This story is about a Malaysian man who thought he had moved on and that staying friends with his ex was just proof of his maturity, until she came back to Malaysia and showed him he had never truly gotten over her.
I was 27 when she told me she was leaving Malaysia for good and that she could not do long distance. I resisted in the beginning but eventually I understood, or at least I told myself I did.
What I could not say out loud was that I suspected the distance was just the reason she gave, and that the truth was something closer to the fact that she had already decided I was not enough to stay for.
I had been supporting her financially for most of our relationship, sending money when she needed it, covering her bills and grocery, because that’s what you do when you love someone and you want them to feel secure. None of that changed her mind.
She called me two days after the breakup and said she did not want to lose me as a person. That she still loved me. That she valued what we had too much to let it disappear entirely. That she hoped we could find a way to remain in each other’s lives.
I said yes, because I was painfully still in love with her and yes was the only word I had available.
What followed was five years of a friendship that I told myself was proof I had healed, when really it was just me avoiding the grief and hurt. She would call to catch up, to vent about her life, to ask for small favors that I always found a way to do.
Our communication got less over time but never disappeared, and I convinced myself that the less meant I was moving on, that I had reached the kind of peace with the past that mature adults are supposed to reach.
Then I met someone, and for the first time in years something in me felt genuinely happy. She was warm and grounded, and she saw me clearly in ways I was not used to being seen. I told myself this was proof that I was over my ex, that I was finally free.
There were also signs I chose to explain away. My ex flirted with me two or three times over those years, small things that I deflected easily by reminding her I was in a committed relationship. I felt proud of how I handled it, as if deflecting proved something about my character.
Then one night, after too many drinks, I picked up my phone and texted her asking whether she thought our relationship could ever have survived if things had been different. I sent it and went to sleep and when I woke up, I told myself it was just the alcohol and that it meant nothing.
It took me a long time to admit that the text meant everything, that it was the most honest thing I had said to her in years and I had needed to be drunk to say it.
She came back to Malaysia after five years away. It had not worked out for her and she was starting over, and because I had spent five years being a loyal friend I told myself that being there for her now was simply what the friendship required.
My partner had questions I did not have clean answers to but she was mature about it, never told me what to do, even agreed to meet my ex and make an effort to know her as a person. We started seeing my ex regularly, sometimes the three of us together and sometimes just the two of us catching up the way old friends do.
That was when something started surfacing that I could not put a name to yet, uncomfortable feeling that sat in my chest every time she was in the room.
Being around her again, I started seeing her clearly in a way I had never managed from a distance. Not as a bad person, she was not a bad person, but as someone whose values and mine had almost nothing in common.
someone I would never have chosen to build a life with if I had seen her this clearly when I was 27 and in love with the idea of her.
I noticed that I was being sarcastic with her, short-tempered in a way that surprised me, carrying a resentment I had no language for. I kept asking myself why I was so irritable around someone I was supposed to be over, and the answer that came back was one I had been outrunning for five years.
Then I found out she had been seeing someone else while we were still together. That she had moved from that relationship into the next one, and that somewhere in the pattern of her life she remained close friends with all of them, a long and tidy row of men she had once said she loved and then folded into a different category she called “friendship”, and I understood with a clarity that felt almost physical that I was next in line for that same reclassification.
The grief that came after was the one I should have felt five years earlier and never let myself feel because she had been standing in the doorway of my heart the whole time, calling it friendship, making sure I never had enough space to actually lose her and mourn her.
She had made the decision to end the relationship for both of us and then spent five years making sure I lived with the consequences of that decision while she moved on entirely. I had been a loyal friend and I had also been a fool.
I made a decision that I will not dress up as anything noble or easy. I cut contact completely, without a long explanation over text, because I had learned by then that she was very good at gaslighting me and that I was very bad at holding my ground when she was speaking.
She had decided for both of us when it ended. This time, I decided for myself.
Staying close to someone you once loved, telling yourself it is maturity, telling yourself it is proof you have grown, is sometimes just your heart refusing to let go of the hope that it might work out. I know because I did it for five years.
Every call I picked up, every favour I did, every time I told myself I was just being a good friend, I was also protecting myself from the grief that I needed to go through in order to actually move on.
I realized that healing needs space and demands absence. You cannot rebuild yourself if part of you is still waiting for love that has already died.
I do not know if it is possible to remain true friends with someone you have genuinely loved. What I know is that it was not possible for me, and that the five years I spent pretending otherwise were five years I will not get back.
I should have let her go right after the breakup. It would have hurt less.
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Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
https://inreallife.my/i-gave-up-my-family-to-pursue-my-dreams-shares-34-yo-msian-woman/
‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman
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