The period of time before a breakup – when you know with near-certainty that the breakup is coming, but the shoe hasn’t quite dropped yet – brings some of the worst feelings I can imagine.
Your blood runs cold with panic. Your heart throbs fast with nerves. Your neurons pulse with uncertainty. You flip through all the possibilities in your mind, over and over again, trying to puzzle it all out so you won’t have to actually face the pain. Depending on what kind of relationship you’re in and what kind of partner you have, you can be stuck in that hell-place for hours, or days, or weeks, or months. (Hopefully not years, but I’m sure it does happen.)
This election feels to me like the last time I went through this agonizing horror. My boyfriend in the summer of 2017, not exactly a king of warmth and affection to be begin with, had iced me out all of a sudden, emotionally pulling away from me so hard that my anxious traumatized brain started to sound the alarms. The terrifying message blared throughout my mind as if by loudspeaker: He’s going to leave you. You’re not worthy of him. You’ll never be worthy of anybody. You’re a fraud, an unloveable fraud. Cool, thanks, brain. That’s great to know.
It felt like a trap, because to reach out and ask what I was really wondering (“Are you mad at me?” and “Are you planning to break up with me?”) would just confirm, to him and to myself, that I was as emotionally needy and broken as he probably already suspected. Open communication has always been my number-one recourse when worried about a relationship; it feels awful and sometimes even borderline-abusive when that option begins to seem inadvisable or impossible.