#TheSW30: Day 20 Part 1, The Boy From The Concert That Stole My Heart

Day 20: Describe your most difficult breakup and what you learned from it.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Day 20 will be in two parts.  Describing my relationship and break-up took way too long.  If you don't want to read through the break-up and go straight to the things I learned from it click HERE.

There's a reason I'm behind in the blog challenge.  That primary reason is that I've been working late trying to get everything ready for our Mockingjay premiere on Thursday.  The secondary reason is because I knew Day 20 was going to rip band aids off wounds that aren't completely healed yet.

If you couldn't tell the time and energy I gave to the salesman really wrecked me and left me quite jaded.  At the same time I was trying to process that situationship another one that had had me spinning my wheels for a while was back in the picture and well, he continued to let me spin my wheels until I had enough and started dating someone else.  The guy I was dating was super nice and had his stuff together, so clearly the opposite of what I was attracted to.  I ended up ending that relationship and swearing off dating.

That's always when you meet the person you weren't looking for, isn't it?  There was this guy in my group of my mutual friends that I danced (or some variation of it) with at a Tiesto concert shortly after I called it quits with the nice guy.  I didn't really know what to make of him, considering both of us were imbibing in the night pretty heavily but from the pictures I saw afterwards, it looked like we had a good time.  I didn't see much of him or any of that group of friends for a while because I took a detox from Downtown for a couple of weeks.  While, several people in that group shot my texts telling me they missed me only one of them made an effort to make plans with me outside of the parts of Downtown I was staying away from for the moment.  Yup, it was the concert guy.  He rode his bike all the way from the club he was DJing at to The Village at Meridian to bike some more during Live for 175...and be there when I got there at the ass crack of dawn.  It was kind of creepy, but kind of sweet.  After two nights in a row of doing that, he had my attention now. We made plans to grab drinks the week after Live for 175 wrapped up (in my mind, this was not a date because I wasn't dating anymore, remember?)

We had a great time that night and I was disappointed it had to end as early as it did because I had to be up for work in the morning.  He was definitely more than I gave him credit for the night of that concert.  He was really smart, quick witted, into a lot of the same things I was and had just that hint of cockiness that I find extremely attractive...but I wasn't going to read to much into that night or develop any sort of attachment to him.  I wasn't going to chase him either.  In fact, I won't do that at all anymore.  If a guy is genuinely interested in seeing me again, I'll wait for them to come to me.  The guys who let me spin my wheels only to hurt me exhausted the hell out of me me.  We're grown-ups for God's sake.  If you had a good time, pick up a damn and call me.  If not, I'll assume you're not interested and move on.  I'm not going to waste my time trying to impress you.

Concert boy did pick up the phone.  And we started spending more time together.  And it was comfortable, but I still didn't put a label on it.  After all, I'm accused of being a "stage five clinger" on a daily basis, so I was just letting it roll where it would.

One night we were sitting on my couch and he said "I'm so lucky to have such a cool girlfriend."  And I was like "You called me your girlfriend?" "Are you mad?" "No."  I wasn't seeing anyone else and didn't want to be.

What happened from there I can't put into words, because it really was the most incredible summer of my life.  The closest thing I can relate to it is the lyrics from a bonus track from Taylor Swift's 1989 album called "You Are In Love."  I don't know when it happened exactly, that sort of weird guy from the Tiesto concert had become my best friend and the one person that I wanted to see every day for beyond the foreseeable future.  I really loved him.  I didn't know exactly what that felt like because I don't think I ever was in true love with my ex-fiance.  He was the first person that planning a future with didn't make me freak out and run like hell.  I wanted to grow up, have a little family and grow old together with him.

That all changed when his grandma died in early September.  He went back "home" to help out with the family.  First it was gonna be a couple days he was gone.  Then a couple of weeks. Then he had no idea when he'd be back in Boise for good.  I missed him a ton, so when Lucky suggested I go along with him and Huggie to where I thought "home" for my boyfriend was for the weekend I decided to go with them.

Imagine how crushed I was when there was no way my boyfriend could make it work to see me while I was there since I sprung it on him literally hours before I would've been there.  The neighbor kid was spending the night at their house for a sleepover with his little sister and when he asked the kid's parents if it was cool if I stopped by they said no.  I was bummed, but understood.  He lived in a really LDS community, so I'm not shocked the parents didn't approve their kid seeing me stay the night at his house.

The boys didn't buy it.  They had a gut feeling either he was cheating on me or really wasn't in the same city that we were.  I wrote it off until he couldn't be in Boise for Thanksgiving.  I found out days beforehand even though he swore he'd be here for me because I don't have any family in Idaho.  Crushed that he couldn't follow through on his promise, invite me to his family Thanksgiving or give me a definitive date he'd be back in Boise, I ended it.

A week later, I did find out that everything he told me was a lie.  Lucky and Huggie were right, he wasn't in the city we went to.  He was in Eastern Idaho.  His experience in my industry was overly exaggerated.  The house he was living in in Eagle wasn't his.  It was his roomate's.  My mind was blown.  How could this guy who I was head over heels for, who I thought loved me just as much, who I was planning a future with deceive me like that?  Hell, how did he pull the same act over on my dad when they met?  I had so many questions I never thought I'd get answers to.

So, in the aftermath I went chasing after the guy that had me running in circles for years again, went home for Christmas, had a great time with old friends, came back to Boise and argued at a bar with the circle guy within a few hours of getting off the plane. Hella drunk on Fireball and upset, I ended up telling him our friendship was over.  He was one of the first people I met in Boise and I'm friends with very few of my original friends anymore so hearing myself say "we're not friends anymore" after three and a half years was gut wrenching.  So gut wrenching I felt like I needed to talk to somebody to make it to morning (again, I was hella drunk so everything seemed far more dramatic that night than it really was.)  I called the concert boy/my ex.

That's when a lot of what happened leading up to our break-up became clear.  He was somewhere I didn't expect him to be when I finally got to talk to him that night dealing with some really heavy stuff that I didn't expect him to be dealing with.  That's his story to tell, not mine.  I'll just say that I still really loved him unconditionally, understood that the deception I went through was out of his control and wanted to be a support system for him.  He stayed in his real hometown in Eastern Idaho and got a new job in my industry so we mainly talked on the phone.

Before I knew it we were back together and it happened as naturally as our relationship did in the first place.  I went out there to surprise him after work one day. He came here for weekends when he could.  We were making it work and talking about the future again.  But sure enough, as time went on he would get surprised by something at work and not be able to come to town when he promised he would.  He missed one of my best friend's weddings.  He was going to be able to stay less than 24 hours the weekend of the OneRepublic show when he was supposed to be here for three days.

Even though I had taken his good days with his bad, I had to confront that he was getting distant again.  The night I called to do that, I never thought I'd break things off for good but I did once I realized the heavy stuff he was dealing with was winning and he didn't have it under control.  Me loving him unconditionally wasn't enough to keep our relationship alive if that was the battle he was in and that's where I became strong.  I said I couldn't do it anymore and that I owed it to myself to get out of this relationship before we went forward with any of our future plans.  It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but I knew I had to.

When I hung up with him I called my best girlfriend and told her what happened.  She listened as I just cried uncontrollably, realizing that the only guy I ever truly loved was gone forever.  The world felt like it was ending as I was forced to close that chapter of my life for good.

The next few months weren't pretty.  I was either incredibly high on the good times or incredibly low on the low times.  Grieving the loss of that relationship was incredibly painful and I'm blessed to have friends that stayed to put me back together every time I fell apart when it really felt like there was something horrendously wrong with me that made me unworthy of being loved.

Would I say I'm "fixed" from this break-up yet?  No, but I've definitely made strides toward loving myself and know that those kind of insecurities I had are silly in the long run.  To be honest, reading Mandy's Life, Love and a Dash of Sass was the turning point for me.  She helped me realize that my life was still full of wonderful, amazing things and people without the relationship that I had cherished so much.  The book also made me realize some important things I learned from the amazing and heartbreaking times with the concert boy.  Read on to Part 2 for those tough lessons.