I Left Him. I Came Back. Here Is Exactly Why and Whether I Regret It.

Let me be honest with you from the start, I know what you're thinking.

Oh, she went back. She's one of those women. I thought that too, once. Before I became her. Michael and I were together for five years before I ended it. Good reasons. Accumulated hurt. The kind of relationship where nobody cheats or screams it just slowly, politely, suffocates. We had become two people who coexisted. Housemates with history. I left on a Wednesday, calmly, with a suitcase and a speech I had rehearsed in the car park of my gym. He didn't fight it. That almost made it worse. Eighteen months passed. I dated, I healed. I took myself to dinner and to Paris and to therapy, in that order. I became, I think, the truest version of myself I had ever been. And then at a mutual friend's birthday, because of course I saw him. He had changed. Not dramatically. Not in the ways you'd notice in a photograph. But he was present in a way he never used to be. He listened when people spoke. He laughed without checking if it was appropriate. He seemed, somehow, to have arrived at himself. We talked for two hours at that party. Just talked. Old friends, catching up. Walking to my car I thought: I would like to know that person. The problem was the beautiful, complicated problem was I already loved him. We took it slow. Therapy, separately and together. Honest conversations about what had broken and whether it could hold weight this time. There were nights I drove home from his flat terrified. Nights he called and said, "I'm scared we're just repeating the pattern." We said those fears out loud. Every one.That is what we had never done before. Two years later: we are not the couple we were. We are something harder-won and more honest. Not a fairy tale. A choice we make, consciously, every single day. Do I regret going back? No. But I want to be clear I didn't go back to the relationship I left. That relationship is gone. I went forward, with the same person, into something we had never actually tried before: the truth.

Have you ever given a relationship a second chance?

Did it work or teach you something important either way? comment below