the nine-month situationship.

sharing this now because i'm not thinking about it next year - and neither are my friends x

Welcome to day five of Substackmas - TWO SLEEPS LEFT! I hope you’ve been enjoying. I’m so appreciative of the love and messages and active participation, particularly for day four — I told you it was a treat. Today’s subby is a tad sore for me, which has taken me a while to admit, but I don’t want to shy away from this anymore. This is still how I’m feeling, and I’m sure others can relate. A lot of people are grieving so many different forms of love (or what should’ve been) at this time, and I’m right there with you. So, before we give ourselves the time to celebrate this Christmas, let’s sulk a little x

Thank you Hannah for giving me the nudge to go with this one today, I love you endlessly🤞🏾

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Just recently, my ex-situationship showed up on my Instagram feed. He’d performed alongside one of the biggest headliners at a festival as a backup dancer, and I froze. Seconds later, I messaged my best friend I’d just had dinner with: ‘As if he’s just shown up on my phone’. I had to laugh, but my period was due, and really, I just wanted to cry.

In my final term of uni, I had met this charming skinhead. To my observation (and then understanding), he was confident but not cocky, nice but not cringe, talented but humble, friendly but not overly so — or so I had thought. Soon after, the more comfortable he would get, the more I would begin to reciprocate. However, the fault lines started to appear, plates began to shift, grounds began to shake, and a tsunami soon rushed over, leaving an absolute wreck (me) in its wake.

I remember feeling sorry for myself for months (the aftermath) because although my friends lived it with me, I felt so isolated in how much he had hurt me. And not just me then, but the me that was so warm, open, and hopeful to finally receive and make time for love — before him. It was the first time in my young adulthood (or maybe my whole life) that I had been fully ready to experience a romantic relationship. In nine months, he’d tarnished it completely.

He came at the worst time. Sometimes, I think my hope in love would still exist if I met anyone else who wasn’t him — this is something I’ll never be fully sure of, of course. He’s not evil, he’s not a bad guy, but he’s the villain in one of my chapters, and he was awful to me. I want to give myself these moments to dwell because I also regret rushing through the healing in the hopes of inching closer to my dream or escaping any and every thought of him, and mostly, I don’t want to bother those around me further. I can hear them saying, ‘Az, you’re never a bother to us’.

This whole year has been interesting; I’m mostly over it (the situation…and probably the whole year, to be honest), but the bruising reappears from time to time. I wish him well (mostly), but whenever I hear his name, my heart speeds up, and my temples throb. Worst of all, I’ll listen to my music on shuffle, and a song from the initial healing period will play, and I don’t know whether to sing along or skip. Alexa, don’t play Special by Sza.

It’s annoying to acknowledge and even say, ‘shit, this still hurts’. It feels like I have to revisit why it does, confront every situation within the situationship, and take accountability where I felt I shouldn’t have had to. I’m not used to feeling angry; the emotion scares me. But I have to deal with that anger because I feel betrayed. We had plenty of mutual friends who cosigned him as a good person, so I constantly doubted my gut instinct about him because ‘These many people say he’s great, so I just need to give him a chance.’ WRONG🚨. That is not what that means. To be clear, I’m not at all blaming them; they weren’t to know. Love them all immensely.

The minute I uttered the words, ‘God, this can’t be your best for me’, is when I should’ve hit pause on the whole thing. I should’ve sat with all the signs I had already been given, remembered all the arms that discreetly nudged mine as a warning and the side eyes that did the more obvious questioning for me. But the lover girl in me switched those rose-tinted glasses for a pair of red opaque shades I could no longer see out of.

By the six month mark, I was going crazy. I was already spiralling with all of the work I was doing, but having to ‘work’ through whatever the heck this relationship was proved tiresome and frustrating. I could cry on cue, not to show for anything, but because it was all I could muster when words couldn’t form — and it consumed my thoughts more than I’d like to admit. I would lose sleep, falling down the rabbit hole he’d dug, repeatedly asserting (to myself) why and how I was unworthy, what I could do to make things better, what I could do to ‘help’ him see me, how I was last on his list but needed to be first — it was exhausting. By my birthday, I was dreading heading into 23 with him still a part of it, but desperate for him to be right there next to me.

“I don’t know how, but you’ve put him on a pedestal he doesn’t deserve to be on,” said Hannah, one of my best friends. Other girlfriends echoed the same sentiment, yet still, I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see what I could see. ‘Surely, all of these moments had to have meant something to him too’ is what kept me hanging on. ‘You don’t just do that with anyone.’ Oh, but you do — and he did, with four other women in this case.

Channelling more MC in 2025…

It’s taken almost a year to unlearn his cadence. It’s been like a factory reset, over and over and over again. I even had to relearn my faith, and see that in a different way from what I had come to know. As far as I was concerned, based on what I’d learned from my faith, love was this pure and welcoming, and often, deep thing, worthy of being cherished — for those nine months, I felt far from pure, never welcomed, surface level, unworthy and like I was nothing special. The kind Sza was, in fact, singing about.

Six days after I last saw him, I found out he was dating another young woman. On that last day I saw him, he had begged me to accompany him to the sample sale of a store that one of my best friends worked at. I waited in line, like the rest of the eager customers, telling myself that this wasn’t for him; it was for me. That I’d be in the line even if he didn’t show up because it was an opportunity to show up for my friend - which it absolutely was, hello? - but I wanted him there. Right next to me. By the time he showed up, I was pulled in to help. Our time cut short on a plan he had initiated, as usual. Once my ‘shift’ was up, we’d chat at a nearby pub. I felt like I was in a limbo of being quizzed for the final time, just in case, but with quite a tight grip on my wrist, loosening with every time his phone lit up with a message from his now-girlfriend.

In Selena Gomez’s song, Lose You To Love Me, she sings:

“In two months, you replaced us / Like it was easy…”

Imagine six days. Not even a week. And that line would loop in my head, less like a broken record, more like I’d accidentally hit repeat. To this day, this is what I can’t shake. It’s a bruise to my ego, I guess. How dare he find a woman who could be more beautiful, more hard working, more popular, more ‘worthy’ of his time, kinder, richer, prettier, prettier and prettier than me?¹ I’d spend hours ruminating on this constantly when, really, the question was: After all of that, why wasn’t I good enough? That’s a question people ask themselves constantly, and sometimes the answer is that we’ll never know, or it just wasn’t meant to be, or they weren’t your person.

“I think you’d be really good for my best friend, actually,” he said, taking a break to look up from his phone (he was texting her). “He can get quite angry - punching walls and that kind of thing - but I think you’d know just how to help him with that.” Him saying that was more like a complete slap to the face than a punch to my gut. I think of that conversation and WISH I could go back in time, utter no word, get up, and leave. ‘What if I was or became that wall?’ I questioned because he didn’t care to do so. But instead, I stayed. I held his gaze, played into his game, and said: “Set us up then.” I thought it would sting. I thought he would backtrack (he did). I thought I’d get a reaction (I did). But what was the point? He did everything I expected him to do, and I still fell ten steps behind when I was 20 ahead.

Me to me, honestly — and I did!!!!

Side note: Did I mention he was one of the ‘stars’ of a nationwide advert, so I had to see his face on phone ads, billboards and in newspapers for almost a year? We can laugh now. I reduced my watch time on YouTube, started walking with my head down more, changed my routes to work or home, and avoided the Metro newspaper. I felt imprisoned in a crime that I was victim to.

One of the worst parts of this (in the aftermath) has been giving up on communicating across the board. It’s a poor excuse, but having to ‘fight’ for him to see where he was hurting me repeatedly and, essentially, begging for his respect left me not wanting to for anyone or anything. I did everything they said to do: walk away, voice my concerns, be open about my feelings, lay down my terms, stand up for myself, say no — but still, that wasn’t enough.

Eventually, it had to be, though. I was exhausted, but so were my friends. God bless them for how they nurtured me and guided me as gently as possible out of my delusion — and consequential despair. The final straw was him continuing to like my stories while he had a girlfriend…especially whenever I was at the Emirates (he was also an Arsenal fan), it was really making ‘the beautiful game’ ugly for me. I did also take him to an Arsenal game, where he cosplayed me as his girlfriend to the friends and people I (!!!) introduced him to. We don’t talk about this anymore.

Another downside is that we work in adjacent industries, so his name often pops up everywhere and randomly. It is triggering to acknowledge a liar, gaslighter, manipulator and someone incapable of being loyal, be praised (and not possess these traits to someone else). It is triggering to be triggered by everything because he was so closely tied to so much of what I did and sometimes still do (and lives in the same city xxx). It is triggering to even remember he exists.

If I were talking to my dad about this, he’d say, ‘But Aswan, he’s clearly not thinking about you, so why are you giving him the time of day?’ And it's true. He’s not wrong. But it doesn’t mean it can’t hurt. Even writing this, I hate to think of the fact that I’m giving him even a smidge of thinking time - a whole newsletter even...sigh. I promise we’re leaving him in 2024.

Mood.

Sometimes, people aren’t evil, but they are stupid. I think that’s him (noah fence). Writer Hilary Mantel told Natasha Lunn, author of Conversations on Love, that ‘Some mistakes have to be made, they are creative errors’, and I love this so much. It feels like, oftentimes, mistakes are allowed to be made in everything else but love — which is perhaps where we make them the most.

I don’t regret how I behaved or how much I gave him. Clearly, he needed all of that love (gentleness, faithfulness, patience, kindness, etc) that I was willing to share with him and so freely. But where I valued for a long while that it was what he needed, it took longer to dawn on me that, actually, that was what I was able to give. Those traits overflowed from cups I had worked hard to fill. And though it was frustrating feeling like he ran them dry, who’s to say I couldn’t work hard to fill them again?

Now, a year has gone by; everything is in hindsight. There’s nothing I can do, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. This has been the biggest lesson in closure not being a thing. If I had waited for an apology, my healing would have only started then — to be honest, I don’t think I’d have been satisfied with whatever he’d said anyway.

From the jump, I should have turned on my faith. I should have trusted God and myself more. Yes, I could’ve known better, prepared better even, but so could he. I don’t walk around with a ‘victim’ badge, but I know I deserve more than what he had to offer me. So, in the end, I forgive him. And wish him well…sometimes (I’m never claimed to be a saint).

When has Miss Elle Woods ever done us wrong.

The worst takeaway would be if I didn’t see what this did for me rather than to me. I’m proud of myself for knowing when to throw in the towel, accept more, and stand for less, and without seeking an apology or ‘any last words’. Philosopher Alain de Botton told Lunn in her book:

‘The best frame of mind to be in - for anything you want - is an ability to walk away from it, were it not to come right’.

I’m thankful that I loved myself enough to do just that.

It’s funny watching (and feeling) healing and learning occur simultaneously, hand-in-hand, side by side. It’s certainly been a challenge and often a gruelling one. I thought I’d learnt all I needed to about love, and suddenly, it threw me another lesson. But I guess the fact that there’s another to learn is something beautiful in itself — a sign that hope is still active where it feels dormant.

How blessed am I?

1. And I’m sure she is beautiful! I could never resent her because it’s not her fault - it’s very much his. Just to be clear that I hold no animosity towards her.