“I don't believe you.”
I said it in the last conversation that I ever had with a woman I loved very, very much, who I will call “Ruby.”
Ruby (not her real name) and I were amazingly close friends, then partners. We dated for less than a year, a very long time ago. I was crazy in love with her, absolutely feet over teacups.
Until this point in my life, I'd never felt jealousy, so I naively believed I was immune to it. Ruby and I were non-monogamous (I was still with my first wife when we met). She started dating a friend of mine, and I absolutely flipped out.
I was buried up to the eyeballs in this incredibly powerful hurricane of destructive emotions I'd never experienced before, but of course I didn't recognize it for what it was, because I was immune to jealousy, right? Right?
So I assumed that she must be doing something wrong to be making me feel these bad things, so I did one of the single most damaging things it's possible to do in a romantic relationship: I started giving her the cold shoulder. Not acknowledging her when she walked in the room, that sort of thing.
She called me on my bullshit. She said we should talk. We had a long talk, sitting in the front seat of her car while the rain came down around us.
She told me she loved me.
I said, “I don't believe you.”
I broke her heart.
She broke up with me, and I was absolutely devastated. It took a long time for me to realize it was absolutely, 100% my fault.
That is one of the scars I carry on my heart that will never, ever heal. That happened in 1992, and it still hurts today. I would do almost anything to be able to undo the harm I caused—in fact, that conversation, in that car, in the rain, was one of the defining moments of my life, and I have taken what I learned into every one of my relationships since then.
But even if I live to be a thousand years old, there will never come a time when I stop regretting it.
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