By Chris Heide
There are moments in relationships that feel so cinematic you don’t realize until later that your brain preserved them like still frames from a film.
One of mine happened on a balcony at a wedding.
Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” was playing while my then-boyfriend stood above the dance floor on a balcony overlooking the reception. The bride and groom looked at me and told me to run upstairs and kiss him during the climax of the song. So I did. I remember running up the stairs laughing, finding him under the glow of string lights, and kissing him right as the music swelled and everyone below us erupted into cheers. Later, the bride and groom told us it was the highlight of the wedding. It looked, they said, like something out of a movie.
At the time, I believed that too.
We were the couple people pointed to as proof that real love still existed. We traveled the world together. We got engaged in Paris. We built a home together. And one of the most meaningful moments of our relationship didn’t happen somewhere glamorous at all.
It happened in Ocean Shores after my mom and I spread my grandmother’s ashes into the ocean.
Later that night, when we were finally alone together, he looked at me with tears in his eyes and told me he felt like he had finally found me. Not just met me. Found me. I remember immediately wrapping my arms around him and crying with him in the dark, overwhelmed not by grief, but by the sheer intimacy of the moment. By the feeling of being seen and chosen so deeply by another person. There was something profoundly human about it. It wasn’t performative romance. It wasn’t Paris or grand gestures. It was vulnerability, love, family, and the quiet certainty that we belonged to each other.
It’s strange how certain moments lodge themselves into your soul forever.
And for a long time, I believed I had found my person too.
That’s what makes grief so disorienting. Not because something bad happened, but because something beautiful did.
People often want heartbreak stories to be simple. They want a villain and a victim. A clean ending. A lesson wrapped in a bow. But some of the most painful relationships are painful precisely because they were real. Because the love existed. Because the intimacy existed. Because the future existed.
For the first year and a half, we were genuinely happy. Not perfect, but deeply connected in the way people are when they truly see each other. He was my best friend. We had our own language, our own rituals, our own way of moving through the world together. Everyone around us saw it too. People constantly told us how in love we looked, how naturally we fit together, how obvious it seemed that we were going to last.
And honestly, I thought so too.
But relationships are not sustained by beautiful moments alone. Eventually life asks more difficult questions. Questions about endurance. About repair. About sacrifice. About whether two people know how to stay emotionally present when things stop feeling easy and cinematic.
Toward the end of our relationship, something between us began to erode. Some of it came from external stressors. He worked out of town for a week every month, and I struggled more with that than I wanted to admit. There is a particular loneliness that comes from being the person left behind, from constantly adjusting to someone leaving and returning, leaving and returning, until the rhythm itself begins to create distance. At the same time, we were beginning to navigate the realities that emerge when a relationship shifts from romance into partnership. We weren’t just dating anymore. We were building a family. Or at least I thought we were.
To me, once you are engaged and building a life together, there should be very little ambiguity about where your loyalty lies. Your relationship becomes its own ecosystem that has to be protected. It doesn’t mean abandoning your family of origin, but it does mean understanding that your partner is now your immediate family too. And somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling chosen in that way.
The hardest part is that I can now look back with more nuance and self-awareness than I had at the time. Illness and grief have a way of stripping you down to your core. I can clearly identify places where I could have shown up better. Places where my anxiety, my fears, or my own unmet needs may have intensified conflict instead of softening it. I know I was unhappy by the end. I know there were moments where I didn’t recognize myself either.
But I can also now see him more clearly too.
I can see the dysfunctional patterns he carried. I can see the emotional avoidance, the fear of conflict, the difficulty tolerating discomfort, the ways unresolved trauma and untreated mental health struggles shaped his reactions and behavior. And importantly, I can hold compassion for those realities without excusing the harm they caused.
Because trauma is not your fault. But it is your responsibility.
Especially once it begins creating real consequences in your relationships and your life.
I think part of why the ending impacted me so deeply is because I could see both versions of him simultaneously. I could see the loving, vulnerable man who held me in Ocean Shores and cried while telling me he had finally found me. And I could also see the emotionally dysregulated and avoidant version of him who eventually callously abandoned me while I was sitting in the ER with a life-threatening illness.
To this day, it is honestly incomprehensible to me.
We started couples counseling, but eventually it felt like he emotionally checked out. I kept waiting for repair, for accountability, for the kind of difficult but necessary conversations that long-term relationships require. I believed conflict was survivable if both people remained willing to engage with humility and love. He seemed to want a version of partnership where conflict itself signaled incompatibility, where love was supposed to feel effortless and untroubled forever. A Disneyfied version of intimacy. But real love eventually asks you to sit in discomfort. To apologize. To stay. To choose each other even while hurt.
Then I got sick.
What I thought was stress or exhaustion turned into pericarditis, an inflammatory heart condition that completely altered my life. Suddenly I was dealing not only with emotional instability in my relationship, but with terrifying physical symptoms, emergency room visits, chronic pain, and the uncertainty of what my future would even look like.
And while I was sitting in the ER with a life-threatening illness, the man I thought I would marry ended our relationship over text.
I still don’t think language fully captures what happens to a person in a moment like that. It wasn’t just heartbreak. It was psychological free fall. My body was already failing me and then, almost simultaneously, my future collapsed too. The person who had once held me while I cried from joy in his arms in Ocean Shores was suddenly gone, emotionally unreachable in a way that felt surreal. His behavior became increasingly erratic and concerning, exacerbated by mental health struggles that, in my opinion, he never truly addressed. Eventually things escalated to the point where I had to seek a protection order.
That was the moment I realized grief can become complicated when the person you miss is also the person you no longer feel safe with.
And maybe that has been the most difficult thing to reconcile: how someone can be both the love of your life and the source of one of the most destabilizing experiences of your life. How both things can be true simultaneously.
Almost a year has passed since everything fell apart, and in many ways I no longer recognize the person I was inside that relationship. Not because I was weak, or lost, or incapable of love, but because grief changes your internal landscape. Chronic illness changes it too. There is something profoundly transformative about having your body, your future, your identity, and your relationship collapse at the same time. It strips away illusion. It forces honesty.
For months, all I could really do was survive.
I couldn’t work because of the pericarditis. My world became smaller overnight. Doctor appointments, medications, physical limitations, exhaustion, uncertainty. There is a loneliness that comes with chronic illness that people do not fully understand until they experience it themselves. Your life pauses while the rest of the world keeps moving. Friends continue building careers, falling in love, getting married, moving forward, while you are sitting in bed trying to regulate your nervous system and convince yourself your life is not over.
But somewhere inside all of that stillness, something in me deepened.
I have always been self-aware. As a therapist, introspection comes naturally to me. But this year forced me into a different level of self-confrontation. I began examining not just what happened to me, but how I participated in patterns that no longer served me. I started identifying where fear of abandonment made me overexplain, where anxiety made me pursue repair too intensely, where my desire for reassurance sometimes overshadowed my ability to simply sit with uncertainty.
At the same time, I also stopped minimizing what I deserved.
Both things can coexist.
I can acknowledge where I could have shown up better while still recognizing that I deserved consistency, emotional safety, accountability, and partnership. I deserved someone who understood that love is not just measured by how passionately you kiss someone on a balcony while Taylor Swift plays in the background. Love is measured by who stays when life becomes inconvenient. By who remains emotionally present during illness, conflict, grief, and uncertainty.
And strangely, I don’t feel angry anymore. At least not in the way I once did.
The anger burned off eventually, leaving behind sadness, compassion, confusion, acceptance, and occasionally even gratitude. Because despite how devastating the ending was, loving him changed me. Being loved by him changed me too. Some of the happiest memories of my life still belong to that relationship. Pretending otherwise would feel dishonest.
That is the strange thing about grief. Healing does not always mean turning someone into a villain. Sometimes healing is simply accepting complexity. Accepting that someone can deeply love you and still hurt you. Accepting that a relationship can be meaningful and still end. Accepting that the version of your future you mourned no longer exists, while remaining open to the possibility that something equally beautiful may still be ahead of you.
Not long before Brock and I started dating, I had returned from Spain after attending my cousin’s wedding. That trip changed something in me. During the evenings, I would explore Sevilla by myself, wandering through the city with a kind of confidence and openness I hadn’t felt in years. I flirted shamelessly with handsome Spanish and German men, soaked in the energy of being somewhere unfamiliar, and felt deeply connected to myself in a way that felt both grounding and electric. I remember coming home feeling expansive, magnetic, and fully alive. So connected to myself, in fact, that when I got home, I asked him out first.
I know now that confidence was part of what drew him to me in the first place.
Somewhere toward the end of our relationship, I lost touch with that version of myself. I became consumed by stress, conflict, illness, emotional instability, and trying to save something that perhaps could not be saved by one person alone.
But he’s coming back now.
Not identically. Not naïvely. But differently. More grounded. More discerning. More resilient. My confidence today feels quieter than it did back then, less performative and more internal. I no longer need to convince myself of my worth because I survived losing the relationship I thought would define the rest of my life, and I am still here.
And yes, if I’m being fully honest, I do still sometimes wonder what it would be like if we found our way back to each other someday.
I think pretending otherwise would make this essay less truthful.
I wonder what it would feel like to sit across from him years from now as two changed people. I wonder whether enough healing, humility, accountability, and time could ever repair what was broken both privately and publicly. I wonder whether the damage done during the breakup irreparably altered the foundation of our love or whether there is some alternate version of our story where we finally learned how to love each other properly.
I wonder whether our families would ever accept us together again.
I wonder whether we would simply fall back into old patterns.
I wonder whether the intensity of our connection was once-in-a-lifetime or simply my first experience of truly adult love.
And then, almost immediately after asking those questions, another thought follows:
Would the person I am now even want that anymore?
That question feels far more important.
Because this story is no longer about whether I can reclaim a lost love. It’s about whether I can continue reclaiming myself.
Ironically, one of the most healing experiences this year came through reconnecting with my fiancé from fifteen years ago. That relationship had been deeply toxic, the kind of love that confuses chaos with passion. He is married now, and our reconnection has been entirely platonic, but something about seeing each other again after so many years brought an unexpected sense of peace. It reminded me how much people can change. How much I have changed. How relationships that once destroyed you can eventually lose their emotional power over your life.
That realization has given me hope.
Not necessarily hope that Brock and I will reconcile. Honestly, I think the protection order and everything surrounding the breakup likely closed that door for a reason. Some endings are protective, even when they are painful. But hope that love itself is still possible. Hope that there are people capable of depth, accountability, emotional endurance, and mutual care. Hope that I have not missed my chance at lasting partnership simply because the person I thought was my forever turned out not to be.
I know now exactly what kind of man I want beside me.
I want someone emotionally courageous. Someone capable of repair. Someone who understands that conflict is not abandonment and vulnerability is not weakness. Someone who can sit beside me in grief, illness, uncertainty, and imperfection without running from the discomfort of being human. Someone who understands that real intimacy is built not only through chemistry and romance, but through consistency, humility, accountability, and choosing each other over and over again.
Maybe I will find that person in Seattle. Maybe I’ll find him in another country. Maybe I’ll find him while traveling again, rediscovering the version of myself who felt electric and expansive in Spain all those years ago.
Or maybe the greatest love story of my life will ultimately become the one I rebuilt with myself after everything fell apart.
And sometimes I still wonder what exactly it is that I miss.
Do I still love him?
Or do I love the moments we shared? The life we built together? The version of our relationship that existed before everything fractured? Am I grieving a real person, or am I grieving the person I believed he was before the ending forced me to question everything?
I don’t fully know the answer to that yet.
What I do know is this: grief is love everlasting. It is proof that something mattered deeply enough to leave a permanent imprint on your soul. And healing is not erasing that love. Healing is learning that your life can still expand beautifully around the absence of it.