The Almost Relationship and Why It Hurts So Much

Almost.
Almost. I hate that word. To me, there is absolutely nothing worse in this world than almost. It’s a tease. It’s a snub. It’s false hope.
You almost had exactly what you wanted. But then, you just… didn’t. And there is literally nothing you can do about it.
Don’t even talk to me about almost—it just makes me so mad. It just makes me so sad.

Almost can strike just about anywhere. You almost get the job. You almost get in. You and your roommates almost order pizza.  But there is nothing more terrible than the almost relationship. Everything is always worse when your heart is involved.

Here’s the thing—relationships end.
Now, I’m not saying they all end. A lot of relationships are strong and stable and last a good long while (i.e. forever). But relationships do end. It’s a simple fact of life. And despite the somewhat ambiguous and cursory nature of the almost relationship, those end too.
And I think those endings might be kind of the worst.

There’s something about all that almost that leads to a whole hell of a lot of feeling. When you’re just getting started with someone new, your imagination runs wild. All rational thought flies out the window—so what we’ve been on two dates? We are totally 100% going to fall in love and be together forever. Yes, it’s naivety. Yes, it’s foolishness. But it is so totally wonderful and if I had one wish for the world (besides all the other wishes I’ve got—the first of which would be to rid myself of all student loan debt—yeah, I am selfish), it would be that people would be free to imagine; that they could daydream and wishful think to their stupid, foolish heart’s content.
 

When you fall (or start to fall) for someone, all of that thinking (wishful or otherwise), all of that feeling, all of that hope gets totally intertwined. Somewhere, deep down, you know that nothing is a promise. But you can’t help yourself—you see a future (even if that future is just for tomorrow), or you imagine one at least, and it all just seems so absolutely and completely fantastic that okay, yeah, maybe you get a little bit carried away.

So, when this person goes away (usually by slowly fading out of your life), it’s like getting the rug pulled out from under you. Actually, no, it’s more like getting your future taken away from you. All at once. And nobody even asked first.
I know that sounds terribly dramatic and hell, maybe it is, but ask anyone that’s ever lost an almost—they’ll tell you it’s the truth.

The thing about it is, you haven’t even really gotten your footing yet. You’re still in that wide-eyed, candy-heart, everything is great, daydream mode. You’re not thinking about all the reasons why maybe you two aren’t compatible. You’re thinking about how cute they look in the morning, how much you want to kiss their freckles one by one, how you’ve got to remember to recommend that book to them, how fun it would be to, oh, I don’t know, take a trip to Rome with them and eat pizza under the stars. You’re all about all of those tomorrows.
And those tomorrows aren’t ever going to come.

It hurts.
It hurts like a bitch.
Because letting go is hard. But letting go of the thing you never really had is harder.

Breakups are bad. Even in the most positive of circumstances, breakups are really, really bad. You have to say goodbye to a whole chapter of your life, you have to say goodbye to someone you loved, to someone you still really care about. But what happens when you have to say goodbye to a chapter of your life you haven’t even written yet? That’s when you start to fixate. You dive headlong into some imaginary world and you tear it apart, thinking about everything, absolutely everything, that could have been, trying to figure out exactly where everything went wrong.

You have to move forward.
But moving forward is really damn hard when you can’t get any closure.
And it’s even harder to get closure on something that never really was.
Eventually though, you will move on. I promise you this—and take it from me, I’ve been there (and I am one hell of a fixater). One day, after weeks of thinking about all that almost, almost all the time, you just won’t. Yeah, from time to time, you’ll still look back on that time in your life, look back on that future you imagined for yourself, and it’ll sting.

But for the most part, you’ll be over it.
You’ll be ready for some new future with some other someone.
And this time—fingers crossed, at least—there will be nothing almost about it.