I have spent a lot of time wondering what my grief about Jerry says about what existed between us.
For a while, I think I was still trying to understand whether what we had mattered to him in anything close to the way it mattered to me. Not because I needed him to have loved me or wanted some bigger relationship. I never believed that. I just wondered whether the connection itself held anything like the same weight for him.
I may never know and I am realizing that I do not actually need to know. Jerry and I never had a clear label for what we were. I do not know how he thinks about that time now. I do not know whether he would describe what we had as intimate, meaningful, casual, complicated, or something else entirely.
But I know what it was to me. I spent almost a year knowing him, spending time with him, having sex with him, talking to him, trusting him, laughing with him, worrying about him, getting irritated with him, caring about him, and eventually being hurt by him.
That was real. It happened in my life, and it mattered to me. I do not need Jerry’s experience to match mine for that to be true and I am not embarrassed by the possibility that it mattered more to me than it did to him.
I know what matters to me because I know what I value and what I give to other people. I take relationships seriously, including the ones that do not fit neatly into a category. I pay attention and I care deeply. I do not stop seeing someone as a person just because the connection is undefined or eventually ends. That is not something I will ever be ashamed of.
If Jerry held what we had differently, then he did. That does not make me foolish for having valued it. It just simply means we may have experienced the same connection differently. That happens.
I think part of what has made this grief so strange is that there is no obvious script for it. We did not have a typical relationship. We may have never defined what we were, but undefined does not mean meaningless.
There was intimacy and trust. There was affection. There was a lot of time, ordinary life, private conversations, sex, vulnerability and things I learned about myself. There were parts of it that were genuinely good for me. There were also parts that hurt me badly. Both are true.
I do not regret ending things with Jerry and there is no part of me that wishes I was still involved with him. I would not go back to the version of the connection I had before I knew what I know now. And I am still sad about parts of what I lost. That does not feel contradictory to me anymore.
Something can matter and still need to end.
Something can be worth grieving without being worth restoring.
I can understand Jerry differently now and still value things I experienced with him then. I can recognize harm without deciding every good memory was fake. I can be angry about what happened and still admit that some of what we shared meant something to me.
That last part matters. There are things Jerry brought into my life that I am glad I experienced. There are conversations I loved. There are things I learned. There are parts of myself I discovered. There are memories that are funny, warm, strange, beautiful, or just ordinary in a way that mattered at the time.
I do not need to throw those things away in order to tell the truth about the parts that were not okay. They belong to me too.
I think that is one of the reasons I have such a hard time with the idea that people should become disposable when relationships end. That has never made sense to me. A person can leave my life without everything connected to them becoming worthless. I can decide someone no longer gets access to me and still care what happens to them. I can set boundaries and still acknowledge that the relationship changed me.
People leave things behind in us. Sometimes those things hurt, sometimes they help. Sometimes they are just little pieces of a life we had for a little while.
The connection can end and some of the meaning can stay. And of course, the meaning can change too. Some memories with Jerry feel very different now because of how much more I know. Some things I once understood as care feel much less certain. Some experiences I thought were safe look very different now. That does not erase them, it just means I understand them differently. I am finally getting more comfortable with that.
I do not have to prove that what Jerry and I had was important enough to justify my grief. There is no minimum length of time. No required label and no requirement that the other person cared in exactly the same way.
It mattered to me. That is enough.
And maybe that is one of the things grief shows us. We grieve what mattered to us. Not necessarily what was good for us or what we should have kept. Not necessarily what someone else valued in the same way. Just what had meaning in our own lives.
Jerry can have whatever understanding of our relationship belongs to him. I can have mine, and I do not need to make mine smaller just because his may have been different.