The Relationship With the Revolving Door

Breaking up with someone once is upsetting enough. Breaking up with the same man repeatedly introduces a rather different problem, because eventually you are not only heartbroken; you are also beginning to wonder whether breaking up and making up has quietly become a shared hobby.

The first breakup, naturally, is devastating. He is angry, wounded, terribly certain of himself and moving toward the exit with the speed of a man who has just discovered that remaining in this relationship for another seven minutes may be fatal. He cannot do this anymore. Nothing ever changes. You want different things. Perhaps you never understood him at all.

The revolving door is spinning so fast it could generate its own weather.

Then four days later, your relationship texts.

He has been thinking.

This is always exciting news from a man who recently thought his way completely out of the relationship.

He misses you. He hates how things ended. Losing you has turned out to be considerably more upsetting than whatever seemed unbearable enough to make him storm out on Friday, and suddenly the same man who could barely get through the door fast enough is returning with the delicate step of someone approaching a frightened woodland creature.

The transformation can be magnificent.

Gone is the furious man announcing that the two of you are hopelessly wrong for each other. In his place arrives a tender little creature with sad eyes, excellent memories of your finest qualities and enough renewed appreciation to make you wonder whether he spent the weekend being visited by angels.

Give him another hour and there may be a rose between his teeth.

By midnight, perhaps a serenade.

Which is convenient, because there will be several more breakups.

Nobody Mentions the Revolving Door

For a few days after the reunion, both of you behave beautifully. He is attentive in ways you have been requesting for months, you suddenly remember that several of his annoying qualities are actually rather charming, and neither of you has the slightest interest in spoiling this miraculous second chance by discussing the thing that caused him to leave in the first place.

Why would you? Look how happy everybody is.

He makes coffee and suddenly you are watching him as though the universe has personally returned a beloved heirloom to you. His old T-shirt is touching, his laugh is wonderful, and even the glass beside the sink has somehow become evidence of domestic intimacy instead of the object that nearly caused an international incident three weeks ago.

This is the peculiar glamour of getting someone back: familiarity briefly becomes novelty.

For a while, it genuinely can feel different. He listens more carefully, you are gentler with each other, and perhaps both of you mean every promise you make. Nobody has to be pretending for the reunion to feel real.

The problem is that eventually both of you settle down enough to become yourselves again. And that is usually when the old problem slips quietly back into the room, takes its usual seat, and before long:

“I don’t know if we should be together.”

Ah.

The revolving door is moving again.

It is remarkable how quickly a man can go from I cannot imagine my life without you to imagining it in considerable detail.

Every Goodbye Gets Its Own Little Ceremony

You might think repeated breakups would lose some of their grandeur, but somehow each one still arrives expecting a full emotional ceremony.

Nobody says, “Right, I am leaving again. I will probably become lonely on Thursday and contact you over the weekend.”

No. Every exit is presented as the ending of a great love story.

There are speeches. There are tears. Someone removes a toothbrush with the solemnity usually reserved for family silver that has survived three generations and one complicated will. Never mind that this particular toothbrush has already completed two farewell tours.

And the exiting version of him is always so convincing. He may be furious, offended by the entire history of the relationship and possessed of several fresh complaints that apparently could not wait until morning. He leaves as though freedom itself is waiting on the pavement.

By now, history may suggest that this man has roughly the same relationship with endings that some people have with diets: extremely sincere on Monday.

Still, every breakup manages to feel horribly convincing while it is happening.

So you begin the miserable little adjustment to life without him, tell your friends that this really is it, and just as you have finally stopped checking your phone every twelve minutes, the phone rewards your progress by producing him.

“Hey.”

One tiny word, standing there with absolutely no respect for the previous week.

And here comes the returning version. Saint Francis of Romance has arrived.

Much softer.

Much sweeter.

This man does not remember being furious beside the front door. This man remembers your smile. He remembers your first date. He has been thinking about that trip you took two summers ago and, rather inconveniently, now realizes you may be the great love of his life.

You half expect him to arrive holding a puppy.

Before you know it, he misses you, you miss him, and somebody says, “Maybe we gave up too easily,” which is an ambitious description of two people currently attempting their fifth breakup.

Back through the revolving door we go.

So Many Goodbyes, Yet Here You Are

After enough rounds, the relationship begins to feel both permanently endangered and almost impossible to kill.

Every argument might end everything, yet nothing quite seems to end anything.

“It’s over” still hurts, but somewhere behind the heartbreak lives a very practical little part of you quietly wondering whether you should actually cancel Saturday.

And that is where the whole thing becomes almost funny from a little distance. There have been furious exits, angelic returns, solemn promises, tearful reunions and enough changes of heart to keep the revolving door permanently occupied, yet the same old problem is still sitting in the lobby watching everybody rush past.

You can almost imagine it looking up from a magazine.

Oh, they’re leaving again.

Never mind.

Here they come.

Of course you miss each other. You have removed someone you love from your daily life; missing him is hardly a supernatural event. The more interesting question is why the same relationship keeps requiring a funeral before everybody remembers they rather liked it.

And after enough furious departures and rose-between-the-teeth returns, even the revolving door must be getting dizzy by now.