Have you ever broken up with someone you loved?
 

Just answer the goddamn question, asshole.

I think anyone who's ever been in any amount of real relationships has to say they have.

It's hard, and it sucks, and it's not a good ending, no matter how you do it. But sometimes you just need to remember that love just... isn't always enough. Sometimes it's a matter of having to do what's best for both of you, even if in the short term, it's painful as hell.

O sure.

And I haven't loved as blindly as I did that first time I got my heart broken. The pain of a break up with someone you love kind of sticks with you forever, I guess.

But all things heal in time.

Perhaps I've been lucky. I think.... I've only broken up with people that for a while I thought that I loved. It hurt a lot at the time, but afterwards I always wondered if love was really the right term. It's a pretty serious word... and although I would probably have said it was love at that time... I'm not sure I understood the word at those times. Looking back, I can say that it was definitely better for those relationships to have ended. Just having feelings for someone doesn't always mean that the two of you are suited.

Maybe that's a bit excessively trite of a thing to say, but honestly I'm still not entirely sure what love is. I've broken up with people I cared a lot about, but did I love them? There's something about being in a relationship that perhaps causes people to delude themselves. I think I am in a relationship with someone I love right now, but am I just in the throes of that self-delusion? I don't like to believe so, but it is possible.

I just don't have a definition for the term "love" which I can apply objectively to myself in order to be sure.

For what it's worth, there was a time when my current girlfriend and I broke up, but fortunately that didn't last for long.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Technically, she broke up with me, not the other way around. If you're asking if I ever did the breaking-up with someone I loved, no. I always held fast in my naive belief that love would be the answer to every problem, and after two and a half years, she taught me that wasn't the case.

I disagree, but hey, what do I know?

(But yeah, it happens to everyone. What a strange thread topic...)

Especially coming from lurker, who is usually the one berating these sorts of threads.

Maybe you're unwilling to let things go? I don't know what your case is, but you can't hold on to pain forever.

To everything turn, turn, turn there is a season turn, turn, turn

Maybe you've never been in love past the Hallmark notion of it?

Yes, I have broken up with someone I love. Reason was that I had to move across the country, and it wasn't serious enough for me to stay located with her.

It Always Runs Deep
 

So deep that when I broke up with this woman named Tracy, it took over a year and a half for me to rebuild myself and get back into meeting new woman.

It was a hard breakup. We dated for about a year, but have been best friends for 2 years in college. *inhales* It was a beautiful time. We would do everything together. I got a kick when we were in Sears in the tool department, and she was like, "Let's go already! I want to check out the latest stuff at Spencers!" A guy over heard us and said, "You can't keep a man from his tools." She replied that she knew that already, and then he asked us how long we've been dating. She looked at me, then at him and said, "3 years." *chuckles* It was an uplifting moment. I was counting the from the days that we agreed to go out. She was counting from the day we first met (which I can still recall to this day).

So wonderful the time was with her that I hoped and always prayed to God that it wouldn't end. When she moved to Columbia to finish her degree, I would visit her every weekend and we would stay by each other's side the entire time. So in love I was that, every time I had to wake up early on Monday to leave, I would kiss her forehead and agonize in turmoil over the the fact that I had to leave. She was my air. My breathe of life. She was, at that time, the only other person that truly acknowledged my existence. Before leaving her dorm, I would watch her sleep for a minute; imprinting my angel's face in my head to hold me over for the week. I would kiss her forehead again, say I love you, leave a rose on her desk with a letter that I wrote to her before I came up.

She was all that I talked about at work. My co-workers wouldn't believe that I didn't watch any porn or that I wouldn't gawk at any woman. They couldn't accept the notion that a man who really loved another woman, didn't need external substance to satisfy all physical needs. The question I would always throw back was, "Why do I need to look at something intangible and beat off to it when I can unleash all my desires when I'm with her?" 'To each their own' would always be their response, but I thought nothing of it.

Fast forwarding to the latter part of the relationship, our separation was painful....excruciating....torture. On New Years Eve she told her parents that she was dating me. They didn't like it one bit. Her emails she received from her parents said it all. They couldn't stand the idea of their white daughter was dating a colored person. I was heartbroken when I read this. Sitting by her side at her dorm, I forced myself to read further. They went on to talk about how would the kids look like, and how society won't truly accept them. I literally couldn't believe my eyes! I, understanding that segregation on a historical level is still relatively young in America, could not register how prevalent thoughts like these were still ingrained in the previous generation's mind.

I was taken back... dumbfounded. We cried, but it got worse. They threaten to pull all family support from her education and stop speaking with her if she continued to date me.

As the weeks went on, I hoped that I can show them that I was a good man. But all my words fell on death ears, and everything I tried was for naught. They simply did not fold and began raising the stakes. Systematically, they pulled her finance, began visiting her daily, and started to harass my work. Luckily, for the work side, my boss was not easily swayed, and I remember him telling them if they don't have anything to substantiate their claims, then he would press legal action against them for calling his company work line.

Oh my gosh, this is getting long. Anyhow, fast forward some more and we had to separate and cut it off. In the end, we knew what had to be done, it's just that we thought we could fight this. Apparently, there are just some things that don't change.

So, a part of me died that day, and the following weeks all I did was just work and cry. I kept telling myself that I had to be strong because Tracy was probably going through the same thing. Oh how naive love makes you. A friend of mine called me up to check up on me, and I told her that I was still trying to sort my emotions. She kept encouraging me to get back in the game, but I kept telling her that I didn't want to carry an baggage over, and that I had no right to place my pains on any woman and possibly not give her the treatment she deserves because of my inability to work things out. Well, she fessed up and told me that the next day when we broke up, Tracy started dating someone else.

So, I was heartbroken more, blah, blah, blah. Fast forward 2 years and I ended up become unfettered by my past and was able to met new woman.

Looking back on it, it was actually good things turned out the way they did because, during those 2 years, I've grown...matured many have called it. This, in turned, as allowed me to know my limits, and never again become hurt in the way I did with her.

Plus, if I didn't, I would have never met the woman I'm with today, since she too went through the same emotions I did. Funny how life works, eh?

Jesus, she asked for an answer, not your life story.

and I'm just going to throw in a no. 16 years old, not quite past "damn i'd tap that"

Welcome to Club Snarky Reply. You'll fit in well here.

Now get a goddamn avatar to fit in with the rest of us.

Yeah I have, but then I can't say it was real love cause frankly, I'm still young and I'd like to think that I haven't experienced the real deal yet.

It was like this, the girl just simply couldn't make up her mind on what she wanted, wanting love one second and being left alone the other. I was also bothered with that the she was the kind of girl that liked getting physical with people, not in a sexual sense, but like being all friendly giving hugs and touching people and this made a huge mess of our relationships at times, cause she simply couldn't understand people thought that she was coming onto them, or rather, she didn't care and I were the one who had to tell people we were going out. So I got tired of how she acted with indecision and being all carefree and decided to give her an ultimatum that I'd leave her if she didn't change because I couldn't stand it. She started spouting out nonsense while crying, like that she loved me so much that she'd marry me and stuff like that, almost obsessingly tried to convince me that she had now chosen that she wanted to be with me.

So she did change her ways a bit after that, but as you might have guessed, this got me real scared being 16 years old having to hear stuff like that, especially when she now were onto me like she was obsessed with me. I really liked this girl, but man I had never like even considered marrying the girl and who would being 16 years old? So I decided to break up with her as quick as possible even though I still had some feelings left for her, cause I anticipated it'd turn into a huge mess if I were to linger on in the relationship for too long. I liked the girl, but heck, relationships when you're that young aren't supposed to last forever.

Nope, I have not. I used to consider one girl in High School that I was infatuated with to be "love", but I realized later I was simply being a teenager with a hard-on.

You're right, but hey, you can't reap drama without making some. Now answer the goddamn question.

You've yet to chime in on the subject, spit-n-shine.

It's a proud Gamingforce tradition to not respond to your own threads!

I have not.

I had a girlfriend once. We broke up after six months. She moved to The Pas for nursing school, and I was still in Winnipeg. Apparently the phone sex wasn't enough for her, and so she grabbed the nearest guy, and then told me all about the tango that followed. So yah, it didn't end so great. I wasn't too torn up about it though. Her mom was a bitch and I was growing tired of her needyness. So, no tears shed.

I have broken up with someone I loved but not someone I was in love with. If that makes sense.

Although I suppose, in the end, he was the one who did the final break up. Does that still count?

Short answer is "Yes, but..."

Nope. They've always seemed to get tired of me first.

How could anyone ever get tired of you Temari, your too cool for anyone to get tired of you.

Personally for me, I don't really have much experience for this topic because any other relationships I've ever been in: its always the girl that always broke up with me. I can't really speak from experience, but I in a sense fell in love with certain people during my early years of university, but it just grew to a point that I was only going to be just friends with them, and in my mind there is no point trying to hold onto something you can't have. Especially when your feelings get in the way of your own better judgement.

You misconstrue an event that can never be painted as a "life story". I have many years ahead, and if they are as fruitful as I hope, it will merely be a flicker in my overall lifespan.

And that, my friend, was my revelation after the ordeal. I just wished it came to be sooner! >_<

I have. It took me a month just to work up the courage. I always try and defend myself by saying how fucked-up I was at the time, how I was trying to protect him, but maybe I was giving up too easily.

I did a couple of months ago. We'd been engaged about a year.

What happened was this: we started dating when I really just wanted a good friend. Since he was persistent and met all the little requirements I had at the time, I couldn't come up with a good reason *not* to date him, and so we began. Turns out his intentions were considerably more serious: he wanted a wife. Fast forward two years: we're graduating, starting to plan a wedding, and I woke up one morning with the terrible realization that if I don't love him after two years of wanting to, it's not going to happen just because we got married. In fact, marriage is probably going to make things worse because I'm already feeling trapped and we haven't even made the vows yet. That was wretched. I had to move (I'd been renting, coincidentally, from his Mum) and change all sorts of trivial life things in the middle of the academic quarter, and he basically melted into a puddle of emotion that hasn't progressed much in the three months since.

But yeah... I just could not face the idea of marrying someone I'm not in love with if there is no good reason for it. It seemed like an incredibly stupid thing to do. (Now I realize that this breaking-up should have happened long before, probably before we got engaged. At the time, however, I still thought I could change to be what he needed/wanted. It didn't work.)