The Man Who Broke Me

Everybody has that certain someone in the past who turned their life upside down. That special someone who took your ideals and revolved them to a complete 360. The one who broke your heart and changed your life forever.

I once had that someone and his name was DevilIncarnate.

Okay, kidding.

I call him Rockstar.

Rockstar was 23 years old, a year older than I was when we first met. He wasn’t that tall but he was well-built, a very talented guitar player who was the youngest in his family. We met at a rehabilitation center where we both volunteering. He wasn’t flirty at first, probably because I still had a boyfriend, albeit long-distance, when we first met. But when I announced that I had finally broken up with that boyfriend, Rockstar usurped on the first good opportunity that he saw. I needed help purchasing a certain DVD for my friend’s bachelorette party and he offered to accompany me. So he picked me up at home and together, we flogged down our embarassment (okay, we were trying to get some porn for the party) and was able to get ourselves some Class A hard-core porn through some local travelling salesmen who sell pirated DVDs. We started texting each other after that, talking more on the phone and before the month ended, he and I were a couple.

It was really fun at first. Despite him being wise in the ways of casual dating, I was his first serious girlfriend so I trained him on the ways of a true boyfriend-girlfriend relationship – the holding hands, the proper positioning of the body when sitting together, the naughty play of words, the expected and unexpected kisses. He was a quick study and soon he was showing me romantic places to dine in, inviting me to lunch with his family, showering me with flowers just because, hanging out at his house after my class, bringing me food at every opportunity. He loved me and never tired of telling me that he was incredibly lucky to have me. He made feel so adored with such fervor that at times I felt that he was choking me with his affection. I found myself wanting to break free, unable to cope up with his expectations, disappointing him so many times for simply being who I am until I started to lose sight of who I am and became forcibly molded into who he thinks I should be.

And oh, how I rebelled.

I started telling male friends I just recently met that was single. I started sneaking out to meet my friends from school without telling him. I started to learn how to drink, to smoke again, to do the things I knew I wanted to experience while was still in my youth. Almost everything he had forbidden me to do, I did. He hated my friends so I snuck out to meet with them. He was jealous of my male bestfriends from highschool and forbid me to stay in touch with them, so I continued texting with them behind his back. But at the end of the day, after a thousand angry text messages and fights over the phone, I feel overcome by guilt and remember that he loved me so much. So I ended up with my tail between my legs, confessing everything to him and vowing never to do it again.

Until the next opportunity came and I once again succumb to it.

If I might have come across as a bad girlfriend, you’re wrong. I swear that I wasn’t. I really did my best to be the person he wanted me to be, to the point that I no longer had any close friends to talk to except for him. I was pulling myself away from my bestfriends and my family and I was so miserable that I tried to drown that mysery with the next closest thing: food. I gained so much weight that I eventually lost my self-confidence, started believing that he is the only person who will ever love me now, began missing a lot of the things that were happening around me, yearning for the opportunity to be who I really am, became desperate for more attention and spiraled more into depression.

And we fought a lot.

Oh, God, how we fought. It wasn’t that it was anybody’s fault really. It was just that Rockstar and I were very different people and I think we had somehow fallen into a relationship before we even got the chance to really know if we even like each other. I was at an age where I was starting to realize that I missed a lot of things in my youth and am now just starting to catch up to them. I wanted to go out, meet people, drink and be noticed. I was driven by an ambition to succeed in life, to not settle if I know that I can still get more and I wanted to make my mark in society. He, on the other hand, was content to stay at home, did not care going out with his friends (the few ones, he had), lounging comfortably at home or working part-time as a business entrepreneur today, a computer encoder tomorrow, a law student one time, a guitarist in a rock band, the next. He was stubborn, opinionated, egotistical and he wanted his woman to spend her days in the kitchen, serving him his meals, catering to his every whim, voiceless, submissive and docile.

I tried to be that woman, but I failed miserably.

He must have been miserable too because he cheated, not once, not twice, but thrice if my memory was right. Our first month together, he slept with a hooker. I forgave him, thinking, I can’t really blame him since he wasn’t getting any from me then. A few months later, he started courting some girl who worked in the same hospital that we were both volunteering in. The girl turned him down so that didn’t progress the way he would have wanted to. His frequent excuse was that I made him so mad because of the things that I did despite him forbidding me that it forces him to cheat with other women just to get back at me. He made me feel like it was my fault, so once again, I forgave him. I can’t remember the rest of the girls he cheated with, except for one, which I will talk about much later in this post.

Somehow, despite all the arguments, we made the relationship work because we knew we loved each other. Almost two years into the relationship, he bought me a 4-carat diamond engagement ring and proposed to me. I was in my 2nd year of medical school, certainly not ready to get married, unsure if I even wanted him to be the man I spend the rest of my life with, but I loved him, I didn’t want to disappoint him and I was afraid that maybe this was as good as it gets. So, I said yes and we started planning for a summer wedding. While his family started checking out churches and wedding venues, we plotted out how we were going to tell my parents.

In my heart, I knew my parents will never agree to my marrying at such an early age, especially when I wasn’t even halfway to finishing medical school. I knew them well enough to know that there is no chance in hell that they will actually say yes. In my heart, I secretly hoped that they wouldn’t agree to it. It was my way out of the engagement. I was a coward, yes, but I needed them to tell him so I didn’t have to be the one who will hurt his feelings.

My parents certainly did not disappoint.

The summer wedding was cancelled. And I was free. For the meantime.

We continued the relationship but it just wasn’t the same anymore. We were still boyfriend and girlfriend, still engaged, but a bitterness was slowly building up in Rockstar. He tried applying for a job at my mother’s office and was turned down. He assumed right away that my mother hated him and bore a grudge against my parents. I left town for quite some time because of school and when I returned, the magic just wasn’t there anymore. After 2 ½ years, we broke up, amicably at first and even when I didn’t think it was a good idea, we continued seeing each other as friends for at least two weeks. He would still text me constantly, even when I chose not to reply, and he would still come around to visit me, hinting at times that he wanted to get back together.

Until he told me about the younger girl he had been seeing, a minor, whom he had been sleeping with behind my back for the past two months.

It was the last straw that finally broke me.

The thing is, if you betray me as a boyfriend, I can understand that, because I might have pushed you to do so being the not so perfect girlfriend. But if you betray me as a friend, then I can’t forgive you. The past two weeks after we broke up, he continued flirting with me, messing my mind up that I didn’t even give myself the chance to mourn for the 2 ½ years that we have been together and had now lost. He made me believe that there was still a chance that we might get back together soon. I agreed to be friends with him even if I didn’t really think it was healthy for both of us. I never asked him for anything except for the promise that we would tell each other once we started seeing other people, so that the other person can move on.

He betrayed that trust, in so many ways imaginable, and I hated him so much.

I barraged him with e-mails of hate and desperation. I even barraged the other girl’s Friendster with scornful messages. Rockstar always brought out the worst in me, and he was still doing it, even after we had broken up. He begins threatening me that he’ll sue me for the hateful e-mails. I didn’t care. I wanted them to feel as miserable as I did. I didn’t want to be the only one feeling the pain.

I wanted to bring them down with me.

It took me two weeks before I stopped crying in my bedroom and burying my sobs among the pillows. It took several months before I could say that I was finally okay. Longer still for me to want to go into another serious relationship again. Rockstar and I never crossed paths again, at least, not face to face, although there were times when I saw him around town. He has a 3-year-old child now with the same girl, but they never married and he was still jobless apparently.

When it comes to my views regarding love, I was never the same person after that. I had become jaded, a little hardened, wiser (if I say so myself) but so much stronger.

I don’t regret ever having met him. I would like to think, if not him, I was bound to meet someone like him in my life anyway. I do hope that he had forgiven me, for I have long forgiven him. For now, I simply choke it all up to experience, just a part of what made me who I am now.