Three months after ending the relationship, I’m still crying over a man who made me feel more loved than anyone had before. I left him myself. There was no shortage of chemistry, no struggle to feel safe with him, no doubt that he cared. What I couldn’t get past was the feeling that I ought to admire him more.
I’m 24, he’s 22, and we were together for a year. We were crazy about each other. I could be entirely myself around him, and he was good at talking things through. He wanted to make the relationship work and was willing to put real effort into it. Those weren’t qualities I had to hunt for beneath a difficult exterior. They were there.
But curiosity, intelligence and having interests of his own matter a lot to me, too. I didn’t find him particularly curious or intellectually engaging, and he didn’t have the creative or active hobbies I value. When we met, he was living with his parents and letting them make his decisions. I struggled to picture a shared future when I wanted someone whose way of living I could look up to.
Then there’s the part I’m ashamed of. I told my friends how wonderful he was, but I avoided introducing him to them. I was afraid of what they would think. In private, I knew how good it felt to be with him. The thought of him meeting the people whose opinions mattered to me brought out a much less generous side of me.
I can’t pretend that was only a private question about compatibility. There was also the uncomfortable business of how my choice of boyfriend might make me look. I don’t know how much weight that carried in the breakup, but leaving it out would make my reasons sound tidier than they were.
I had always believed I needed to look up to my partner. Admiration was supposed to make me want to grow, to become a better person. Without it, I thought something essential would always be missing. Eventually, that belief mattered enough for me to end a relationship in which I was deeply loved.
Now I keep running into a problem with my own explanation: he did make me want to be better. I wanted to be worthy of the love he gave me. I admired his resilience and emotional maturity, and he taught me a lot in both areas. It wasn’t that there was nothing about him to admire. It was that those qualities didn’t quite match the picture I’d carried of an admirable partner.
I’ve also tried the other version. I once dated someone I admired enormously, and being around him made me feel stupid and insecure. I thought he was out of my league. Later, I realized I hadn’t really loved him; I had wanted to be like him. Admiration hadn’t given me the kind of connection I had with my ex.
That doesn’t make the differences that bothered me disappear. I still catch myself thinking I couldn’t stay with someone I didn’t admire in that intellectual, curious, independent way. Missing him doesn’t settle whether we could have built a life together. It does make me question whether I understood what I was giving up.
I’m afraid I won’t find that ease and closeness again. And the man I left keeps complicating the standard I used to leave him: I already looked up to him for things I’m still learning to do.
