For years, I thought love ended with a slammed door. I imagined shouting in a hallway, a suitcase half-zipped, somebody crying outside in the rain like a scene from a film. Ours didn’t end like that. It ended on a Tuesday evening in Dublin, over two bowls of pasta neither of us finished, while the washing machine hummed in the background.
I met Niamh in a pub near Camden Street when we were both twenty-six and pretending to be more confident than we were. She had a laugh that made strangers turn around, not because it was loud, but because it sounded like she had just discovered something wonderful. I was working in a café then, doing early mornings and writing bad poems on receipt paper. She worked in a solicitor’s office and carried herself like someone who knew where she was going, even when she didn’t.
Our first few years together were full of small adventures. We rented a cold flat in Rathmines with windows that cried every winter. We walked home from town along the canal, sharing chips from a paper bag. On Sundays we went to St Stephen’s Green with takeaway coffees and talked about impossible futures: a house by the sea, a dog, maybe children, maybe not, maybe moving abroad for a year. We had very little money, but we had the feeling that life was waiting for us to arrive.
Then life did what it does. It arrived in quieter ways than we expected. Better jobs. Longer hours. A nicer apartment in Smithfield. Bills on direct debit. Her father got sick. My mother had surgery. We stopped going out because we were tired, then because we were saving, then because neither of us suggested it anymore. We became efficient together. We were good at shopping lists, dentist appointments, booking flights home for Christmas, remembering each other’s passwords. We were kind. That was the hardest part. There was no villain.
I used to think kindness was proof that love was still alive. Looking back, I think sometimes kindness is what remains when love has quietly packed its things and left. We still kissed goodbye in the mornings. We still asked, “How was your day?” But we asked it from another room, half-listening, scrolling through our phones. We slept back to back, not out of anger, just habit. If her hand touched mine in the bed, I’d feel startled, as if a stranger had reached for me.
The moment I noticed it properly was on her birthday. I had booked dinner in a place near the quays and bought her earrings from a shop she liked. Nothing was wrong with the evening. She looked beautiful. The food was lovely. We talked about work, her sister’s new baby, the rent going up again. At one point, she smiled at something the waiter said, and I saw the old brightness in her face. I realised I hadn’t tried to make her smile like that in months. Maybe longer.
On the walk home through Temple Bar, with music spilling out of doorways and tourists taking photographs of everything, she slipped her hand into mine. It should have felt familiar. Instead, it felt formal, like we were remembering how to behave. I squeezed her hand because I loved her as a person, because she had been my home for eight years, because I did not know how to admit that home had become a place we both only visited.
We didn’t talk about it that night. We watched half an episode of a show we’d been pretending to enjoy and went to bed. A week later, the conversation finally happened. It started with something stupid: I forgot to buy milk. She said, “It doesn’t matter,” but her voice cracked on the word matter, and suddenly she was crying at the kitchen table. Not dramatic crying. Just exhausted, embarrassed tears.
I sat across from her and asked, “Are you unhappy?”
She looked at me for a long time. “I don’t think I’m unhappy,” she said. “I think I’m lonely.”
That sentence did more damage than any argument could have. Because I knew exactly what she meant. I had been lonely too, sitting beside her on the couch, eating dinner with her, sleeping inches away from her. We had kept the shape of the relationship and lost the warmth inside it.
We talked until nearly two in the morning. There were no accusations, which somehow made it sadder. She said she had stopped telling me things because I always seemed tired. I said I had stopped asking because she always seemed far away. She said she missed laughing with me. I said I missed who I was when she first loved me. We both apologised for things we hadn’t meant to do.
For a while we tried. We went for
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
