There are movies made about this: Two people fall in love, but still walk away, knowing they may never find a person so suited to them again. Casablanca (1942), The Remains of the Day (1993), La La Land (2016).
It’s heart-breaking on screen, and even more so when this happens in real life.
There was no real reason for them to call it off, people say. In my experience, the reasons are real enough; they just needn’t have served as a breaking point. Those are the saddest stories of all.
One woman living out such a tale is a 38-year-old client of mine, a lawyer; let’s call her Rinny. She fell in love with a classmate in their final year of college. Let’s call him Kris.
Thiers was a slow-burn kind of love. They interned at the same firm and that’s where they formed a deep friendship. They realised there was true trust there, then affection, then intense attraction.
They embarked on a relationship, became inseparable, and remained so in the years after college. In something out of a modern-day fairytale, the two began their careers at the same law firm too. Both families were overjoyed when they announced, a year later, that they were moving in together.
By this point, friends and family had assumed this was it. They were a package deal, was the joke: Wherever one was, the other would be. Rinny and Kris felt it too, the certainty of their love. Their joy, friends laughed, was almost annoying to be around.
Four years of living together brought them closer. They turned up at each other’s parental homes on festive days, and in times of sickness in the family. They got to know each other’s cousins. They learnt to have healthy fights, moving from bitter attack to measured argument, as many couples tend to do over time (a transition that does so much for the health of a relationship).
Then Kris began to discuss marriage, and Rinny started to panic. It’s too big a step, she said. She said it over and over, and he began to wonder what she meant. For the first time in six years, they weren’t on the same page. Eventually, the arguments stopped and a deep hurt set in.
The chasm proved unbridgeable. She was heartbroken. He was so bereft, he quit his job and moved to another city.
It has been 10 years since then. Rinny has dated, on and off, but hasn’t been in another serious relationship. She says she is still in love with Kris, and regrets following through on her decision to not marry. But a number of women are wary of this institution, she points out. They fear how it may change their relationship, and force them in predetermined roles.
Rinny has seen this happen; I have too. Formalising their relationship, she argues, would have allowed a number of ideas into their lives that they had not accounted for.
“I’ve seen people who lived together and were perfectly happy, as we were, tie the knot. And then expectations change,” she says. “From family, from their spouse, even from themselves.”
She still doesn’t know if she and Kris would have been immune. But she is starting to wish she had tried.
I find myself wishing they had sought external help before calling it off. There are so many ways around such an impasse: continue together and create your own rituals, marry but adhere to a pact of your own making. This is exactly the kind of situation where an experienced counsellor could alter the directions of two lives.
Fear of being consumed by a relationship, insecurity about change, a sense of being overwhelmed, are among the most common emotions encountered by relationship coaches and counsellors. They can lead people to walk away from a perfectly healthy and loving relationship for reasons that may be very real, but needn’t be a breaking point.
Once the damage is done, all we can do, as with Rinny, is work through the grief, try to put the what-ifs to bed, and hope that another great love will come her way. It hurts to be at such a point with a client; I can’t imagine how it must hurt her.
So I want to say, there is a better way. Talk to someone who is trained to help. There are no guarantees it will all work out (there never are), but at least that way, you’ll know you did all you could.
(Simran Mangharam is a dating and relationship coach and can be reached on simran@floh.in. The views expressed are personal)
