February 6th, 2022. 6:22 PM. I look at myself in the mirror. Pristine blond hair and perfectly combed bangs. Just the way he likes it. 

   I see a notification from him and frantically click the message. It’s a paragraph, not even written in his dialect, with the ending “Hope life treats you well.”

   I was dumped a week before Valentine’s Day. I was distraught. At that point, I had spent five years, a third of my life loving him. We had been dating for almost three years. Our relationship was my entire world.

   He was my first love. We met in fifth grade, the year we all felt like we were so mature, even though we so weren’t. He startled me as I was reading my Steven Universe book, and I fell head over heels for him. 

   I don’t know what I saw in him. For one, he had a buzz cut. Every woman’s worst nightmare. And he had middle school boy humor. Genuinely disgusting.

   I guess I liked that he was nice to me. He complimented my hair when I would wear it down, and my cringey cat ear headbands from Hot Topic. And most of all, he genuinely wanted to talk to me. Crazy, right? Someone wanted to talk to me, the loser girl who was always reading a book and had a weird obsession with cartoons and cats.

   We only grew closer through the rest of the school year. I remember I would send him YouTube videos and memes every day, and my heart would light up at every “Lol.” We played Roblox together (I know, very romantic). We worked on school projects together. Seeing him was the highlight of my day. 

   My love only grew over the summer. He loved soda, so I picked up drinking Coca-Cola, even though I hated how fizzy and “spicy” it was. I started wearing my hair down, even though I hated how it would get in my face. I texted him at seven AM on his birthday, and he responded, “Thanks Kaitlyn :D”. 

   He didn’t even remember how to spell my name (or my birthday for that matter), but that didn’t stop my undying love for him. I would fawn over him in our sixth grade reading class, laughing as he would make weird noises and drive our teacher crazy. I was so excited to be invited to his house, even if he hung out with his male friends the entire Christmas party and left me and my fellow two females to chill by the cheese curls. 

   I was so attached to him that I invited him to our lunch table. I so desperately wanted to combine our two friend groups, to make my friends see what I saw in him. To have a perfect utopia, with both crush and comrade, and have all of us hang out together and be friends.

   It never turned out the way I hoped. For a brief moment, I thought my dream was achieved. But I never took into account that I was devoting more time and energy to him than I was to my friends. My best friends. The people who had been by my side for ten years, defending me from bullies, and being the only people I could be weird and geeky with.

   The divide only increased once we started dating. I was so elated that he liked me back, he actually liked me back, that I focused more on that than my friendships. It started to become a part of my identity, of my self worth. The guy I liked for two and a half years saw me and didn’t think of me as weird, or overweight. He saw me as beautiful and worthy of his affection. And I craved that.

   And then quarantine hit. And it only made things worse. I was isolated. I gravitated to our relationship. It was all I had to hold on to. Everything I was looking forward to was ripped away from me, and he was my only constant. We spent hours and hours playing Minecraft on my brother’s realm. I invited my friends too, but almost every time I called them, he was there too. And of course, if he was there, that’s where my attention would gravitate to.

   My friends’ teasing remarks turned into resentment. Every hour I spent with them was another five I spent with him. Every twenty dollars I spent on a gift for them was a hundred dollars I spent on him. Looking back, I can see why they started getting jealous and angry. I wasn’t being fair. But I was too blind to see that.

   By that point, he and I had been dating for over a year. I finally got up the courage to tell my dad about him. I kissed him for the first time on the Wildwood Boardwalk, right after receiving Jesus pamphlets from the Boardwalk Chapel. 

   I spent so much time picking out outfits for our dates. Hours upon hours brushing and drying my silky blond hair, that I grew out and wore down almost every day. I depended so much on the good morning and good night texts. The flustered voice telling me how pretty or beautiful I looked on every date we went on. The occasional post made about me.

   I would look at the hundreds of likes adorning my screen, the comments on my loving posts about him talking about how cute we were and how great of a match we were. The people that didn’t see that I was always the first to reach out. The first to plan a date. The first to make the big relationship move. 

   It felt like my relationship with him was a part of me. I felt like I was only pretty because he thought I was pretty. Every insecure thought in my head was soothed by the fact that I was in a two year relationship. I would write pages upon pages about him in my notebooks, journals, and diaries, constantly romanticizing our love story so I didn’t have to deal with the cold hard truth. It wasn’t as great as I made it out to be.

   My friends tried desperately to take the rose-colored glasses off of me. To make me realize that he wasn’t a great guy. He was saying terrible things and being plain mean to them. But I could never see it. In my mind, he could do no wrong. He was the “best boyfriend I could ever ask for”.

   I realized our friendship was waning. I realized that jealousy had turned into blatant dislike. But instead of acknowledging their side of the story, I threw them to the side. They didn’t want to invite him to group hangouts (that they were hosting), and I decided if he wasn’t invited, I wasn’t either.

   The tension turned into an all out war. I left my own group chat, ghosted the two friends for several weeks, and sent strongly worded paragraphs to both breaking things off. I even blocked them so I wouldn’t have to hear their responses. I had moved from Philly to New Jersey, and figured that, out of the two, my relationship with him would have more strength than the ten-year bond I had with my friends. He moved to Jersey a few years before. We would be closer than ever, able to hang out more often. Our relationship was getting stronger, or at least I thought it was. 

   It was great until it wasn’t. He grew distant. It wasn’t his fault. He had a back-to-back stint of family injury and pet loss. I was there for him, but there was nothing I could do to ease the pain. Our relationship only got worse from there.

   Something about him was off. When we called, or when he came over to my house, I could always tell something was wrong. But he wouldn’t budge. I desperately wished I could break through, to see what was going on in his head. But he was a brick wall.

   I wasn’t able to sleep. My appetite was shot. I would cry, for hours and hours, wondering where it all went wrong. Staring at our pictures, reading over my diaries, and trying desperately to convince myself that things were okay. It was just a rough patch. He was fine. I was fine. Everything was fine. We would be okay.

   I was in denial. My good morning, good night, and check in texts started to pile up, the bubbles turning green. I would run downstairs to my mom late at night, hives all over my arms and back, and try to tell her what was wrong without making her think there was anything wrong with my relationship. Everything was fine. Nothing was wrong. I’m just stressed about school. He’s doing well. I’m good.

   I wasn’t good. Infrequent texts turned into no texts at all. I stopped being worried, and became angry. Why would he do this to me? I had put everything I had into this relationship. I cared so much about him. We met each other’s entire families. I thought our relationship was perfect. So why, why why why isn’t he talking to me?

   He would say he could call tonight and then cancel. He would randomly reply to one of my messages that stacked up, and his one sentence “Hope you have a great day. Love you” would appease my concern for a brief moment. Until it wouldn’t. I started being fed up. I was doing everything I could to be the best girlfriend I could, and I wasn’t receiving anything in return. It wasn’t fair.

    I was almost ready to text him and say we were over, until out of nowhere, he started texting back. He acted like nothing was out of the ordinary. He was just busy. He would call me just like he used to—except he would also be on the line with his friends. He barely even talked to me, but I was just content to hear his voice. It wasn’t even the bare minimum, but it was enough for me. 

   Things stopped being ordinary. I texted him checking in how his day was, and he just said “horrible”. He lashed out when I asked why and got concerned. Something was wrong. I tried to climb over the brick wall, to see what was going on, what I was being shielded from.

   He wanted a “break”. I don’t remember much of that conversation—besides the shock and sobbing and my heart shattering—but I do remember him bringing up the breakup between me and my friends and how it impacted him. How it affected him too, and I didn’t think about that.

   I was too emotional to think about it at the time, but he was all I thought about when I stopped being friends with them. I was more concerned about him and his well being than I was about my own. I cut those ties because of how they treated him. I was in the wrong. If I was in a clear state of mind, I would have taken their feelings into account before everything blew up into what it did. But I wasn’t. I was a fourteen-year-old girl head over heels in love with a teenage boy, who really wasn’t as great as I made him out to be.

   It took me a long time to heal from it all. It felt like a vital part of myself, my personality, my entire being was gone. I had placed “best girlfriend ever” on the shelf alongside my greatest achievements. If I wasn’t the girl he loved, the girl with the long blond hair, the one that was always there and cared about him more than anyone else, who was I?

   I had to figure that out. I started devoting more time to my friendships. I started writing more. I took self care days, watching South Park to give me the laughter I so desperately needed. I spent more time around my family. I thought they would be disappointed in me, because things didn’t work out, but they weren’t. My dad hugged me as I sobbed into his arms, and he comforted me and told me that things would be okay. The world wasn’t going to crash in on me just because the “guy of my dreams” turned out to be just that. A guy. I was worth more than that. It just took being dumped to realize that.

   A month later I chopped my hair. I told everyone it was to start a new era for myself, which was partially true, but not the full story. I wanted to be different. I wanted to not look into the mirror and see the sad girl. The one with the pristine blonde hair and perfectly combed bangs. The one that was still huddled in her room, desperately trying to console herself. The one that he loved. I needed to find who I was, and a new haircut was the perfect way to do that.

   It took a bit to get used to. I looked in the mirror, and saw myself, but a different version. A version that was more devoted to her academics. Who cherished her friendships and actually had plans during the weekend. Who was becoming her school’s up and coming journalist and reporter. 

   After a while, I started to like this new version of me. It didn’t even feel like a version anymore. It was just me. The beautiful, bubbly, confident girl who doesn’t need to depend on how she looks in the view of some guy. 

   The breakup was a blessing in disguise. I spent so many of my formative years in a relationship that I didn’t know who I was without it. I finally figured that out. And you will too.

   If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this. You are not your relationship. You are not the length of your relationship, what your partner thinks of you, what your followers like and comment on. You are not every love letter you write, every gift you give, every tear you shed over someone who wasn’t worth it. You are only yourself.

   You are all so beautiful and so important, and my greatest wish is that you don’t measure your self worth on how your partner sees you. Because you are so much more than that, all of you. You are not your relationship.