After all that we’ve been through, I would have thought you would be the last one to hurt me. But I don’t blame you, I’m at fault too for believing that this relationship would stay strong through the tests of time. I believed that you were different from the rest and for the first few years of dating you, you were. As a young woman, I’d felt as if I had the entire world in my arms when you held me and I never wanted that to end. From the moment I met you, I knew I wanted you to love me forever. Maybe that was selfish to want and maybe I asked for too much, but I never would have expected it to end the way it did.

You see, I put all of my cards out on the table for you and all I asked in return was for you to as well. I trusted you with every single ounce of my soul, I trusted you with my life. I was 100% certain that you were the person for me and that I would spend the rest of my life with you and you made me feel as if the feeling was mutual. You reminded me every day that you would love me no matter what and we talked about our future together. I never imagined myself with anyone else and in the end, that’s what hurt me the worst. You led me to believe that we would be together forever and I was blinded by your love. I wanted so badly for the future that we had planned to work out, so I was blind to the way that I was being treated. That loving and appreciative person that I’d known had grown into someone who made me feel insignificant and unwanted. I began to see the real you, the one I didn’t know existed. Every “I love you’ began to be followed by a “but,” and every night ended with the slamming of doors.

This was not the fairytale relationship anymore, this was a nightmare. My worst nightmare to be exact. The more I tried to make it work, the more you pushed me away. Once again, I take the blame for expecting more out of you and wanting something that would last forever. I was so sure that you wanted to spend the rest of your life with me that I put my self-worth aside. I settled and I let you treat me the way I never would have let another person treat me. I let you put me down and push me aside. I acted like it didn’t bother me when you didn’t consider me at all when it came to your decisions even though I had always thought of you when I made mine. I couldn’t make sense of it all and I always wondered if I wasn’t doing enough or if I was doing something wrong. I made excuses for you and took all the blame for your mistakes.

Now I know, people change. As much as I thought I had you all figured out, you changed into a different person. Someone I didn’t like and someone who didn’t treat me with respect. It took me until now to realize that I deserved more than what I was getting from you at the end of our relationship. As much as it still hurts to admit, you are no longer the person I see myself with in the future. I see myself with someone who will never take me for granted and who appreciates every single flaw that I have. I have so much love to give, more than you could handle. And that’s okay because you gave me the opportunity to make someone else eternally happy. I will never regret you or the lessons I learned from our relationship, but this is my message to you: I deserve more than what you offered me and I intend to find it. I have a future as open as the ocean and as daddy always said, “there are more fish in the sea.” Thank you for giving me another opportunity to find my trophy fish.