found her GroupMe, and starting thinking of whatever excuse I could to text her. While I was engaging in the classic act of having no idea what to text her, she put a message in the floor group chat, asking the person who was hogging the dryer to please remove their clothes. I seized this opportunity to tell her that she could use my dryer once my clothes were done. Little did I know, however, that this one decision would change my life.

A couple hours later that same day, I’m at dinner with my friends and I tell them about this girl. Being the supportive and humor driven individuals they are, I was encouraged to text her again. The only problem with this was that I’m a massive wuss, so I handed the phone to a friend of mine, who proceed to send this message,

“How’s the concrete?”

To which she replied,

“Solid, very solid.”

We exchanged a couple more texts after that and things weren’t looking too bad. While doing some homework with a friend, I asked for their opinion on how I should ask this girl out. After throwing up some ideas, we settle on ping-pong at the game room, so I hopped onto GroupMe and asked her if she was down. To my very genuine surprise, she said “yes” and I met her in that game room half an hour later. We ended up stayed down there for hours, chatting and playing point after point. We talked about our interests, families, goals and dreams—I’d never had more fun talking to someone from six feet away in my entire life. Once the game room closed, I walked her back to her room and miraculously got her number (let’s go bois!).

That next day, I end up going back home to Austin for the weekend, but we were texting non-stop. While out to lunch with my mom at Jason’s Deli, I tell her about this girl I was talking to and bring up the topic of if I should ask her out on a date. My mom, being the amazing mother she is, convinces me I should “full-send it”—so I do. I asked her if she wanted to get happy hour sushi when I got back and she, again to my surprise, said yes.

The date was a amazing, and the couple of study sessions that followed were even better—it was scary how well everything was going. We’d really gotten to know each other and the connection was definitely there. One night, we went to an outdoor seating area to study for an upcoming calc test. That morning, I was feeling spunky and was listening to a self-development podcast. The episode I was listening to was about passion and the speaker recommended this activity where you write 10 things that you want. The speaker, expecting you to have written 10 things that you didn’t already posses, then asked the listener to write 20 things that they wanted, but every other item on the list must be something they already have. For example, I might write that I want a GT3 RS, and then below it write that I want a blog with 3 active readers :)

So I casually brought this up in conversation that night to flex my sexy self-development muscles. Turns out she actually thought it was really cool and asked me if I could show her the list. Now, I thought this might happen, so I prepared in advance by redacting 1 of the items on the list so that I still knew what it was, but she would have no idea. This was item number 3. So after we talked about some of the things I wrote down, we finished studying and started walking back to our dorm (we both live in the same hall). As we approached the final stretch, I asked her if there was anything she wanted to know about me, and promised (like a dumbass), that I would answer honestly. Within less than half of a second, she asked me what number three on the list was. This is when I had realized that I had fucked up. Now, while I may be a wuss, I’m not a bitch, so I looked her in the eyes and told her,

Will you go out with me?

Holy shit, are you serious? You think I’m even the slightest bit more attracted to you than that piece of dog shit on the side walk

—thankfully was not her response. But she told me that she had just gotten out of a relationship, and didn’t want to rush into another one. This makes total sense—this woman didn’t even know I existed until 10 days ago. But I was still over the moon. This in my mind, was a yes, and as luck would have it, two days later, it officially was.

So we lived happily ever after, right? Not exactly.

I spent every waking moment I could with her. She was my best friend, and I was absolutely head-over-heels for her. We would stay up until 3AM in the lounge while she did homework and I layed on her lap, even though she had to wake up at 6:45 for work—that’s just how much we wanted to spend time together. Over the weekends we’d just sit and talk for hours or we’d hangout and watch anime until our eyes couldn’t stay open any longer. She was always on my mind, and when I wasn’t with her it felt like my coffee had just stopped hitting. I spent less time with my friends so I could be with her more. I would log on to my remote teaching job from her room just so I could be with her. After a few weeks, it felt like I had been with her for years. For our one month anniversary, I bought her a silver locket with matching earrings. A couple days later, I went to her hometown to meet her parents. A couple weeks later, I met her entire family on Black Friday. And just that next week, she met my parents and spent a couple days with me in Austin.

We end up going back to campus to take our finals, but all of our friends stayed home to take theirs. This meant that I could stay with her for two weeks in her dorm, essentially living with her 24/7 for that period of time: and it was great. We got to spend all day together, we got to go on fun dates all the time, minus the finals we had to take, it was heaven. She ended up coming back to Austin with me for a couple days after we finished our finals and we had a blast—but then we had to go our separate ways. At this point it was the beginning of December and winter break would be ending an entire month later. This meant that we wouldn’t be able to see each other that often until school was back in session due to the three hour drive that separated us. It was tough. We went from seeing each other all the time, every day, to only being able to text one another, with the occasional call at night. Whenever we would talk, something seemed off, and I just didn’t know what. It seemed like she would get mad at me out of the blue, with no premonition whatsoever. Thankfully, I had a surprise in mind. My plan was to wake up a little early on Christmas morning and surprise her with her gifts in person. She liked this a lot. The next day, she drove down to Austin and spent the days before New Years with me.

One of these days was one I don’t think I will ever able to forget. It was a perfect Texan-winter day—blue skies and a light breeze. We slept in, had a nice lunch near where I went to high school, played 18 holes of mini golf, went to the 360 overlook during sunset, got Amy’s ice cream on the way back—everything about it was just perfect.

But just like the last trip, we couldn’t be with each other forever, so after a few precious days, she was on her way back home. After she left however, it felt like we we’re back to square one. We would still somehow get into arguments or I would somehow manage to upset her without even seeing her in person. After this happened as often as what felt like every other day, two weeks had passed and I was starting to get burnt out. I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong or why she just kept getting mad at me. Then, after my mother dropped me off to campus, a few days before she was moving back in, we got into another fight—and I snapped. All I could focus on were the negatives. It felt like the relationship hadn’t produced anything positive in the past few weeks and I was tired of having to play damage control.

So I gave up.

Fuck you, I’m breaking up with you.

And just like that, I was done. I didn’t want to be with her anymore. It just didn’t seem worth it. All I could see were cons and it got to the point where I couldn’t answer the question of why I was dating her.

Now, of course we still saw each other all the time in class and around the dorm hall. And slowly, it dawned on me: I fucked up. This ended up being one of the greatest learning opportunities of my entire life. Dale Carnegie says “any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.” I was critical, I was lacking in self control, and I was neither understanding nor forgiving. It hit me like a brick wall: I fucked up. My days from then were filled with self-reflection, regret, and lots of fucking crying.

But I knew I had to make it right. So I did everything I could. I apologized, I told her I was wrong, and I begged for her to take me back.

But she said no.

I had betrayed her trust and said things that she could never forget. She was done with me. But I couldn’t give up. I needed a second chance to make it up to her. She had given me too much over the 5 months that we had dated, and even through our breakup. I had to be better for her. So I just kept chasing her, trying to changing her mind. But she wouldn’t budge. And I could see that every time she saw me, it hurt her more than I was okay with.

So I decided something. I would give her space, work on myself, and come back better.

But the fabled February 14th comes around, coincidentally this was exactly one month after we had broken up, and I was still working on myself. School came second, I was spending every second I had trying to be less critical, more understanding, and breaking other decade or even life-long habits. As the sun fell, I end up making a joke in our dorm floor group chat, something along the lines of “happy singles awareness day!”

Then I open my phone, and the one app she hadn’t blocked me on notified me of a new message—from her. She apparently had seen my joke in the floor group chat and had taken it very poorly. She lashed out, telling me about how hard the past month has been for her. I ask if we could talk about it in person.

And the rest, is history. That night, we get back together and at the time of me writing this, we’ve been dating for almost 7 months and have been so much better off since then. I’ve made strides in being less critical, more understanding, and more emotionally mature.

So, let’s go into the lessons I learned and how reading this story may be able to benefit you.

Don’t be Critical

This one is huge and I cannot emphasize this enough. Do not be critical! The best relationships aren’t the ones where both partners are perfect humans. The best relationships are built on the mutual understanding that neither one of them is perfect, and that there are so many great things about both of them! “If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.” Oprah said that, and this is something I live by now.

I genuinely believe that most people are amazing and that if you can look past their few shortcomings, then and only then, can you truly appreciate this fact. Before we broke up, I was so unhappy because all I could focus on were her shortcomings. But once I allowed myself to not be blinded by these shortcomings, and look further at all the amazing things about her, I was the happiest guy alive. Because she’s such an awesome person! And I owe it her, and for every single person in the world for that matter, to appreciate those things that make everyone so special.

Transparency: Don’t be like any good CEO

You know all those CEO’s that advocate for transparency? Well sadly, most of them are full of shit. Don’t be like them. Be honest. And do so early. If you truly believe something is worth brining up, then do so before it becomes a larger problem.

Keep in mind though, if someone is bad at backgammon, it’s fine to tell them, and it’s even better if you do so before it becomes detrimental to their backgammon career, but there are many right and wrong ways to say something. And these are specific to different people, so sadly there is no one-size-fits all approach. This used to frustrate me for the longest time because I wished I could just be blunt with everyone and that it was their fault if they took it the wrong way. This is incredibly childish. People are creatures of emotion, not logic. A method I enjoy employing is presenting things not as problems, but instead avenues for growth. Or if you really need to give someone the hard truth, maybe sandwich it between a pair of complements to remind them that you still love and care for them, and that you’re not just trying to make them feel like shit.

Life comes first

This seems like a more general lesson, but it’s not selfish to prioritize yourself in a relationship. If you can’t make it to a date because you really want to go to a concert with your best friend, then no one is allowed to tell you that’s a poor decision. And although this may cause some friction in the short term, relationships where both partners become codependent on each other results in two people who are frozen in time, not taking the time and space to grow as people. This is especially important when you’re young, because youth is when most people are constantly evolving into (hopefully) better people. So don’t become attached at the hip, live your own life, and make sure you’re also not living theirs. It’s not up to you to solve their problems or give them all their time. Everyone has to scale their own walls. If you do it for them, you’re stealing their opportunity to grow.

Conclusion

Sorry if that carried on for a while, this post took me a long time (like a couple months) because I wanted to make sure I had understood and grown enough from what happened to write this post. That doesn’t mean that I’ve mastered anything I’ve listed above, or that I’m perfect by any means, but it does mean that I’ve grown considerably.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post and I hope that this may provide you some lessons that you may be able to apply to your own life. Until next time, just keep on keepin' on! You got this, I have so much faith in you 😄