How Many Times Can You Believe the Same Person?

The first time I believed him, I knew very little about love.

That’s the explanation I gave myself later.

I was in love.

Really in love.

The kind where another person seems to change the temperature of your entire life.

So when things became complicated, I believed there had to be a way through.

Maybe we needed time.

Maybe circumstances needed to change.

Maybe we needed to grow.

Maybe love was difficult because real love was supposed to be difficult.

I can understand that girl now.

She was experiencing something enormous for the first time.

What became much harder to understand was this:

What about all the other times?

I wanted to make it work

When our relationship ended, we didn’t completely disappear from each other’s lives.

We still talked.

There was distance between us, but there was also this strange thread that never seemed to completely break.

And I kept thinking that maybe the problem wasn’t us.

Maybe it was timing.

Distance.

Circumstances.

Life.

Maybe if one of those things changed, the story would change too.

Looking back now, I want to hug that girl.

Not shake her.

Not tell her she was stupid.

Just hug her.

Because she knew so little about how relationships worked.

She thought that because something felt powerful, it must mean something about what would happen next.

It doesn’t always.

Then he came back

At some point, he told me he missed me.

He loved me.

He wanted to come back to Dublin.

Maybe we could try again.

And I believed him.

Of course I did.

This was the person I had loved.

The person I’d cried over.

The person I had imagined a future with.

So I waited.

And then he came back.

Except the story didn’t become what I thought it was going to become.

Things changed.

He changed his mind.

There was someone else.

Another relationship.

I remember calling my mum and crying so hard I could barely speak.

And underneath the heartbreak there was another feeling that almost made me angrier.

Confusion.

How can somebody give another person hope when they know how that person feels?

That question stayed with me for years.

Because in my head, the rule was simple.

If you don’t want me, leave me alone.

Don’t come back.

Don’t tell me you miss me.

Don’t tell me you love me.

Don’t open the door if you already know you’re not going to walk through it.

It seemed incredibly obvious to me.

But people don’t always behave according to the rules we would follow ourselves.

It took me a long time to understand that.

Eventually, life moved

Years passed.

I met other people.

I studied.

I completed my master’s.

I travelled.

I went home to Argentina.

I did a lot of personal work.

And eventually, the story stopped feeling as raw.

We talked again.

And something had changed in me.

I wasn’t angry anymore.

There was affection.

History.

Intimacy.

That strange familiarity you can have with someone who once knew a version of you that doesn’t exist anymore.

And perhaps, somewhere along the way, I had confused the magnitude of what I felt with the magnitude of who he was.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

A person can occupy an enormous space in your emotional life without necessarily being an enormous person.

Sometimes the size belongs to the feeling.

To the moment.

To what they represented.

To who you were when you met them.

I didn’t understand that yet.

“He’s not coming”

In 2025, I was visiting a city where he was living.

He knew I was there.

We talked.

There was the possibility that we’d see each other.

And all week, I waited.

Not dramatically.

I had plans.

I was doing things.

I was living my life.

But somewhere in the background, I kept expecting him to appear.

A message.

A plan.

Something.

He didn’t.

At some point, I remember saying to myself:

“Marcia, it doesn’t matter what you do. He’s not coming.”

And there was something brutal about that sentence.

Not because someone not meeting you is the worst thing that can happen.

It isn’t.

But because sometimes absence gives you information that words have managed to avoid giving you for years.

He wasn’t coming.

Later, I questioned myself.

Maybe I was being dramatic.

Maybe I expected too much.

Maybe he was busy.

Maybe I had misunderstood.

Maybe this.

Maybe that.

I became very good at finding alternative explanations.

And I think there’s a strange danger in becoming too good at understanding everybody.

Sometimes you become so determined not to be the victim of your own story that you start explaining away information you actually need to see.

And then I believed him again

Later that year, things changed again.

We started talking.

He told me he missed me.

That maybe things could be different.

That perhaps we could try again.

And here’s the part that bothered me the most afterwards:

I believed him.

Again.

But this time, I had very sophisticated reasons.

I wasn’t the girl from 2020 anymore.

I was older.

I’d been to therapy.

I’d had other relationships.

I’d learned about attachment.

Boundaries.

Patterns.

Communication.

I’d spent years thinking about myself.

Surely all of that meant I wouldn’t repeat the same mistake.

And besides, this wasn’t the same situation.

We were different now.

Older.

More mature.

More aware.

Maybe this time we actually understood what had gone wrong.

It’s amazing how sophisticated hope can become when it learns psychological vocabulary.

And then reality answered

Then, later that year, I received a message.

Things had changed.

He was going to try again with someone from his past.

He was sorry if he’d given me false hope.

Maybe we could be friends.

I didn’t reply.

I just looked at the message.

And I think the strongest feeling wasn’t even heartbreak at first.

It was disbelief.

Not at him.

At myself.

How did I believe this again?

That question hurt.

Because by then I couldn’t use innocence as an explanation.

I wasn’t twenty-something experiencing love for the first time.

I knew the history.

I knew the pattern.

I had the evidence.

And still, some part of me had thought:

Maybe this time.

I thought knowing better meant I would do better

There’s a very comforting idea that once we understand our patterns, we stop repeating them.

Sometimes we do.

Sometimes understanding changes everything.

But sometimes you can understand a pattern beautifully and still participate in it.

You can name it.

Analyse it.

Explain where it came from.

Discuss it in therapy.

Recognise it in books.

And still feel hope when the person texts you.

Because knowing something intellectually and no longer wanting a different ending are not the same thing.

I think that’s what I hadn’t understood.

Maybe I wasn’t only believing him.

Maybe I was believing in the ending I had been carrying for years.

If the story finally worked, then everything before it would make sense.

The waiting.

The heartbreak.

The returns.

The disappointment.

All of it would become the difficult middle of a love story that eventually arrived where it was supposed to.

And who doesn’t want the painful chapters to mean something?

My body understood before I did

Not long after that message, I fell.

Badly.

It was an ordinary day.

Ordinary shoes.

I wasn’t drunk.

I wasn’t high.

There was no dramatic explanation.

I just fell.

And I remember crying.

A lot.

Looking back, I don’t think I was only crying because I’d fallen.

I can’t tell you that my body was “releasing trauma” or that the universe pushed me over or anything like that.

I don’t know.

Maybe I simply fell.

But I do know what that moment felt like to me.

Something in me had collapsed.

I felt heartbroken.

Embarrassed.

Foolish.

And scared.

Because underneath the relationship there was another grief.

I was thirty-three.

I wanted love.

I wanted marriage.

I wanted to become a mother.

And suddenly it wasn’t only:

This man doesn’t want the same thing as me.

It felt like:

What if the life I imagined isn’t coming either?

That was much bigger.

For months, I felt low.

I went to work.

I functioned.

I did what I needed to do.

But part of me wanted to disappear.

Then came another message

Months passed.

Eventually, there was another message.

Something stupid.

A TikTok.

Nothing important.

Then there was contact again.

And eventually, we saw each other.

Years earlier, seeing him had felt like stepping into another universe.

This time, something was different.

The story felt smaller.

Not meaningless.

Not erased.

Just smaller.

And maybe that’s one of the strangest forms of healing.

Not waking up one morning and feeling absolutely nothing.

Not hating the person.

Not deciding they were terrible.

Just realising that the thing that once occupied the entire screen is now only one part of it.

Maybe he was finally becoming human-sized in my mind.

When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work

For years, I wanted a more satisfying explanation.

Maybe the timing was wrong.

Maybe one of us needed to grow.

Maybe we met too early.

Maybe distance ruined it.

Maybe circumstances did.

Maybe one day we’d finally become the people who could make it work.

And perhaps some of those things were true.

But there is another possibility that is much less romantic.

Sometimes something doesn’t work because it doesn’t work.

Not because nobody cared.

Not because the entire relationship was fake.

Not because one person has to be the villain.

Two people can have tenderness.

History.

Chemistry.

Love.

Beautiful memories.

Real connection.

And still be unable to build a life together.

Both things can be true.

I can acknowledge what was beautiful without using it as evidence that I should keep returning.