Page 171 of Let's Kiss and Tell

My eyes start welling and I feel so lost. I want to talk to someone who might be able to understand, who can help me, guide me…console me. And that person is just a couple floors below and someone I can’t go to. But I want to so badly.

I wipe my eyes and walk back to my desk. It’s then I see two missed calls from Jonah. Reluctantly, I call him back.

“Lucy…” he answers.

“I swear this is the worst morning,” I sniff. “I wish you were here—”

“Lucy,” he cuts me off. “Did you click the link I sent?”

I frown. I’m not in the mood to entertain some viral video. “No.”

“Check your email,” he says cryptically.

“You’re scaring me…”

“Just look.”

I open my inbox, and among other unread emails I see one from Jonah sent three minutes ago with no subject. I open the email and see a link to a story fromThe Journal.I click it and am brought to the opinion page. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking at.

“What is this?” I ask.

“Just read it,” he replies.

I shift my focus back to the screen and gasp when I see the byline.

“Keep reading,” Jonah says.

Why There’s No Room for Pride in Your Relationship—From Someone Who Lost Everything

By Marshall Oakley

October 8

A little over a year ago, my girlfriend of ten years and I broke up. The technicality of whoreallyended it is still up for debate. I was a shitty partner. She cheated on me. I broke up with her. In that order.

I can count the number of people who know that information on one hand and I’m certain after this article is released, I’ll have to change my number.

A few weeks ago, I went to my ex’s wedding to the man she cheated on me with. I was nervous leading up to the big day; not because I still had feelings for my ex, but because I was nervous about how people were going to see me.

Most people see me as someone who has their shit together, so to say. The fact of the matter is that I don’t. Not at all. But it was so important for people to think I was just as happy as my ex. It’s important for people to think I’m a bigger person than I am. As if that wasn’t pathetic enough, I was so embarrassed to show up alone that I brought a fake date. “Fake date” is putting it lightly; this was someone I told everyone was my girlfriend. The new person in my life. The embarrassing part is that while all of it was supposed to be an act, it felt real to me. It felt real to me from the first day. We hung out with each other for a month leading up to this wedding and while I told myself everything wasn’t real, I gave it my all. I allowed myself to care for this woman knowing very well it was going to end.

What I wasn’t expecting was to fall in love with that person. I wasn’t expecting to fall so head over heels in love with that person it made me forget that my ex even cheated on me. In fact, it made megratefulshe cheated on me. In her defense, she cheated on me because I wasn’t a good partner. I’ll admit that. Perhaps my karma isn’t the relationship ending, maybe that’shergood karma. My karmais that the person that I’m so deeply in love with fell in love with me too.

She fell in love with me and left me.

I think it would have been easier if she didn’t reciprocate those feelings and left.

She called me out and said a lot of things that were true. Things that I guess I never learned from my past relationship. Isn’t that the point? You Love and you Learn?

It’s too late for me to patch things up with her, but at least now I can be honest. Because I learned that there’s no room for pride in a relationship. A real relationship means showing the ugly parts of you to someone else and having them love you no matter what. Because if you can’t be yourself in front of the person you love, how can you be yourself in front of anyone else?

I write this not as a therapeutic effort; trust me, it doesn’t feel great. I write this because I’m stripping the worst parts of myself off to reveal a person I like a lot more. The one person who mattered to me is gone, so I’ll at least try to put myself first for once.

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Lucy