This is my MAL love story, and the very first love story of my life, as well as the very last post in MAL I will ever make. And I just feel that if I wrote everything, it would help in my healing process. And because I’ve got nothing else to lose, I might as well make it public and all, since I won’t be coming back to MAL ever again because of how much painful memories it holds for me. After all, everyone will probably say tl;dr anyway so nobody would actually read this, but here it is. The story of my love life on MAL.
For privacy purposes, let’s call him Nathan.
I met Nathan on the 23rd of December of the year of 2014 on MyAnimeList.net. I’ve just returned home from a three day cruise that sailed to Mexico, so I was relatively exhausted and went on MAL to mainly check up on what I’ve missed and to simply relax. It was then on a 5PM when Nathan popped a simple “hello” in my comments. I didn’t know at the time that I had previously spoken to Nathan before, but only simple exchanges that I heeded no mind to. I also didn’t know that responding to that comment would turn into something that became the most important part of my life for almost a year.
Nathan and I got along well enough. I found out the first week that we lived on the opposite sides of the country (USA) and that we were three years apart in age. He was 19. I was 16. At the time, I was still raving about Hunter x Hunter (2011) deeply and I wrote massive analysis articles on his wall, which I assume was the thing that got our conversation going. Nevertheless, as I was slowly talking to Nathan in our first week of interaction, I slowly started to notice that I began to develop slivers of feelings for him. It was on the third or fourth day of interaction that I had began to realize that the emotions were obviously present and it was something that bothered me very, very much.
As background information, I had a massive crush on another person back in November of 2013, and it wasn’t until a year later that I had gotten over him and finally moved on and accepted the fact that he would never reciprocate my feelings. So when I did the math, I realized how much of a dangerous territory I was heading towards when I found myself slowly falling for another man when I just got over my previous crush. Later that night, I had a serious conversation with myself (in my head) and told myself that I couldn’t risk falling into the same pit I fell in a year ago. I mustn't let myself make the same mistake. Yet once again, I proved to myself that I make rash decisions and I once again prove myself to be an idiot.
But as our conversations still began to develop, and eventually move to PM after one week of commenting on our profiles, I couldn’t help but feel like Nathan could maybe possibly perhaps like me back. Nathan was the one who first revealed his real name to me, and told me that he wanted to leave MAL yet he would stay here because he wanted to talk to me. I was excited to talk to Nathan every day. Every day when I come home from school, my first immediate thought was to send a PM to Nathan. And Nathan never failed to log on every day and respond to my PM (except Sundays; he says he doesn’t try to use social media on that day) and start a conversation. Our PMs weren’t exceedingly long, but they were exciting and fun. We’d talk almost every day for three hours minimum. Sometimes on weekends, we would go the whole day from morning until night, just on MAL, talking. Our conversations were fun, flirty, exciting, sometimes deep, philosophical, and not rare of sexual talk or innuendos. Often we asked each other where our relationship was heading, and we both agreed that we had no idea, yet are willing to stick to each other and continue talking and see where it goes.
After a month of talking, the date now at the end of January, Nathan was the one who suggested that we would move to “the next level.” He asked if I had any social media he could link me so we can start to talk outside MAL. The problem was that I don’t have social media, so the only medium I could suggest to him was texting on our phones, which yes, meant that we needed to exchange phone numbers. And after I suggested that, Nathan said that he needed to see a picture of me before he can give me his number, to which I strongly denied doing. It wasn’t because I was catfishing, nor it was because I didn’t want to. I wanted to, but I had a fear inside me that felt that if he saw how I looked, he might become disinterested and stop talking to me. Saying that I can’t, we had to drop this whole conversation, and continued PMing on MAL.
During the next month, the topic of me showing my face was not uncommon to say the least. It came off as either a joke, a side thought, or downright seriousness. Nevertheless, I was still way too shy to show him to my face, and I tried delaying this as much as possible. However, I soon began to realize myself that it was getting highly inconvenient to log on to MAL and talk every day, and I needed to have Nathan at my fingertips in my mobile if I wanted to still talk to him daily. I finally cracked at the end of February, a few days after Valentine’s Day (which we kind of spent together, I suppose), and he exchanged his photo with me as well and told me I didn’t need to worry about him not talking to me anymore. And a few days after that, we finally exchanged numbers, and our textual relationship began.
Nathan and I hit it off pretty well texting, and slowly but surely I was getting ready to tell him my feelings for him, which has only but grew even stronger the past month and two. And on the first of March, on an absolute whim, I told him that I liked him. And I was downright fearful of my response, because at that point I was completely uncertain about what he felt. On one side of the coin, I thought there was enough evidence in his actions to perhaps demonstrate he did reciprocate. On the other side of the coin, he could just be sending off the wrong vibes and is just playing around like all of my other previous crushes have done. But to my surprise, Nathan told me he liked me back. And I was elated. But that joy was quickly torn down as Nathan said that he would prefer if we stayed friends instead of going the romantic route, to which I immediately agreed to. At that point in time, I was okay with the idea of two people in love but still friends. I thought that as long as he said he liked me, I was okay with it. After all, this was the first time I’ve ever confessed to a guy, and the first time in the world a guy has told me he liked me back.
But as we proceed into the next month, April, things started going in a negative direction. For the first time in our entire relationship, we started arguing. And the arguments didn’t gradually happen. It was one argument after another, all of a sudden, to the point that we had an argument every other day. I felt uncertain. I felt… weird, for lack of a better term. It was at this point I began to felt that my situation was weird. For the first time in years, I started crying for no reason. I simply felt hurt and started crying. I felt that Nathan was leading me on this whole time. I felt Nathan lied to me about his feelings. I began to feel so hurt to the point that I ultimately made the decision to stop talking to Nathan. For the first time in my life, I told someone I love them, and that was Nathan. I told Nathan I loved him and that I couldn’t stand being with him anymore as simply his “friend”. And I attempted to cut off all ties with him. And Nathan obliged to my wishes. He said that our distance and our age different (him now 20, me 17) meant that a romantic relationship was uncertain and untraditional in every way. Yet it wasn’t until 3 days when I cracked and I crawled back to Nathan, telling him I couldn’t take it without talking to him. Keep in mind that I was talking to Nathan every single day for four months before this scenario, so my weak mind couldn’t handle not talking to him for 3 days. And we continued talking.
And we kept talking for another month, and here comes May. The month where everything and anything happened, when I went crazy with this feeling of unrequited yet reciprocated love and on a whim, once again, cut down all ties with Nathan, yet this time, I didn’t tell him. I realized it was a cruel thing to do, yet in my own vanity I felt it was unfair that I had to suffer over and over again in the hands of love, and almost felt that Nathan deserved it. But here came my best friend, whom we will call Frank. Frank was a mutual friend between me and Nathan, and Frank said he was willing to repair our relationship if I wanted it. I was extremely uncertain, because this was the decision I made to cut Nathan out of my life for real, and I didn’t want to turn back on it like last time. Yet, I told Frank that I wished to talk to him once again, and two days later, we met once more. And this time, Nathan called me, for the first time. And I got to listen to his voice. And I was so happy. I was the happiest girl in the world, because the very next day, on the 18th of May, 2015, Nathan asked me to be his girlfriend, and I entered my very first relationship.
I had a boyfriend. Could I be dreaming? Me, a boyfriend? But I wasn’t dreaming, and I was so happy. So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so happy. I didn’t care if I never met him. I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted to be with Nathan. Yet, as I continued our relationship, I soon began to realize that we weren’t short of arguments. We had one at least once a week, on the most trivial of things. But it was soon that I realized that we weren’t compatible. Yet I chose to ignore this fact because during the moments where we weren’t arguing, I was truly happy. I loved hearing his voice. I did things with him I never imagined I would ever do, and probably would had frowned upon. I sent him presents. I bought him sweets, wrapped them up in little bags, and sent them to him. I wanted to make him happy, because I was the happiest little girl in the world. I loved Nathan, and I swore to myself that I would never let him go. I wanted to meet Nathan someday. I wanted to live my life with Nathan. I wanted to someday be with him, kiss him, and have him hold me close.
But Nathan held back. He was very wary of his actions and words. Sometimes he did let loose and let his desires run wild, but Nathan was reluctant to fully express his feelings. When I told him I loved him, he often chose to change the subject or say some vague response, but never chose to say it back. And it was actions such as these that made me began to doubt our direction. We argued a lot. We talked about the uncertainties of our relationship a lot. We talked about how much our age gap concerned him. He talked about how he couldn’t give me the attention I wanted because he would be graduating university this very year and off to join the military as well as finding a full time job and a place for him to live. He said he wanted me to find someone else that could give me the physical interaction I wanted. Yet I wanted to cling onto him and keep him by my side and I told him I would be willing to put up with all of this. I was willing to change myself for him. I was willing to put aside my selfish desire for attention and sticking with him even when he’s busy. Yet all of this wasn’t enough for him. And he broke up with me telling me all this, on the 25th of August.
This was a very difficult paragraph for me to write.
I feel anger. Hatred. I felt that I’ve been lied to. Betrayed. Led on. Yet somehow, deep down inside, I know he was right. Our relationship was unrealistic. But I couldn’t deny my disappointment in him on how quickly he gave up. I knew it wasn’t realistic either, but I chose to put in my 1000% nevertheless because I wanted to take this risk by following my heart. I wanted to go forward in my life no matter how hazy and how foggy the end goal seemed to me, but Nathan wasn’t the type of person to have the same mindset as me. And if it wasn’t this date, I knew he would had tried to do this sooner or later.
I'm foolish. I'm young, and young people do foolish things. Yet, as foolish as this relationship was with him, it was genuine, and my love for him was real as any kind of love in this world. And I miss him. I miss him so much. But I can’t help but feel that this is truly the end. And there is no other choice but to now move on. I don’t know if I could ever believe that he truly loved me like he claimed he did at the very end, but for now, I’m empty. I’m missing a part of my life. And even now, I want him back. But I’ve lost him. I’ve lost him forever. And the only heal for me now is the one thing I never want to hear… time. |