A woman shared how she randomly thought about her ex-boyfriend one night and wondered how he was doing, reminiscing about their times together.
Here is the story:
Do you ever think about your ex-partner and wonder how they’re doing?
For the record, I’m happily married, with a beautiful baby girl. My husband is loving, everything I could have ever wished for. My life is complete, beyond my dreams and I’m really grateful..
But today, while putting my baby girl to sleep, I suddenly realized that it must have been roughly 10 years since my first boyfriend had broken up with me. (My husband is my second)
I started to wonder how this first guy is. Not in a romantic kind of way but genuine concern as someone who had known him very well in the past.
You see, he’s not a bad guy. At all. He just has all the bad luck. And I do wonder how he is from time to time, though I’ve no desire to get in contact. I genuinely hope things have looked up for him since.
Break up
The circumstances of our breakup were dramatic, though it was none of our faults. He’s just plain unlucky.
We had been together about 5 years, throughout the university, but he broke up with me the first year after we graduated and started working.
The following can probably be written into a Mediacorp drama:
His family had always been fraught with problems. They’re a working-class family, with a total of 4 brothers. He is no. 2. They could have had a good, middle-class life but his father gambled to the point of having loanshark come to the house and to the office, causing him to lose his job.
Supporting father
Then his parents divorced, selling the flat to split assets. His father then became homeless, and my then-boyfriend who was still in uni had to fork out a few hundred a month from his part-time tuition income to rent a bed for his dad.
I pitied him having to support his dad while the rest of his family moved to an HDB rental flat. By this time the other brothers had stopped contact with his dad, only my ex-boyfriend was supporting him.
Wanting to save on university fees, he deliberately loaded on more modules so he could graduate a semester earlier and go to work to earn money to support his dad and family, with 2 younger brothers who were still schooling.
The last straw came one day when I was at work. By that time I had just started working a few months, so he could have been working for a year already.
I still remember I received a text from him, asking him to meet me that night after work. I had period cramps and really wanted to go home to rest so I asked if we could meet another night. But no, he had something urgent to tell me. So we met at my void deck.
I still remember that night. He sat me down and told me everything…
Never ending problems
He wanted to break up with me. Because his youngest brother, then in sec 3, had been kicked out of school for failing to turn up for the retake of his end-of-year exam. Yes, so he had failed once and had been retained. The school gave him another chance to come back for a re-exam but in between, he had gone to lion dance, fallen, and broken his collar bone, meaning he couldn’t take the re-exam since he couldn’t write. So the school had called to kick him out. That was the last straw for my ex-bf as his problems seemed unending and which led to his decision to break up with me.
Incredulous? The whole situation was incredulous to me. I cried and cried and cried. I didn’t understand why it was me who had to suffer a breakup when we both agreed I wasn’t a problem to him.
He then told me everything else. He said he didn’t want to burden me with all his family’s problems so he had kept a lot of the severity of the problems to himself.
But during the breakup, he came clean and told me everything that had been plaguing him.
Brother arrested
By that time, I hadn’t seen his eldest brother for months. I did ask, but my then bf just made excuses. Only during the break-up did he tell me that his elder brother had been caught taking drugs and had been either in jail or rehab (I can’t rmb). I was shocked and so pained for him. This meant that he could no longer continue to work in insurance after his release, and the burden on my ex-bf to support the family became even heavier.
He also told me, when his parents divorced and sold the flat, they split proceeds, and his dad went uncontactable for a week, apparently, he had gone to Batam to gamble and came back after he lost heavily or most of it.
So yeap up until that point, I had been blissfully unaware of the severity of his family’s problems and only knew that they divorced due to his gambling problem and that only my ex-bf was supporting his dad by renting a bed space for him to stay.
I was stunned. And sad. We had talked about BTO, visited the show flat, discussed applying for the one at AMK, etc. Everybody including me thought we would end up together because that’s just how we were.
And then as I sat crying and wailing, he told me he decided to break up with me because I was always a happy girl and he didn’t want to burden me with his problems. So he didn’t tell me alot of these things that plagued him. But when he had to meet me, he had to put up a happy front and he didn’t want to anymore.
I was bewildered because yes I’m sheltered, but I’m not unhelpful or uncaring. I didn’t understand why he had to hide his problems from me.
When his dad was homeless, I even suggested he move in with my own dad so as to save on rent.
My parents were and are separated, my dad stays alone in a house. So there was room for his dad. He did move in, but my dad is not easy-going. He has OCD and is very x100 naggy. So anyway, things didn’t work out between the dads and his dad had a fall in the house and was warded and later diagnosed with kidney failure and needed dialysis.
Stalked boyfriend after break up
Anyway so we broke up that night but I was distraught and kept pestering him, stalking him at his house and workplace to force him to speak to me. I even contemplated jumping off his block, while sitting on the stairs in between knocking on his door for him to speak to me.
Eventually, he told me, please stop knocking on my door. I feel very stressed, it reminds me of times when the loan shark came to our house.
It took me more than a year, and a few months of severe pimple outbreak before I got over the heartbreak. I had a pimple outbreak from excessively crying, it dried out my face or caused some hormonal changes and at age 25, I had my first outbreak.
Epiphany
My turning point came when I was overseas with a group of girlfriends doing community work. After activities one day, they took us out fishing for lala in the river. It was evening time. As I floated lazily down the river, I looked up and suddenly saw that the sky was round. I can’t put it in words, but the sky was so vast and clear.. clouds dotted the sky. I could see it was indeed round. And I thought to myself: The world is so big, there are still so many things I haven’t seen and done, so many things waiting for me.
At that moment, I was filled with hope and excitement for the future and stopped looking back on my past. It took another few months for my pimples to die down. I discovered the vegetarian diet helped calm my hormones and pimples down.
My healing really came after this river trip. I started doing a lot of things on my own, like cycling from ECP to Changi Point or Barrage every weekend. Going to swim 20 laps. All on my own. It was very empowering because I had never been a very independent person.
Started dating again
And then about a year after the breakup, my colleagues encouraged me to start dating again. They told me about online dating. Actually, my director was the one who told me about it. That’s where he met his wife. So I did, and then I met my future husband. We dated for 2 years and have been married for 5 years now.
Anyway, I am just writing to put this on the internet, and putting it out there that I hope this first guy is well and found someone he deserves. I hope things have gone better for him and his family and I sincerely wish them the very best. I keep him in my thoughts quite frequently, like once every few months I would wonder if he’s ok.
I mean, after all that he has been through, I hope God is treating him better now.
Oh, actually we did meet about 2 years after the breakup. Purely by coincidence. My grandma had been warded in hospital and so was his dad. My cousins bumped into him and told him about grandma, who he also knew. So he messaged me after that to ask about her condition.
That’s the first time we spoke after so long, I was already dating my husband. Anyway long story short, his dad passed away from kidney failure shortly after and I also visited his funeral. I felt really guilty at that time because I had blamed our breakup on his dad too. Anyway, that was the last time we spoke.
End of story, it was long.”
Editor’s note: Man, that was quite some journey wasn’t it?
