“I am sorry, I didn’t mean to be so critical. You are great. The time is just not ideal for us to be together.”
I could do nothing, but agree. It had been three years since we started dating and even though we always found a way back to each other, Manik and I did have underlying problems. We were right out of college when we met, I went straight for masters and he took a gap year. So naturally I had a job even before he started looking for one.
By that same logic, I was over my ordeal of having to wait around for all the 100 mails I had sent out seeking job opportunities. When it was time for Manik’s job search to begin, almost everyone he knew was well settled into their jobs. It became harder and harder for me to explain to him that everyone went through rejections, and endless nights waiting up for a response from at least one company. Manik wasn’t the only one. But I was “inconsiderate” to not understand his situation.
The charm of youth is that even love is a believable thing
How lucky are people who find someone while they are still youthful and believe in the whole concept of romance. As you grow older you realise that people just love the idea of love and don’t know what it is.
What is love? Something that gives you security, warmth and feeling of being cared for, or is it the intrinsic want of a partner to never feel lonely.
Manik and my relationship was a bit of everything. It started off as a passionate love affair and after a while it was all about trying to keep each other. We often spoke about our fear of losing each other because of our unworkable differences. But it was beautiful at every step.
He changed me for the better, and hopefully I did so too
Manik was not the kind of boy I had dreamed of, he was his own person and very different from what my teenage checklist was. He wasn’t insecure or possessive, he was hardworking and his work always came before me and his family. It was refreshing to see a 23-year-old talk about work so passionately.
However we had fought too much, blocked each other off social media too often and gotten back after every ugly fight–because that was our “love”. We had become toxic. We were perfect for each other, our morals aligned, our commitments aligned, and both of us were intrinsically family people. We had found commonalities between us pretty early and felt we had built a foundation on those lines. However, the time wasn’t right.
The time was not for romance or compatibility, it was for hard work and career
It was time for us to focus on our careers and not have a relationship which took up a lot of space and time. For him, more than for me. He needed the space and I could sense it. I had a flashback of our best moments during our last fight– a party hopping New Year’s Eve, a surprise visit while I was out of town, always holding hands in public, taking the mushrooms from his plate because he hated them, ordering extra food for me because I love to see more food than I can eat, the unending trail of ‘I love you’s’ throughout the day and our last hug before this fight.
When we cut the call, I felt he was going to bring up the break up. So I prepared myself to agree with him, because I knew these frequent fights had disturbed his mental peace. That is why I agreed when he said the time is not ideal for us. I knew we were ideal, but not the circumstances.
The time is right now, but we are not for each other anymore
That was a year ago. Manik is successful (in my eyes at least) now, and I am engaged to someone else. One year wasn’t enough for me to move on. I am still trying to justify where we are today to myself. It is not like he did not try and get back, he had texted me a week after he broke up as if everything is okay. I did not give him a chance to come back because I knew he was not in that space, even before he realised it a month after our break up.
I am off social media to not know about him at all. He is blocked off everywhere and my focus is back to my fiancé, who is unaware of the intensity of my love for Manik or our “perfect compatibility” (except for in our last month). The silver lining here is that even though now is the perfect time for us–we are not perfect for each other.
*As Told To Yashi Marwaha
Image credits: Tamasha & Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani
