I've heard from guy and girl friends alike the same "it came out of nowhere" break up story over the past few months, maybe even years. The "it's not you, it's me"s. The "I just need to focus on my career" right now. The "I'm not ready to get married, so why be so serious" conversations. And depending on which side of the table my friend happened to land on, my response varied, but in all honesty I get it. It always sucks to be on the receiving end of the breakup news when you claim to have thought things were going just fine, but the truth of the matter is the "out of nowhere" breakup is never really out of nowhere.
The signs are always there. Whether it be the lack of presence while doing things that you used to enjoy together, or something as blatant as claiming to be on a "break" when going stag to a wedding, that weird feeling in the pit of your stomach that you can't quite distinguish between hunger and nausea is called [woman's] intuition. And it doesn't mean that the other person is most certainly in the wrong and you should go snooping through things because the Chinese food you had for lunch didn't sit well and you're confusing that for a sign, it simply means something might be off about the situation and worth addressing. But when you address it and you get the "I need to find myself" excuse I empathize, because that might be one of the hardest pills to swallow.
It's the hardest to swallow because you can't place on the blame on either side, but yet don't know where to direct the angry and confused energy. Because you can't argue with someone about what they perceive as their life journey and what that journey entails, especially because every opinion article or self-help book about the 20s preaches how this is the time to be the "good kind of selfish". What I'd really like to know is when our society became so entitled that the thought of the possibility of other options and opportunities out-valued the tangible things or people currently in ones life. We've become a generation expectant of such immediate gratification, constantly plugged into some device that redirects our attention away from the present into a virtual world of endless possibility and lose sight of the people and things right in front of us. It's like our self-esteem is affirmed by the number of likes a photo gets on Instagram, sexual fantasies can be experienced voyeuristically with a few clicks, and you feel like you know someone because you stalked their social media profiles, but yet you refer to them with their middle name as their last. It's not real, people.
