5. Exposing My Journey and What I’ve Learned

12/26/20

Hey friends! Welcome to the fifth and final week in my series on relationships. :) Thanks for sticking with me and for making this such an enjoyable experience!

So, while I’ve bounced back and forth between more generalized advice and my personal takes on love, this week is going to basically lay out my story thus far. While this is the most uncomfortable blog for me to write, I have always told you guys that I am here to be as open and honest as possible. My goal is not only to help you grow, but to grow with you! And for that to truly happen, I feel that it is only fair for me to tell you exactly where I am coming from. This week is going to be just that along with the main things I have learned overall!

As a child, I was self-described as “boy crazy.” I literally got angry at my mom once for talking about me on the phone to her friends because during the conversation, she said that I thought I was boy crazy but wasn’t actually. Which offended me??? Haha.

Somewhere in some photo album, there is a super tiny square picture of me and my pre-school boyfriend. I had two more in kindergarten and then I landed in the private school that would make up the next eight years of my life until I went off to a public high school at 14.

My first heartbreak was around 7 to 8 years old. My family took a trip to see my Dad’s mom, Ema, at her Georgia home when we met her next-door neighbors two sons: Corbin and Evan. Savanna liked Corbin and I liked Evan! We stayed there for two weeks and were “boyfriend and girlfriend” up until the very end. I remember I was riding a bike the night before we left town and ended up falling and scraping my knee pretty bad. At the very moment I crashed, Evan walked up to me and said, “I’m breaking up with you.” And stormed away from me with no other explanation. I started sobbing immediately so Corbin tried to comfort me, but it didn’t help much. 

I spent the entire next year thinking about him until our family went to see Ema again. We immediately made up and started dating again. This time around he even gave me a “promise ring.” 😂 But, by the end of those two weeks, he and Savanna disappeared on our last day for a few minutes only for her to come back telling me that he kissed her. He stood there and said nothing, knowing he was busted. I ran off into a bedroom and hid LITERALLY between this random mattress and a wall. No idea how I fit there. Anyways, he tried to slide in with me and kept kissing my cheek saying sorry over and over. But I wouldn’t say a word and have since never spoken to him again. I don’t even remember his last name at this point! A lot of that sounds extremely silly, especially now, but I spent years of my little life caught up in it. 

My next heartbreak started with a boy that I met through my sister’s best friend. He was her older cousin and planning to transfer into my school the following semester. Because he was behind a year academically, I was in 6th grade when he started 5th grade. I used to sneak into his classroom during lunch breaks and write notes that I’d leave in his desk. We used to talk on the phone for hours and “dated” for a few months before I randomly broke up with him one day. We had fought about something and I worried that if I didn’t dump him, he’d dump me first. And I also worried he would lie about it (I literally had no reason to think that) and so I recorded the break-up phone call on my mini video camera as proof. Yeah… I wasn’t very self-aware at the time. I had no idea what the “why” was behind any of my actions. Nonetheless, I still very much cared about him.

I couldn’t get over it but stayed his friend anyway. Being in a really small school didn’t help a whole lot. When I got to 8th grade, I thought I was past it and that he was as well. At least until he started dating my best friend at the time who was one of four girls in my entire grade. Which led me to then start dating another guy at my school! At the time, I thought my feelings were genuine. But within two months I realized that they weren’t, and I had developed a pattern of using other people as distractions for my true feelings. (I had done the same thing in 4th grade: dating someone I never liked at all to try and make the boy I did like in my class jealous.)

Going back to the 8th grade story- I broke up with my boyfriend and ended up flirting back and forth with my best friend’s boyfriend (who was my ex from 6th grade) behind her back (which ruined our friendship when it came to light.) On the last day of 8th grade, I picked up a new boyfriend at our pool party celebration. He was the valedictorian, blue eyed, athletic, kind, and caring. I thought I liked him in the moment until I realized I didn’t later on. On the 4th of July that summer I met a high school boy at my dad’s concert and started to video chat with him regularly. I never liked him, but I definitely enjoyed the attention. At one point, my phone was dead and so I made a Facebook status tagging only the two of them in it to let them know I’d be out of reach for a bit. Amongst other immature things I did to make my boyfriend insecure. Yeah… I had absolutely zero awareness of what I was doing. I ended up apologizing to him four years later as a high school senior when that Facebook status popped up in memories and I finally realized what I’d done.

I don’t have to dig into a whole lot more for you to get the picture that my heart was very messy and I had no real boundaries. To me, love was nothing but a game. It was a mixed bag of high highs and low lows. It was something that was only fun to have when it was wrong because it was boring when it was right. 

You may argue that I was extremely young during a lot of these things and that they likely weren’t true reflections of my character, and I would agree. But that doesn’t mean they should be dismissed; I was acting out from hurt places in my life that I didn’t even realize were there.

I grew up around lots of adults who manipulated other people’s emotions for personal gain. I was used to love feeling more like chaos and instability than anything else. It was always about who had the upper hand, who held the power. And so, from my first taste of a broken heart at 8 years old, I started playing the games and using other people without even realizing what I was doing in the slightest. Subconsciously, I never wanted to feel that kind of pain again. Which meant I always needed to be the one with the upper hand.

High school was the utter opposite of my childhood years- the regret I felt from hurting my friend in 8th grade sent me in a different direction. I broke up with my boyfriend from the summer and swore off love, labeling it as a source of drama. I could tell it drove me to do things very out of character and made me feel like a horrible person. But that was all I realized at the time. Which left 13-year-old me feeling like if I could just keep my distance from people, I wouldn’t hurt anybody else. 

What I started doing next was what I briefly mentioned last week- never committing to anything but hating the feeling of being alone. So, I would keep every guy who dared to speak to me at arm’s length but entertain them enough to keep them around. I didn’t really date and found myself “talking” to guys who didn’t align with any of my values. I never accepted a date to any school dance the entire four years except for my best guy friend when it came to prom. (Shout out to my BFF Moses Choi!) The only sort-of relationship I had was my senior year, which made sense at the time for a few reasons…

1.     I knew I was moving out of state for college and subconsciously factored that in.

2.     I wasn’t physically attracted to him but felt like maybe that was where I kept going wrong with other guys… I thought forcing myself to feel feelings for a “good guy” was a better route.

Turns out he didn’t treat me well at all and was actually in love with one of my closest girlfriends at the time. Hence, the relationship lasted a little over two months but left me feeling pretty broken. I had placed my identity in my level of “purity” without knowing I had, and he was the first boy who got to take a stab at it. While ultimately things didn’t go far at all, anything felt like a lot to me because I hadn’t even kissed someone before him. So, I found myself at 17 years old graduated from high school and very unsure of myself. I was barely 18 when I stumbled into my dorm for the first time on move in day at Lipscomb University. 

I gained a much deeper relationship with Christ in college, but also felt more distant from Him than ever before at the same time. I lost a lot of loved ones and struggled greatly with being away from home. I honestly had too much going on personally to pursue men and slowly found myself to be very at peace with a life of no prospects to sort through. Even getting to know someone felt like a stretch that I wasn’t really willing to do. 

I really stuck with the same mentality I’d developed at 13: distance equates to me not hurting anyone else. Every time I thought I was ready to date, I’d find I was drawn to toxic situations. I was constantly frustrated with myself and didn’t really know what to do. It was at this point, halfway through my junior year, when I found myself at a total loss. I felt worthless, inexperienced, unlovable, and like too much of a challenge to take on. I also had really big dreams and felt guilty dragging someone else through them with me. I felt like any good man would want a stable life and I wouldn’t be able to provide him that without chopping off pieces of my heart. So, I made peace with and even started looking forward to a life alone. And then I ended up in what I would call my first and only real relationship to date. I wasn’t looking for it and I didn’t want it. But God had a purpose for that year- to break down everything I’d ever believed about myself and about love so he could rebuild my entire life from the ground up.

God was breaking my family apart, my career apart, my relationship apart, and my faith in anything other than Him apart. Satan did everything he could to warp my misfortunes into lost faith while God was working, but it was the one thing I never lost and also the one thing that broke me free from the chains in my life.

On December 29th, 2019 my final grandparent, Ema, passed away from years of battling with cancer. And ten minutes after midnight on New Year’s Eve, I was dumped over a single text message. That was about all of the closure I got from the entire year of my life I’d just spent loving someone with everything I had in me.

For the next three months, I couldn’t stand up for more than ten minutes without feeling like I was going to pass out. My eyes would go bright and my ears would ring if I tried to do more than that. True heartache is absolutely vicious, my friends. I am sure a lot of you know that pain. I couldn’t clean my room and was living in piles of stuff for a pretty long time. I deleted all of the apps off of my phone and disappeared for a while at one point. And it wasn’t just about him, it was about everything. I was reduced to nothing and forced to reexamine everything. It was a blessing in disguise, even though at the time I didn’t know how I would get through it. But the last year of my life since then has shown me a lot of important things…

1.     Christ strengthened me in ways I never thought possible. He will never forsake me at any point in my story.

2.     I discovered the “why” behind all of the poor choices I kept unconsciously making in relationships.

3.     I had already done the personal work to be the kind of life partner I knew I could be- I just didn’t give myself enough credit for it. Which is why I found myself in a situation where I settled.

4.      Very few people know what real love is and even fewer know how to both accept and return it.

I had green flags and red flags all mixed up. I had my worth in all of the wrong places. I was closed off, distant, unattainable, and so very broken. It may be hard to see, but even before my year long relationship God was preparing my heart in so many ways by allowing me to walk through those low places. That year of being committed to someone else was simply the icing on top of the cake. By the end, I finally received all of the puzzle pieces God had been slowly delivering to me.

Now? I can tell you I will never be perfect, but I have learned so much. I have seen God completely shift the types of people and situations that I attract. He has taken the wrong ones out of my life and brought the right ones in. He has re-organized everything and wiped my slate clean. 

I have worked SUPER HARD to get where I am today and I am not done yet. But with all of that being said, here are some of my biggest takeaways. Thank you so much for sticking with me up to this point- it means the world.

1.     Your value is not placed in how little or how much experience you have with relationships. Especially on a physical scale. And we all will make mistakes no matter how hard we try not to.

2.     Listen to your gut- I ignored mine and waited for patterns to emerge before I could justify cutting ties. This can be dangerous if the person you are dealing with is seeking to manipulate you. You will see all the proof you need within the first 6 months in most cases so take a good hard look before you decide to continue after that.

3.     If you find yourself in a toxic relationship, the people in your life will disappear because they aren’t perfect people. So, if you find that the only person you feel like you have is your partner, run. I promise you aren’t actually alone- it is just that most normal people don’t even know you need help in the first place. You’ll have to get out on your own before they can get to you.

4.     If you find yourself in the same ruts time after time, have grace with yourself. Something is hurting you and God is getting you to a particular place before He reveals that wound to you… Imagine expecting a newborn to speak fluent English- you wouldn’t. God works the same way! He gives you the tools you need, allows you to develop them, and once you are ready, he opens the hard doors. This is because you are equipped now to walk through them. Trust His timing.

5.     A few qualities are necessary when it comes to the people you love long-term: empathy, self-awareness, humility, and perspective. Not only do you need to constantly be sharpening these things, but you need people in your life who do the same thing for themselves. Otherwise, they will take away from your story rather than compliment it.

6.     Love is extremely difficult and exposing. Very few get it right. We don’t need it to have purpose. And it is only worth the challenge when it adds more to our life than it takes away. 

7.     Love is not truly love until it is battle tested- I have said the same thing about how God loves us. While he may have “proven” per say his love on the cross, he goes out of his way to do the same thing for each of us individually. He walks with us through our personal battles so that over time, we can truly trust him. This is a great model for any relationship in our lives! The butterflies of a new relationship feel great, but you will see just how “for you” someone really is in hardship. It is here that deep love is created, cemented, and sustained.

8.     The right people, places, and opportunities much more often than not will find their way to you. You won’t have to go searching for them. But when they appear, don’t hesitate to pursue them!

9.     The mistakes are a vital, important, and non-negotiable part of your story. Without them, you would not have the tools you need to become the person who not only can step through the tough doors of life, but the beautiful ones as well. The brokenness of your past is what allows you to not only recognize the right one, but to appreciate the right one.

10.  Every step you take is purposeful. Every season you walk through is purposeful. No time is spent in vain; no love is given in vain. Never regret being vulnerable. Even when things make no sense, hold on to hope that there is a bigger picture we are living in. Not only this, but a plan that is crafted in your favor. By a God who loves you.

Thank you for letting me get super real this week. See you next Sunday!

-Lexi Cummings