I Expected His Words to Crush Me; They Absolutely Didn’t

This post is the fifth in a series. (Please read the posts here, here, here and here first, if you haven’t yet!)

I was in the middle of convincing Andrés that we should continue to date. Date exclusively. He was resistant. Even through the phone, I could feel there was something he wasn’t saying.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he prefaced.

Then, he told me he wasn’t sure whether I was good enough for him.

I expected his words to crush me. They were an echo of his sister’s, a reverberation of critical judgments not unlike those that had swarmed around my mind for years.

With the phone to my ear and silence between us, I looked at myself in the mirror. I touched my face, ran my fingers through my hair. I was checking reality. The rug under me had been pulled, but I hadn’t fallen. How could this be?

I thought I was fragile and breakable. Was I wrong? The words were painful, yes. But they hadn’t destroyed me.

And then his voice, again: “Are you ok?”

“Yes,” I responded.

I felt strong, suddenly. Which was unexpected, to say the least. It was a moment of clarity:

Andrés didn’t think I was good enough for him because he didn’t feel good enough himself. His years at Harvard and in Silicon Valley had made him believe, time and time again, that he didn’t belong. Andrés didn’t feel he was good enough—not smart enough, successful enough, wealthy enough, networked enough. He was looking to patch the hole he felt in himself with a girlfriend-shaped bandage. If I have the most beautiful, most successful, most intelligent woman at my side, then everyone will know I belong.

“I’m ok. I really am. Because I am quite sure that the problem here has nothing to do with me and everything to do with you,” I said.

“Damn,” he said, after a minute. “You might be right.”