Photo by Hiep Duong on Unsplash

Four years ago, I was working in a call center in Hunt Valley, Maryland, when I met and fell in love with a girl. We ended up dating, and moving into a condo together. A year or so into the relationship, her mother took a job in Florida and moved away with her step-father. We planned on going with them, but before I met her, I had gotten in trouble for the distribution of marijuana and was on probation for a few years. My past was holding us back from an opportunity to live in a tropical climate.

I really loved her, and was willing to sacrifice my job to make the trip. I had my lawyer request a sentence modification, in order to allow me to leave the state of Maryland, but it was denied. Love will make you do ridiculous things, and to show her how much I cared, I was willing to risk my freedom to make her happy. We quit our jobs, packed our bags, and left for Florida. In order to not get arrested for violation of probation, I needed to return to Maryland on a monthly basis and meet with my probation officer. This meant I needed to pay for travel both ways for several months until the end of my probation, and made it difficult to find work. Those visits to the office of parole and probation were some of the most anxiety-ridden experiences of my life, but I miraculously had gotten away with it.

When we had finally been able to settle down in Florida and were able to secure serving jobs, I thought things would start falling into place, but I was wrong. She started staying out really late, and on several occasions not coming home at all. It became apparent to me that when she started her serving job, she began spreading her wings socially and making friends which was awesome to see but the flip-side to that was our relationship started to dissolve. Our communication started to fade, and it was eating me alive. The last straw for me was when she asked me to sleep on the couch upstairs so her and a male co-worker could watch TV in our bedroom together. At the time, I respected her desire for space from me but needed her to know how it was impacting me emotionally. Her defense was, “If this was a girl co-worker, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” which I found completely insulting but I let it go right then. The next day, I asked her if we could talk when I got off work, because she would be off and she agreed. When I was about to clock out that night, I received a text from her asking if she could go out “for a few hours,” because it was her only night off, to which I remember replying something along the lines of, “sure, I don’t want to stop you from having a good time, but we do need to talk.” She responded promising that she would be home.

Spoiler alert––she never came home. I packed my belongings and flew back home to Maryland that morning before she even got back. She made up some story about how she fell and hit her head, got a concussion, lost her phone, and couldn’t figure out how to get home. I blocked her on all social media platforms. Just to see if I was crazy, I posted this story on Reddit a while ago and the responses I got were incredible. The moderators actually removed the post because some people figured out who she was from my post history and started revealing her personal information.

When this happened, I was completely lost, destroyed, and emotionally broken. Since then, I have been able to find peace in studying for a bachelors degree in music production, and growing a brand. If you are going through a tough time in a relationship, try and take some time to shift focus on creating a solid foundation for life.