Hi Baby,
I guess I shouldn’t be calling you that. How are you doing? I am not sure actually if I will be sending this letter at all so writing this is really for me more than you.
Frankly, I’ve spent the last couple of months crying about what happened to us. I miss you. That’s all I do but today I woke up suddenly sick of both, crying and missing you. It is what prompted me to think a bit clearer.
One of the things that I realized is that I blame you for the break up of marriage. But I also blame me. It is, after all, the two of us that made up the marriage. I had my faults as much as you had yours. I don’t know, though, if I can say that yours weigh more than mine. I also know for sure that at this point, it doesn’t matter anymore. What matters more are the things that I learned because of everything that happened.
I entered our marriage certain we were going to last forever. I was sure no girl and no guy can ever come between us. For all it’s worth, I was right. Melix, as pretty and as passionate as you were with her, didn’t break up our marriage. She was a result rather than a cause. What I didn’t know is that if there is anyone who can destroy us, it is us and we did.
I think we failed to understand that love and romance are two separate things. Love is what should have taken over when there wasn’t any romance. Romance is what makes us want each other, makes us want to have sex, makes us want to look pretty and act nicely… love is more than that. It is what makes us want each other especially when we are not pretty or nice. When we lost the romance, it wasn’t a sign that our love disappeared, it was a sign that if we really loved each other we would fight through it until we find our way to romance again.
We should have known, too, that no matter how much we try, time will come when we will dislike each other. It’s just what happens when you spend are set to spend a lifetime with someone. You become too comfortable and you start seeing things you will end up disliking. These dislikes pile up and put it together with a legal obligation to bear with it, you have the sure fire way of hating someone. The key in making it through that is the decision to take the bad along with the good. There was no other way we could have made it through that unless we decided to accept those things and work our way around it.
I also wish one of us had some sense of humour. It would have gotten us through some really hard times. During nights when we were bored with each other, humour would have entertained us. It would have made the other not mind sticking around a bit longer. The natural predilection for humour would have also inspired us to look at the funny side of things instead of the irritating side.
We should have put more importance on patience. We are humans and we have limited supply of energy. We work. We get tired. We should have known that we wouldn’t always have the patience to listen to each other, tolerate each other, and put forward the best foot for each other.
We made a pact to always be honest but we never did make a promise how to deal with the truth when the truth becomes too painful. We should have known that as much as we would always want to hear the truth, we will not always like the truth. There were many truths I didn’t like about you and there were many truths about me that you said that I didn’t like. There were also many truths that I wish were lies.
I wish I could have given you everything you wanted and I wish you could have given me everything I wanted but we should have also known that wasn’t going to happen. No one person could be everything to anyone. At some point, you will need something or want something I can’t provide. We were bound to do something that will turn the other one off and it was bound to happen at the worst time.
Reality, that’s what set in and we didn’t have enough love to bear with it.
What we should have never let go is faith in each other and in ourselves. We should have had faith that no matter how bad things were becoming, we would find our way back to each other.
This marriage did not make me lose faith in marriage but it did make my expectations more realistic. That will surely make me want to work harder in my next relationship.
Lastly, I want to thank you for everything. Not everything was bad. I want to think that all the bad thrown together will never measure to the half of the good we shared. I was happy for a time and it was the kind that some people can only dream of.
Believe it or not, I do wish you well with Melix and I really do hope that someday we could be friends. I can’t do it now but maybe someday.
Finally, I am going to do what you had done even before we separated, I am moving on.
Goodbye.
With love still,
Shin
