Hanging on the wall near my bed is this heart. It’s a chalkboard heart that my mom gave to me over a year ago. I stuck it to the wall almost immediately, in love with the concept of what would soon fill that heart.

Minutes later after hanging it, my boyfriend took all my chalk and drove me from the room in order to complete his masterpiece. What resulted was a picture of him and me standing and holding hands on the field of my grandfather’s farm in Nova Scotia. We’re pictured right next to the beautiful red barn, a million dreams before us.

I loved it.

And so, the picture stayed up…almost for an entire year.

Until a week ago Sunday when I erased it, along with the dreams and the whole idea of a happy ending with Sal.  

My boyfriend came on January 1^st, the day of new beginnings and resolutions, to tell me that his heart and focus was in other things, and that the relationship should end because of that.

I was devastated. And blindsided. Hours earlier he’d called from his parents’ home to wish me Happy New Year and to say I love you, and now, we were done. In an effort to wait until we were in person, he’d been playing the part of the loving, missing-you-boyfriend for about a week and a half – and I was completely horrorstruck. In fact, the first thing I said to him was, “You’re kidding me right?”…thinking perhaps this was all some sick joke and in a second we would be laughing about it.

The punch line never came.

There I stood, in my bedroom, next to the chalk heart with his beloved drawing of the two of us happily holding hands on the farm, while I watched as my dreams erased faster than I could even begin to erase the heart. I stood there in my new jeans, new hoop earrings, makeup perfectly on, hair done, his Christmas presents wrapped and arranged under the tree – and I felt as if I’d been stripped of everything and turned into nothing but a raw, paining wound.

As you can imagine, the past week or so has been hard to handle. I’ve had to absorb this news – communicate with him via email and text – and been left to pick up the pieces of my own heart that I gave him in full trust.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize: I can’t change what happened on Sunday. I’ve talked to him (via email) about my feelings, asked questions, explained things, etc. Things are they way they are – and likely to stay that way.

Without disclosing a lot of personal detail and private information, I can tell you that this relationship is ending for reasons that don’t really make sense, and aren’t deal-breakers. I know that perhaps that’s what everyone would expect me to say, but it’s really the truth. There was no huge fight, we weren’t having problems for some time, there was no cheating, etc. We were doing great. In fact, as I told my best friend about what took place this week, the first thing she said to me was, “I would have put money on the fact that you and him would be the next couple to get engaged.”

Yup. That’s how good our relationship was. And not just on the outside to all my friends and family, but it really was that good on the inside as well. We got along beautifully – our personalities are the perfect complement. We never run out of things to talk about, we take good care of each other, we have a lot of fun and laugh over everything, we enjoy doing the same things, we rarely argue or fight…we’re just good together. This same best friend I told, the only one (other than family) that I’ve talked to about this, said to me, “I just don’t understand. You two are a packaged deal pretty much. I just can’t imagine not saying the two of you in the same sentence cause it’s so normal – Jeralyn and sal are coming tonight downtown…Jeralyn and Sal are going out to dinner tonight…so what did you and sal do this weekend?” And it’s true! I sort of feel like a fish-out-of-water…like my best friend is gone and now I have a void next to me where he should be. My partner in crime is absent.

That’s how much I was blindsided – and that’s how much this doesn’t make sense.

I have to be completely honest and say something. I don’t think that this is what he really wants, deep down. I’m not saying that to comfort myself or make myself feel better – it’s just that I know him too well to believe that he really doesn’t want this anymore. Perhaps he feels that way now with the things he’s personally struggling with, perhaps people have advised him on it that don’t totally understand the situation or have convinced him of something that he is unable to stand firm on in the midst of his own battles…but I know him too well to think that he’s ready to say goodbye to me, and US, forever.

I mean, we talked about marriage. A lot. It was something we both wanted – the seriousness of our relationship wasn’t a one-way street. He brought it up, made comments, and talked about it all the time. Our future was decided. We were ending up together, rings on the hands, happiness accomplished. Not in a we-love-each-other-fantasy-kind-of-way…but in a realistic, this is what we both want and can’t live without each other way.

I guess people change.

I’m a big enough person to tell you that I know I’m not a perfect girlfriend. I know that I have a very fierce desire to always speak my mind, I’m opinionated, I’m independent, I give tough love, I tend to not always be open about my feelings or thoughts because NO man has ever given me the freedom or environment to do that (including Sal), and I keep a lot of things inside. I’m not a stay-at-home kind of girl (or mom)…I never will be. I’m not satisfied in just settling for the status quo. And never will be. I think Sal had a problem with that, even if he never talked about it. He grew up with a mom at home who quit her job as soon as she had children, and never went back. She has dinner on the table every evening, cleans the entire house, and takes care of all the errands, finances, and things that just need to get done. She’s a complete saint and I don’t know how she does it. And that’s not me. I believe in an equal partnership that isn’t like that one. I believe in TWO people making dinner, cleaning the house, getting groceries, raising children, running errands, etc. I believe in equal participation. It means absolutely nothing to me that one person in a marriage has a pee-pee and one has a hoo-hoo – IT IS EQUAL. And if I want to fulfill my dreams as a teacher and writer, then I want someone who is willing to support that. And vis versa! If I have a man who wants to stay at home to simply raise children, then I should support that too.

I’m not going to apologize for my dreams and the fact that I want an equal relationship. I’m certainly not going to apologize for the fact that I’m an adult, ready for an adult relationship, am mature, ready for a mature relationship, and excited about finding someone fantastic.

What I WILL apologize for is being pretty emotionally unavailable the last few months. There’s something else that’s been going on in my life that I haven’t written about at all. In the past few months (since early fall) my parents have separated, after 30 years of marriage. It’s a one-sided separation, which has caused a lot of heartache, stress, angst, and confusion. When this all began, my sister told me that I should try to limit how much I talk about all of this with Sal. She said it was going to be too much and he wouldn’t be able to handle it being a relatively “new” boyfriend. I told him that was my plan, and he said that he didn’t want that at all. That he wanted to be there for me to support me and help me through it. I think, in the end, he really couldn’t handle it as much as he thought he could. I think that in the end he resented me for going through this. Maybe not on purpose or consciously, but I think he resented my parents for putting me through it and causing some rifts in our relationship, and I think he resented me for putting a lot of emotional energy into my parents and into self-preservation instead of him.

While that is immature, I understand why it happened. It’s immature to not understand what I was going through – or to offer help and then resent it…but I think that’s exactly what happened. You see, my parents and sister and I are a VERY close family. We do a ton of things together, enjoy hanging out, talking on the phone at length, and are very active in each other’s lives. So when this all started to go down, my entire world was shaken. There are only two big things in this world that cause major identity crises: death and divorce. And I told Sal that…and still he couldn’t understand. Yes, he held me when I cried and listened when I talked – but in arguments, he would bring up the fact that I was putting too much attention on my parents and not on him and I. I would to think that would be a given seeing as what I was going through. Unless you have gone through a parental separation or divorce, you cannot begin to understand what it is like. At all.

My parents’ separation really came about through some decisions my dad made – he simply stopped communicating in the relationship. He wouldn’t say what was bothering him, or talk about the problems that they were having, and so he bottled it up until the point that he exploded and this was the result. In his own words, “They stopped working.” I won’t push a lot of personal details here, except to say that it was one-sided on his part, and it probably could have been prevented years ago if he was willing to be a communicative partner.

Once again, without being too explicit, this is almost exactly what Sal did to me. He was dealing with some issues and having some problems and didn’t tell me about them. He hid them from me in fact until the point that those things he is dealing with became more important than me, and he made a choice. And the choice wasn’t me. It was almost an exact, watered down copycat of what my father did. And Sal knows about the decisions that lead to my parents’ separation…and he knows how I feel about it. And he still committed almost the exact same crime.

So let’s couple ALL that with this: I can now honestly say that I don’t know one man in my life that isn’t an abandoner in some way. Whether it be physically, emotionally, etc. And I’m not just talking about Sal and my father…the only other things other boyfriends taught me in the past was that they can stop caring about you or loving you at any given time. That it’s a switch. It turns on and it turns off. And you have absolutely no control over it. That someone who you spend every single day with, love, open up to, are vulnerable with, and share incredible moments with, can wake up one day and the switch will be off. They’ll walk out the door. And you can’t do anything. And I honest to god thought that Sal WASN’T that guy – I seriously thought he was the one person who would turn that idea around and love me forever, unconditionally. Imagine my devastation to find out he too loves with a switch.

I have stood by Sal through a lot of things. In spite of some of our different choices, very different pasts, and very different habits, I stood by him and never stopped loving him. His struggles had absolutely nothing to do with how I felt about him or how I loved him. When he would go through these things, or when he would make bad choices, or when he would talk about his past, I never left. The switch never turned off. Sal is someone that does have some issues, but did I just straight off tell him that I was going to break up with him? No! I told him that we could work on it and talk about it. But now, I feel like I stood by him through a lot of trials – and he was unwilling to do the same for me. It became “too much.” It was as if the idea of supporting me through my parents’ separation, my becoming an auntie, my student teaching and job searching was “too much” for him and he had to break free. He couldn’t handle the responsibility of being an adult – or having to grow up. And yet, how is it fair that I loved him unconditionally through some pretty stupid things?

What is the point of love, relationship, marriage, and monogamy if you’ll give absolutely everything you have – everything – and in the end someone will just flip the switch to OFF? You know, Sal said to me that he knew what he was saying didn’t make sense, but that they were his feelings which can’t be right or wrong. Is that true? Can feelings not be right or wrong? In relationships, are we simply pawns in someone else’s game where their feelings can change so quickly and absolutely? And we’re powerless to stop it? That no matter how much love I gave him, how much laughter, conversation, support, comfort, care, fun, presents, time, surprises, etc…just in the end don’t matter because it all comes down to the ON/OFF switch? Even though he was saying how much he didn’t want to be doing this, even though he was crying so hard, even though he couldn’t eat or keep food down after telling me this – he still feels that the switch is OFF and it’s worth throwing everything away? That I’M ultimately worth throwing away? And I’m not being modest when I tell you, that I know no one else will ever offer him as much whole and complete and pure love that I offered him. Because he even said the exact. same. thing.

And the switch still turned OFF.

And I really can’t believe it. You know, I think it’s mostly the little things that I miss – I went grocery shopping this week and got sad when I went to buy my grape juice, that I wasn’t picking up apple juice for him…his favorite. I was cleaning out my closet and I found this $1 he gave me – it was early in our relationship and I was giving him a back massage. I stopped and he pulled out his wallet and said, “If I give you this dollar will you rub it for 5 more minutes?” I kept the dollar special. I found the mixed CD in my car he made me for our one anniversary only a couple months ago that says, “To the love of my life…Happy 1 Year Anniversary…Can’t wait to see what else is in store…Love Always, Sal.” I mean….was it all just words and no action? All talk and no walk?

You know, for someone that was so crazy about me – and I mean really, really crazy about me…I just don’t know how we got to this point. I mean, the boy left flowers by my door the first week we were dating. He borrowed my mom’s key to my apartment on Valentine’s day in order to spread rose petals around my apartment. We got a cat together. I took him to another country to meet my family. When his mom met me, she loved me so much she started crying. His 90-year old grandmother, who had never met a single girl Sal had dated, gave me a Christmas present before she even met me. We are known for our roadtrips together – we’re constantly in the car on the move somewhere. I taught him to do a bunch of new things and to try new adventures – veggie food, tofu, rollerblading, watching Friends, going on a chairlift, travelling to new places, eating at new restaurants, midnight movie premieres, trying new bars downtown, seeing Canada for the first time, owning a pet for the first time, etc. I took him to his first Celtics game. I rode a school bus in a snowstorm blizzard for two hours (to go a mile) in order to get to see him. I’ve kept almost every bouquet of flowers he ever gave me. He used to surprise me by doing the dishes. He left a bouquet of flowers on my car at school when he knew I was having a terrible day. I skipped class to come see HIM when he was having a terrible day.

Relationships like that aren’t supposed to end. They’re supposed to have a happy ending.

I saw that beautiful happy ending with Sal.

Talking with my best friend – whose relationship seemed doomed….I found out that she and her boyfriend had a huge talk and worked out a bunch of their issues to the point that their relationship – a relationship that was literally headed for a breakup over Christmas break – is better than ever now! I ask myself, how did I end up with the broken relationship? When WE were the ones everyone was comparing their relationships against?

The only answer I can come up with is….the switch.

ON/OFF.

I don’t know….I just don’t know. I wish so many things…I wish Sal and I had worked. I wish I could Sal COULD be different than all the rest. I wish I could date someone different than all the rest. 

This life as I know it now has become an experiment in finding a man who DOES exist without a switch. Someone that really does love until the end…that really will stick around to see “what’s in store…”

Ultimately someone that makes me always laugh…and never, ever cry.

Because that’s how much I’m worth – and that’s how much I should matter to someone else. A true love would never sacrifice you…not for all the friends in the world, not for all the parties in the world, not for all the money or riches. 

What will fill the heart chalkboard next?