The Oldest Story In The Book

In the end, six months after we broke up, C. decides to finally tell me last night the real reason why he left me. For another guy he met two months earlier. A guy I know very little about, except he is one year younger than C., newly-reformed from his promiscuous ways of old after attending some self-help course, wants to enter a more "serious" phase in his life, has a "big chest" and makes C. feel "protected".

Anyway, it seems he met this guy and fell hopelessly in love with him. They carried on for a while but the guy thought this is not right and he cannot live his life like this. Being a third party in a relationship didn't gel with his newly-reformed self so he "broke up" with C. Roughly a week later, C. then broke up with me in order to get back with this guy. Which he did. A sequence of events which has taught me that despite all the high-faluting theories about the hows and whys of relationship break-ups, including the ones he peddled to me in the last six months, there is always a simpler reason why guys do what they do. They upgrade.

In C's case, the new guy also held out the promise of a fresh start away from a messy relationship with me which he didn't know how to fix and apparently had lost the desire to fix. It was the "easy way out", he admitted, to clean up his life, get the independence he wanted and end all the "wrong" things about our relationship (e.g. clandestine hook-ups, me being too fat) which he never wanted to have a frank discussion about. In other words, all the previous reasons he cited for leaving still held but perhaps they weren't enough to jolt him into action. So here, I suspect things like "big chest" (and as I now know, big other-things) probably helped tip the balance.

I'm not sure yet what to do with this new information. I'm angry because although I also made mistakes in the relationship, I always stuck by our "rules", which were that either of us could go out and have fun but if our feelings ever got involved and there was a possibility of break-up, we had to sound the alarm with the other. My feelings were true to the end but he did not keep up his end of the bargain. Looking back, I also believe I always tried to play my best with the cards I were dealt in the relationship. The problem is that there were so few cards because he refused to discuss all these serious problems with our relationship with me. Apparently he has now learnt his lesson: he discusses everything with the new guy now and because of that, they quarrel very often (something we hardly ever did).

C., who is now also attending the same life-altering self-help course, is convinced that it is only by telling me the truth about what happened ("his Story", to speak in the vernacular) that we can move on and be true friends. He has said sorry so many times for hurting me, but right now it rings very hollow. The fact is that this has helped him much more than it has helped me.

There is some part of me that empathises with him, given that I did the exact same thing he did six years ago when I broke up a 4-year relationship I was in to be with him. At least now, as F. puts it, the "bad relationship karma" slate has been wiped clean (with the negatives transferred to C.'s slate I suppose). And I suppose it is some sort of closure, though that wasn't exactly what I was looking for. Or maybe I was, I dunno...

Added later:
It turns out that I do know who C.'s new guy is. A big guy called E., whom I know through two other friends. I'm not surprised because C. is the type he likes.