The breakup story I tell first…

You can read about my breakup story in my breakup diary as well.

The first breakup story I tell needs to be my own.  Like many of us, I have been through a few, but the big one was Yoshi.  I was 26 (over 10 years ago now!) when I moved to Tokyo for an adventure and met Yoshi.  I remember the first time I saw him, dressed in his retro surf gear and geek glasses.  He was six foot, tall for Japanese, with wide surfer shoulders and a dry sense of humor.  I was hooked.  We hung out, started dating, and I moved in with him three months later.  He opened up Tokyo to me – we had adventures, went clubbing, and explored the beaches and the city.  My life was everything I had hoped for in my travels and he was everything I hoped for in a man.  I extended my stay and we got married.

Life was fast forward fast in Tokyo

Things changed gradually.   Life is fast-forward fast in Tokyo, with long hours, many late nights for work and for fun – but my friends lived that same life. I was teaching English in high school, and making great money teaching executives after school.  I realize now that Yoshi saw me as a young thing he could mould, not understanding that I was playing at my new experiences but had come from a serious career background.  I was easy-going and didn’t really understand the Japanese wife’s role was to rule her husband, finances and home in a firm, motherly way. We started to clash over money and sex.  I thought he spent too much of the former and we didn’t have enough of the latter.   I didn’t want to be his mother, I came from a background of strong women and marriage meant mutual respect.

I wanted time in our lives that wasn’t scheduled.

Then my sales and teaching background got me a job at IBM, designing and delivering my own courses in presentation skills and negotiation.  I was back working at an executive level and thrived.  At home things crashed. Rather than be equal partners at home, as we both worked long hours, he continued to put pressure on me to run the apartment and cook.  My job was so high pressure that my interest in clubbing waned and I was too tired to get up early – four o’clock! -to go surfing in the weekends.  I realized he was a planner, and I wasn’t.  I wanted time in our lives that wasn’t scheduled, and was sure that was why we hardly had sex.  I hardly saw him unless I wanted to do what he was doing. I asked for one day free each fortnight but he couldn’t do it.   I felt like the lowest priority in his life.

I felt like the lowest priority in his life.

There were many reasons we collapsed as a couple: different sex-drives, cultural differences. I did too much at home and compromised often.  My Japanese girlfriends said I was too nice.  I didn’t know how to – and didn’t want to – play the role of the Japanese wife.  He manipulated me – playing me to get the best of both the Japanese and Western wife models, and I let myself be played.  It didn’t help that I was isolated from family and lifelong friends in a foreign country.

Something had to give.

I developed insomnia.  I was deeply unhappy about not having a sex-life.  It ate me up from the inside, until I was festering on the out.  We fought often.  I carried the complete responsibility for our money situation but not the control – Yoshi spent more and more.  In the end I split our money – it was the only way we could achieve our dream for a house and a family.  We visited my family, and my mother said that I looked haggard and Yoshi looked younger than ever.  Something had to give.  We finally split five years after we married.

I had no idea of where the destination was

I didn’t expect to be 32 and single again. I thought my future was mapped out and it included Yoshi.  I had to realign everything in my life to my new single status.  I was stunned, numb and so very sad.  There was the confusion of relief mixed in as well – relief I started sleeping again, relief that I wasn’t responsible for both of us any more, and relief I didn’t feel loneliness you can only feel when you are isolated from the person you love while they lie next to you.   Nothing prepared me for this breakup as I watched helplessly as my hope ebbed out of me.  I felt like I was taking a train ride through a tunnel, where I had no idea what the destination was or where I should get off.