Last night, my boyfriend told me he couldn’t see a future for us anymore. We’ve been together for five and a half years. I’m still struggling to put those two facts next to each other.
We’re both 24. We started dating during our freshman year of college, grew up together, and now we’re both in law school. He’s my best friend, the person I’ve always felt knew me almost without explanation.
His parents don’t know we’re together. They’re Indian and religious; I’m neither, and he expects they wouldn’t approve of our relationship. He’s no longer religious himself, but he hasn’t told them that either. There are important parts of his life they don’t know about, and our relationship has had to fit around that secrecy.
He says he would feel this way even if everything were fine with his parents. I can’t understand how he can know that. If things were fine, we could have had a different relationship. We could spend time together freely, take trips, move in together—the ordinary steps that let a couple find out what a shared future feels like.
From where I’m standing, he seems adrift and unhappy. I keep thinking he’s throwing away something good because he can’t stand up for the life he’s actually living. But that’s how it looks to me. He’s the one saying he no longer sees a future.
He told me he’d felt this way for two weeks and had waited for a big event in my life to be over before telling me. That detail hurts in a separate way. During those two weeks, we were still close. We were intimate. I thought we were carrying on with our relationship, while he was waiting to have this conversation.
Now I don’t know how much of the ground beneath me is still there. I have law school and everything else I’m supposed to keep up with, and I can barely understand what happened last night.
The person I want to turn to is him. I want the comfort of being known by my best friend, the reassurance that somehow this will be okay. He’s still the person I want beside me, and he’s also the person telling me he may be leaving.
I don’t know whether we’re completely over yet. I don’t know how to begin moving forward when the first person I want to tell about losing him is him.
