We were supposed to get married and have kids. We were supposed to go house shopping together and instead of going to the car dealership to "dream," like we always used to do, we would be picking out our family car that would carry us safely to and from the family vacations we had planned out for ourselves. We were supposed to spend Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with yours. We were supposed to do a lot of things but the one thing we hadn't planned on doing was never spending forever together.

We'd talked about the possibility of not spending forever together when you enlisted in the military but the conversation always held the unrealistically optimistic tone of "we can talk about it but it's never going to happen." And I genuinely think that we both believed that we had been through the tough stuff in our relationship, so we would and should surely get married and live happily ever after.

But, two and a half years after our relationship has ended and 'forever' came to a screeching halt, I've now realized that even though we never thought we wouldn't spend forever together ... I was never really supposed to be your forever because you weren't mine.

We had so many problems that I never wanted to face. There was a time that I would have easily blamed you for all of those problems, but I had a lot to do with why those problems continued to occur. I was insecure in myself and I looked to you to secure me but sadly, my inability to trust you made my insecurity the scary monster that always seemed to show its face in the dark. I needed you to love me because I didn't love myself. And that's why we were never going to have forever even though that's what we were scratching and clawing at the backdoor for.

I placed too much pressure on you to fill the void of being loved and quite honestly, you put pressure on me to love you even when your actions didn't warrant a loving reaction. I deserved better than someone who took the challenge I was proposing -- "love me to death." And, you deserved a love that would challenge you to be better, not a love that would warrant your cheating and lying as acceptable "forever" behavior.

Neither of us knew what love was. Love for you was skewed - it meant having someone who loved you no matter how many times you stepped out on our relationship or how many times you lied but swore it was for my own good. Love for me was also skewed - believing that it was your responsibility to love me so that I could learn to love myself the way you did. The only problem with both of those types of love is that neither one of them was healthy and neither one of them promoted a "forever" kind-of-love. No, both of them was like asking the other jump off of a cliff and not worry about what lies below. Trusting that we wouldn't get hurt when we jumped. But, what happened time and time again was ... we both jumped knowing that it would hurt. And it did. Always.

You see, neither one of us was building a forever relationship with the other because neither one of us needed to be in a forever relationship with the other. We didn't need each other. We loved each other but in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. We loved each other because we thought that we could fix each others insecurities. We loved each other because we thought that being with them made us better. We simply hated ourselves so much that we thought the other could make us love what we couldn't. And as was the case for us, hate trumped love.

Now, you're in a new relationship that will hopefully grant you a forever-kind-of-love. You may not know this nor may you ever, but I pray for you everyday. I pray that your heart has been changed and that you don't have the same kind of love with her that you had with me. I remember telling you to not treat her the way that you had treated me ... and without even realizing it at that time, I really meant that. I hope you get with her all that you couldn't get with me. I don't say that out of envy or hurt. I say that genuinely because I now see that I was never meant to be your forever, and you weren't going to be mine. But, I have prayed that we would both find in someone else what we so desperately wanted to find in each other. I hope you've found that - it seems you have. And, I hope you take some comfort in knowing that I'll find my forever kind-of-love someday, too.