When I first met you, I didn’t see the man you were. Instead, I saw the man you could’ve become.
I simply refused to see you through the way your past had affected you, although I knew everything about it. I refused to see you the way you saw yourself.
Although you kept telling me this, I refused to accept that I was dating a broken man.
I had to admit that you were always honest — you told me you’d been through a lot in the past and that you still didn’t know how to deal with it.
You told me that there was this girl who caused you a lot of pain. A girl who betrayed you, despite all the love you gave her.
You told me she changed the essence of who you were and that the harm she had caused you had made you a different man.
That you’d become a bitter and pessimistic man who had lost all of his faith in love.
That you stopped believing that there could exist a woman who would love you despite all of your flaws.
That there could exist a woman who would accept you for who you were, together with all of your insecurities, imperfections and emotional scars.
You told me that you’d lost all of your trust in people and you advised me not to get my hopes up with you because you didn’t know how much of yourself you could offer.
But I didn’t take any of this as red flags and none of it chased me away.
Instead, I appreciated your honesty more than anything.
And I took it as my mission to save you.
I thought I was the only one capable of healing and fixing your heart and soul.
That I was the one who would show you that true love didn’t have to hurt and that not every woman you let in will hurt you.
I armed myself with patience and I waited for you to be ready to open up to me, to let me into your life, to trust me and to love me.
I waited for you to feel like you could rely on me and for you to commit to me.
I didn’t look at you as an unavailable and emotionally damaged man .
Yes, I was very much aware of all the scars and wounds on your heart but I simply refused to allow myself to look at you through them.
I knew you were a man with many qualities and that you had a lot to offer, besides your brokenness.
And I decided to be the one to wake up the man you used to be, before you got your heart broken. I decided to save you, whether you liked it or not.
What I didn’t know was that deep down, you didn’t want to be rescued and that all of my efforts were in vain and doomed from the very beginning.
That this pain you were feeling had become your comfort zone and that you had actually been holding on to it all this time.
What I didn’t know was that I would lose years of my life, trying to pick up the broken pieces of your heart and soul, without any success.
What I didn’t know was that you weren’t only emotionally damaged—you were also damaging to everyone around you and especially to me.
What I didn’t know was that I would never be able to save your wounded soul, no matter how hard I tried.
But most importantly — I didn’t only know that you wouldn’t heal but that you’d end up breaking me.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t blame you for anything and I still think you treated me the best way you knew.
But the fact is that you dragged me into your negativity and that you exhausted me completely.
The fact is that I got used to your behavior patterns and that you changed the person I was, instead of the other way around.
The truth is that I didn’t fix your broken heart. I only broke my own.
I was obviously too weak to fix you. I was obviously not strong enough to love a broken man .
My love for you clearly wasn’t strong enough to heal your wounds and scars.
And I am sorry for that.
I am sorry for not keeping my word and for not healing you, as I promised.
I am sorry for having to choose myself over you. And I am sorry I abandoned you when you obviously still needed me.
But that is something I had to do if I wanted to save myself. I simply had to give up on you.
And that is something I’ll never forgive myself for doing.
