She called me on Tuesday and told me she didn’t feel she had time for a relationship anymore. I wish I could say the explanation made it easier. Mostly, it meant I understood what she was saying while wanting very badly for her to say something else.
First, it wasn’t because of the shower situation. That happened, but it wasn’t why she ended things. There was much more going on in her life than that one incident.
She works a stressful full-time job and goes to college full time in an accelerated program: nine credit hours every two months. She also plays sports, recently started going to the gym again, and hired a trainer. Somewhere in that schedule, she needs time with her family and friends.
Then several things went wrong close together. The week before the shower incident, she failed one of her courses. A few days after it, her water heater and air conditioning started having problems. Even the things that were supposed to work quietly in the background were asking for her attention.
On the call, she said she could hardly make time for me and didn’t think it was fair to keep me hanging on. She also acknowledged that she’d been hot and cold. She didn’t want to keep putting me through that.
I can see the truth in what she said. That’s what makes this so difficult. I don’t have some obvious misunderstanding to clear up, some missing detail that would make her reconsider everything.
My first instinct is still to tell her I want to stay. I care about her. I want to be someone who makes a hard stretch easier, someone she can lean on while everything else is demanding something from her. But she has already told me that being in a relationship feels like more than she can manage.
I’m devastated, and I don’t know what to do with the urge to convince her. She’s pretty much everything I want in a partner otherwise. I keep coming back to that word: otherwise. I wish the circumstances were different. She called on Tuesday to tell me what they are.
