I decided to break up with my girlfriend by the end of the last Babelian Year. We had been together for 6.5 years and 5 years happily living together. We never had a serious fight; we were each other’s closest confident. She is great and we love each other. She did not expected it at all.
A few weeks before that, I was told I would loose my corporate role due to a reorganisation. That implies I will be eventually be laid off, given garden leave, possibly an indemnity, and set free from employment obligations. That implies I can claim unemployment insurance for up to 2 years with 70% of a well-paid Swiss job. Altogether, it’s quite a sweet deal: About two and a half years of what I call “funemployment”.
This two events are connected by what I am calling the reset. I have two and a half years to recalibrate my habits and goals. If we stayed together, I would still be involved with the same habits from the previous me, walking back into old habits. I could see I needed this reset and I could see she needed it too. We were self-indulging each other. We were not getting the most of ourselves, by being utterly happy. That had to stop.
I prepared the most wonderful weekend. Dinners out, long autumn walks by the parks, a beer at the lake boat cruise… Then watching the sunset at the park, I told her: “We have to break up in two weeks”.
She laughed.
Then I said: “I’m serious, we have to break up by the end of the Babelian year”.
I was crying. Then she didn’t laugh anymore, she got that I wasn’t joking. She knows my style. This was one of my non-negotiable decisions. It was the end and there was not way she could have expect it, nor to stop it. She wanted the easy life of a comfortable relationship —”what everybody wants”, she would say— but I want to do what’s not easy.
There’s the Ying and Yang… Water and Fire… Growth and Destruction. You cannot have one without the other. Embracing change is easier than resisting, then when change comes I must follow and see what it brings. We had our good times, we had no bad times. There’s no better way to end things. Without anger or resentment, just sadness that it will not be forever. Yet full of joy that it happened and it is pure.
This is for me a good ending. It is open to continue, it is full of opportunities for both. For all the things we could not do together will make us stronger.
I cannot see romantic relationships the same way. They can be mutually beneficial, they can be great to create an enjoyable life together and to achieve great things. They also create bad habits of complacency. We become comfortable with ourselves and our goals. We forget the struggle.
Ying and Yang… Peace and Struggle… The moment must continue.
Es muss sein.