How The Past Almost Destroyed My Future

I found boys at an early age. Earlier than most, later than some. They started as innocent relationships, most of them probably not even coming close to what you'd call an actual 'relationship'.

There was my childhood best friend who I'd known since we were in nursery together. He was sweet and we were both very, very innocent. We'd always be found in each other's company both at school and out of it. He'd give me sweet little presents on my birthday and valentine's day. But when we moved up to secondary school, we grew apart. That was fine. We were young. No big deal. Although it felt like it at the time.

Then there was the boy I'd kiss around the back of the English building and always be found holding hands with. Everyone in school knew we were a thing and everything was good but although I cared about him a lot, something just didn't click.

I was fifteen when I found the stereotypical 'bad boy' and everything started to go downhill. I was led on by the guy who promised me the world and I gave him everything in return. We lived a good distance away from each other and that made it easy for him to hide all kinds of things from me. He was always in trouble with the police. My friends warned me away from him but I didn't listen. Looking back I probably should have. He was the first guy who ever broke my heart and being the naive young girl I was, I allowed him to do that more than once, the kind of guy who would give me just enough of a thread to keep me hanging. And like an idiot I ran back at every chance I got. That is until he got a fancy for someone else and decided he wanted nothing more to do with me until he did want something more to do with me and then I'd run right back only to be thrown to the kerb all over again - over and over and over again.

Then came the guy I'd spend 6 years of my life with. For this article and allowing people their privacy, we'll call him Jack.

Things were good at first. I was sixteen and everything was new and fun. In the beginning, we were good together. Things got serious pretty fast, and after a death in his family, he came to live with me and my parents but looking back on it now that relationship outran its course by a good few years. I'd say by at least three. By year four I knew things were never going to work out. We just didn't 'click' anymore. I tried to break things off but it's just not that easy when your entire family has lived with someone for the last three and a half years. In the end, we broke up, I moved out and started to see someone new (and kind of old). Remember that bad boy I spoke about earlier? We got back in contact and I fell hook, line and sinker for all his b.s all over again. We even talked about moving in together. He visited me every night and then, one night when he was supposed to come and see me, I got a text out of the blue telling me he couldn't see me anymore because his girlfriend was pregnant. Girlfriend? A girlfriend I had no idea about.

Broken and hurting, I went home with my tail between my legs and made the stupid mistake of allowing Jack to get close to me again. We were living together at my dad's house once more because he didn't really have anywhere else to go. I was lonely, he was lonely, and we decided to give it another go.

A few months after, we moved out of my dad's house together and things were good between us again. We were both in our twenties now and decided what the hell, let's see where this takes us. We talked about marriage and even started trying to have a baby. Then, a month before our relationship's demise, Jack was in a car accident taking one of his coworkers home from work. I sat with him in the emergency room for four hours but everything turned out to be okay.

Then January came around, a few weeks after the accident and things got really bad between us. We barely spoke. Whenever we did, we argued. In the end, enough was enough and I decided to move back to my dad's. Jack and I told each other we'd try to work things out but I know now he never had any intention of doing so. You see, that coworker he had taken home just before his accident had actually turned out to be a woman and it turned out they were seeing each other behind my back. Even then while he was seeing this girl, he was trying to see me too. What he didn't know was that I knew what he was doing and so I waved bye-bye, shutting the door to that part of my life for good.

Something else you should know is that during my relationship with Jack, my parents, unfortunately, began to go through a pretty messy divorce and because I was the oldest of two siblings, it fell to me to try to protect my little brother from it all.

So with all this in mind, I come to the part where my past almost destroyed my future.

In June of 2017, I met the guy of my dreams. He was handsome, funny and willing to do just about anything for me. It turned out that he was just as broken as I was and we helped each other heal in ways I never thought were possible. It was a whirlwind romance and by September 2017 he asked me to marry him, that is after he spent half an hour giggling because he was so nervous that he couldn't bring himself to pop the question. We planned to get married on the 30th of June 2018, a year after we had made our relationship official.

But by March 2018 the stress of wedding planning had gotten on top of me and I started to question everything. I'd suffered from depression on and off since I was 18 and those little demons inside my head decided they were going to grip on and I thought they might never let go. They told me I was no good and my amazing man would put me through exactly what the guys from my past had put me through. They told me that my parents had gone through a messy divorce and so, in the end, that's where my relationship was going to end up.

I spent three days nonstop crying, unable to get out of bed, unable to eat. My man had no idea what the hell was wrong with me. And then I did the unthinkable. I tried to call the whole thing off. I broke my partner's heart because I was terrified he was going to do the same to me. I pushed that big red self destruct button and everything exploded. That night we spent the better part of 8 hours talking, arguing and crying and in the end, we decided we'd spend one last night together and decide where to go in the morning.

I was awake into the early hours of the morning. For the first time in almost four days, I wasn't crying. Instead, I was numb. Having gotten everything off my chest I was finally able to take a step back and examine my life from a distance. Things had been amazing with my partner up until that point. Sure, we'd had a few ups and downs but nothing that we couldn't fix with a little communication. And I found myself thinking about something my dad had said to me during my three-day meltdown. He'd told me that I was being stupid. He reminded me that when my partner had proposed he had questioned me at length on whether I was sure it was what I wanted. He didn't have anything against my partner, in fact, he loved him but like all dads, he wanted to be sure I was making the right decision. He also told me that love isn't just a feeling, its a choice, one that we make every day to love the partner we've decided to spend the rest of our lives with. I should probably now tell you that my dad, by this time, had been divorced from my mum for quite a while and he'd been remarried for a good few years. He was happy again.

It was that night that I made a promise to myself. I promised myself that instead of focusing so much on the past, I would look to my future and how I wanted it to look. I closed my eyes and thought about it, really, really thought about it. And in that future I saw my partner, I saw us married with children and living a successful life together.

The next morning we sat down again and talked, with yet more tears, and decided that we would wait until the end of April to decide whether or not the wedding would go ahead.

I got back on the medication that I hadn't been on since my partner and I had first met and started to see a therapist again. We focused on each other and building a life together. Whether we would be married or not, we decided that we wanted to be together.

The end of April came around and I decided that if my partner could stick with me, even though our worst time together, I wasn't about to throw it all away. I pulled him to one side and told him that June 30th would go ahead if he still wanted it to. He knew that I was still struggling with my demons and although he was still pretty hurt, we both made a promise that no matter what happened we'd get through it together.

So June 3oth came around and although I was still struggling, we spent a magical day with all our nearest and dearest. We were married at 3pm and it was during my partner's wedding vows that I realised I had 100% made the right decision. His words spoke of understanding and loving each other through thick and thin and I could see in his eyes that he meant every last word.

We spent an amazing week together in Greece for our honeymoon where the conversation came up a couple of times but we both decided we'd made the right decision. After all, we were both broken, we'd both had people hurt us in the past. We both knew what we had to do to make things work.

Three months later, while living with my dad, his wife and my little brother while we waited for the mortgage on our first home to go through, our wildest dreams came true. We found out that we were expecting our first child!

Now, almost three years on, we have a beautiful home, a wonderful daughter and no matter what we go through, we always talk it out.

The moral of this story: don't be afraid to do something just because it went wrong in the past.