I’m Sorry I Was The Perfect Girlfriend

I know, I know. You’re cringing at the title. What kind of self-aggrandizing asshole thinks she’s the perfect girlfriend? I don’t mean that I myself was actually perfect. In fact, I was pretty shitty. I didn’t know what I was doing.

But damn if I didn’t try to be the perfect girlfriend. I gave Cosmo-worthy blow jobs, made dinners for you, brought you and your friends beers from the kitchen to the couch on guys nights, I lent you money, I paid for dates, I left surprises for you, I worked to win over your entire family and all your friends, even though you didn’t do the same.

I said I loved you. I never brought up grievances. I was always fine. Always. I thanked you for everything. I was never not appreciative. Or sorry. Those were the main things I was. I drove to your house. I was low maintenance to an unparalleled degree. Your friends kept telling you to marry me.

And you tried. Oh how you tried to tie me down. It wasn’t that you didn’t try to keep me.

But I kept pulling away. I gave you the perfect girlfriend, but I could never give you me. Those rare moments where I let you see what I wanted or who I was were fraught with panic for me and judgment from you.

You said I was too hyper, too loud, too disrespectful, too sexual, too liberal. Too much.

And I was too afraid to play by anyone’s rules but yours. What if I had spoken up more and you’d walked away?

No that wouldn’t do. I had to be the one to leave. Just one last assertion that you could never have me. But that was really the thesis of the whole relationship: you can’t have me, so here’s my iteration of a perfect girlfriend, instead. I’m so sorry.

If I’d given myself to you — and not Barbie: Girlfriend Edition — you would have left me months into the relationship. Maybe weeks. Maybe it wouldn’t have ever started.

Instead I did the meanest thing, and I left you ’cause you never got me. How unfair is that?

All my life, when other girls wanted to be wives and mothers, I just wanted to be a girlfriend. So I jumped at the chance you were offering me and I’m sorry. I know that by now you’ve moved on from my out-of-the-blue break up, for which you never got an explanation — because how do you tell someone I don’t think I love you and I don’t think I ever will cause I am just playing pretend and giving you everything you want? — but I truly am sorry.

And I know you’ll never read this, which is maybe more awful than that breakup was. That I know what I should say to you, but that you’ll still never get to hear it. You’ll never know why the perfect girl, the one you wanted to marry, just walked away and never spoke to you again.

That wasn’t very perfect of me, was it?