The First Time You Hurt Me, I Should Have Given Up On You

The first time you hurt me, I should have decided I deserved better and stopped fighting for our relationship. I should have unglued myself from you before I grew even more attached. I should have paid closer attention to the warning signs to avoid this cycle of heartbreak.

Instead of listening to my gut instincts, I listened to my heart. I gave you another chance. I accepted your apologies and forced myself to believe the lies about how you were going to change moving forward.

I convinced myself that you were worth the effort. The teardrops. The headaches. The stomachaches.

The second time you hurt me, I should have ended the relationship without a second thought. I should have realized if you broke your promise to change once, you would break it again and again. I should have decided there was no way I would let you hurt me for a third time.

Instead of listening to common sense, I took a leap of faith. I made myself believe that if I loved you enough, you would rise to meet my expectations. I thought you would be able to do that much for me since I have always done so much for you. I thought you were worth the wait.

The third time you hurt me, I should have realized it was becoming a pattern. I should have called you out when you swore it would be different this time. I should have used my brain.

Instead of doing what was best for myself, I did what felt the most comfortable. Leaving you would have been a big change and I wasn’t ready for that. At least getting hurt by you was familiar. I knew how to handle my disappointments by then. I was used to them. I could handle them.

I kept letting you hurt me because it had become a routine. You would screw up. I would yell. You would apologize. I would forgive you.

The more chances I gave you, the more you betrayed my trust, because you thought I would let you get away with anything. You assumed I would stay with you forever because I never gave you a reason to believe otherwise. I let you walk all over me. I let you get your way every time.

I wish I had given up on you the first time you hurt me, because now leaving feels even more difficult than before. We have so much history together. There are so many good memories to balance out the bad ones.

After all this time together, I don’t know what I would do without you — and I mean that in a literal sense. I don’t know what I would spend my weekends doing. I don’t know who I would text when I had news to share. I don’t know where I would live. I don’t know who I would be.

Even though it’s going to be hard to forget about you, I am going to try. Even though I have let you hurt me a million times before, I am not letting it happen again.

I am finally going to stop fighting for us. I am finally fighting for a better life for myself.