Breaking Up

Breaking up.

Uglier than moving, because it is cutting off a connection to another human, with jokes, secret kissing places, testimonies, love, compromises, and plans all factored in. I may soon break up with my boyfriend in a mutual decision to end our 1 year, 2 month (depending on how you look at our beginning) relationship. We are growing apart, after months of anxieties, fears, pressure, and adriftedness that has pitched us together in an unsteady and exhausting dependent state, while causing us to spiral deeper into ourselves and away for each other as we try, perhaps, to protect each other from the instabilities that we both see in our current life.

Living the expat life is not easy, especially with regards to relationships of any kind. I have watched (and experienced) other strange relationships take out on other continents and then struggle to spark again on home soil- or relationships that move to foreign locations and then widen tiny fissures as the pressures to deal with language, bureaucracy, distance, and coping with the myriad tiny difficulties of finding your favorite food, getting parents on skype, figuring out the bus schedule, and making new friends takes hold.

My relationship now is of a different sort. Born between us as we pursue our Master's degrees in Europe, we had a sort of shared history that sustained and deepened our knowledge of each other's past quickly, as we had both attended the same university for our undergrad, but never met. Our relationship strengthened over a long year in Germany as we both found solace in each other in the loneliness of leaving everything behind, and we became the darlings of the group, the couple that group sentiments rallied around for its sweetness, novelty, and the feeling of complicity that everyone had to keep our relationship afloat.

As our program mandated, we set off for a new country, Austria, after 10 months. The boyfriend took off earlier to start an internship, laying the foundations of his life far before me, engaging with his roommates, and welcoming visitors from home. I joined two months later, fitting into his pocket as he rushed around in his life, and free-riding on his friendships and happiness. I was empty, though, and found it difficult to make friends and to break out of my dependence on him and his world. He is so happy- he always seems so happy- and I was jealous of little indications of the contentment of his world, when he didn't need me anymore as he needed me in our previous year.

He grew! He found himself in a new place. Not entirely, of course, but I was blinded by my own needs. It soon became apparent, through sudden and multiple panic attacks, that he was also finding the pressure great, that he too is homesick, adrift, worried about the future, nervous, struggling. But our relationship fizzled again as the labidos dropped, the sadness within each of us grew, and the fear of disappointing the other became overwhelming. I worried incessantly that he would break up with me for the first two months. He labored under his own emotions, unable to share them, and convinced that dumping them on me would turn me away- a typical result of the very undiscussed problem of the pressures of the myth of machismo on young men, usually subsumed or made subordinate to the pressures on women of body image, which seems much more apparent, if only because it is fiercely advocated for and challenged by legions of feminists. Read Betty Friedan's "It Changed My Life" for an honest and accomodating feminist's early perspective on the multiple pressures of relationships to get an idea of the untold suffering of men in our society.

We are "on a break." We are both scared and sad, but the gulf dividing us is real. Writing this out now, I think it is because we are both so lonely and afraid of our futures (separately, without even beginning to consider together, though naturally, 'together' is a big, scary issue that we try to tackle without real conviction of its reality, which Erik chalks up to us being afraid of committing too early) that we are turning in on ourselves instead of sharing together in a more intimate and honest way.

To say we don't have issues in our relationship is to deny a huge reality. I suffer because Erik does not talk about his emotions freely, seeing them as a source of weakness. I depend on him heavily in Vienna because I am so much unhappier, due to having trouble finding friends. But there are so many reasons we get along, so many things we could support each other about, so many places where we could grow together. But competition racks us with stubbornness and a fierce desire to have independent interests, so we don't blend them. We try to preserve that element of independence, or we try to encroach on the other's territory somewhat falsely, when all we have to do is ask for earnest help, care about it, and mean it to engage the other to let us into their little world and to broaden our support and love for each other.

I love him, but I'm trapped in an ugly, scared, and lonely place that is keeping us both apart. He said he wishes he had met me 5 years from now, which I gather means that, because we are so comfortable, and that we could be with each other for a long time, we would be a wonderful marriage- but, because we have slightly different ambitions right now and not a totally overwhelming desire to coordinate (from our obstinateness, or merely from our desires at this point in life?), we are drifting apart from something that has been so good for so long. If we break up mutually because of fear, what kind of break-up is that, really? Are we giving up?

I'm glad the channels of communication are open. That's love and respect- and fear.