He Said He Had Never Felt This Way About Anyone. Then He Said It to Someone Else. | The Toxic Relationship Pattern

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I heard the sentence for the second time while standing in a grocery store, holding a bag of lemons. I will tell you where I heard it, because the details matter. Aisle 6

Between the olives and the dried pasta.

A man's voice around the corner, saying into a phone, in a low, warm, delighted tone, I swear, I have never felt this way about anyone. I knew the voice before I knew the words. I stood perfectly still. My hand had closed on the bag of lemons, and a lemon had split, and the juice was running through my fingers. Then I heard the next part. He said, I know it's fast. I do not care. I have never been so sure. It was Nico. He had said those words to me, in exactly that order, 14 months earlier, on a rooftop, with a glass of wine in his hand, and a skyline behind him. I put the lemons back on the shelf. I walked out of the store without buying anything. I got into my car and I sat there with the engine off. And I laughed. Not because it was funny. Because there was nothing else my body knew how to do.

Let me take you back to the rooftop. I met Nico at a friend's engagement party. He was 34, a sound engineer with a scar on his chin and a way of looking at you as if he had been waiting for you to arrive. We talked until the cleaning crew came. He walked me to my car. He asked if he could call me, and he called the next morning at 8 and he said, I could not sleep. I just wanted to hear your voice. The first month was a kind of weather. Flowers on Monday, a song on Tuesday, a photo of a sunrise he had taken on Wednesday with the message, thinking of you.

Every night a phone call that lasted past midnight. He listened to me with his whole face. He wrote down things I said. He remembered the name of my second grade teacher. I was happy in a way that frightened me, a bright, dizzy happiness like a fever. He said it for the first time on the rooftop in the sixth week. I have never felt this way about anyone, I believed him. I want you to understand that there was no reason not to. Then, in the third month, the weather changed. It was subtle, and I want to describe it carefully, because I think it is the heart of the story.

Nothing dramatic happened. He just began to find things about me that did not please him.

My laugh, a little loud, my job, too demanding, my friends, a bit much. He said it playfully, at first, with a smile, then less playfully. A raised eyebrow when I ordered dessert. A sigh when I was late. A long, cool silence when I mentioned something that had gone well at work. I felt as if I had been moved, overnight, from a spotlight to an exam hall. Every day there was a small test, and I did not know the rules.

If I passed, the sunshine came back. For an hour, or a day.

If I failed, the weather stayed cold for a week. I tried everything. I changed my laugh. I changed my schedule. I bought the kind of clothes he said he liked. I became, I think, a very careful person. And at the same time, a part of me was holding on to the rooftop. I thought, that is who he really is. That man is still in there. If I can only be good enough, I will get him back. That, I think, is the cruelest part. The first weeks do not feel like a trick. They feel like proof. And so you spend months trying to return to a place that you are told, quietly, in a hundred ways, you no longer deserve. In the tenth month, he stopped calling at midnight. In the eleventh, he stopped calling at all. When I asked what was wrong, he said, you are being very needy. When I cried, he said, I do not know how to be around this.

By the twelfth month, there was a person at his work, someone named Aria, who was, according to him, just a colleague, and whom I should not be so insecure about.

I want to stop for a moment on the eleventh month, because it was the hardest, and it taught me the most. Nico had gone cold, and I was in a state I can only call pursuit. I did things I am not proud of. I sent him long, careful messages, in which I apologized for everything I could think of. I wrote a letter, and did not send it. I wrote another, and did. I drove past his building once at nine in the evening, and I sat in my car with the lights off and watched his window. I tell you that because I think people imagine that those who are discarded are calm and wise about it, we are not. We are people who have been taught that love is something you earn back, and we try, with enormous energy, to earn it.