I just got rid of someone I thought I already had from my life—my ex. I’d broken up with him years ago, but we still maintained a loose friends-with-benefits kind of thing. Because we’ve got chemistry, and good chemistry is a great thing! It’s a personal pastime of mine, carving out and trying to hold onto what worked between a guy and me without all that stuff that didn’t.  As if my men were something to dissect like frogs in Biology class. 

It never works, of course. You can’t just have the passion without the other parts coming along. Painful parts. All the reasons I can’t be with them are still there, and those reasons sneak in and spoil things. 

Mel Robbins did a reel on Instagram about compatibility versus chemistry. Getting with someone who matches your energy is the key to a sustainable partnership. Sometimes someone you don’t even know can call you out and make it impossible for you to hide from yourself in the same way. To do the same things. 

As my ex raises his voice, overrules my emotions, and insults my processing of the rainstorm upon us, I realize Mel was talking about me. Her reel replays and gets ready to say, ‘I present to you, Exhibit A.’ 

That’s how growth works. We hear or learn something that resonates on some level. It sort of festers and infects us, in a good way, and slowly but surely, we rise to the occasion this revelation offers us. 

We can try to forget things we hear, but we cannot unhear them. I could not go back to acting as if someone hadn’t just summed up my post-breakup M.O. in a two-minute video on Instagram. Something in me rose up and said, I’m done. Really done. 

“You can’t act that way and be in my life,” I hear myself say. “You can’t hijack my emotions and use my perspective against me.”

And if I keep letting him in, I’m telling him just the opposite. Louder than my words are my actions. What good are boundaries if you don’t enforce them?

That goes for my inner boundaries, which I have between me and me. I can’t say I deserve better and keep hanging out with someone who treats me like I don’t.

All hope that he’ll change, extinguished. We must accept that some people can’t, or won’t, change. Behavior rewarded is behavior continued. So is behavior justified. If someone gives you all the reasons why they do something—tired, angry, hungry, jealous, frustrated, drunk, stressed—what they are saying is, ‘When this condition returns, so will my behavior.’ 

We may see their potential, but potential is not something to fall in love with. 

Loss is painful, but fear of pain is not a good enough reason to stay. Change always feels weird at first. And exciting. There’s an opening in my world—I can’t wait to see what happens in it.

Promises don’t make change. Begging and pleading doesn’t either. Nor does fighting, demanding, or ultimatums you can’t follow through on. And repeated apologies without any behavioral modifications are manipulations designed to buy time—until the next time. 

The only thing that sparks change is a personal decision, and it usually sounds like, “I didn’t know my actions were having that effect. I’ll handle it differently next time.” And then, they do. 

People tell you who they are every day, all day. Better to believe what you see than your fantasy. 

Another thing I’ve learned (later than I would’ve liked), them not wanting to be without you is different than doing what it takes to be with you. Don’t get it twisted. 

I won’t take the former as adequate substitution for the latter ever again.