Last year, I ended a five-year relationship. It's an agonizing statement to write, let alone an experience to share, and so many of my emotions are still so raw. I could write a post about love: "What It's Like to Fall in Love", "The 15 Best Tidbits of Being in Love", "How to Be in Love With Your Best Friend", but I don't feel like popular culture underserves that area in any way. I'm still learning a lot so I'm wary of my own advice and probably have no authority in telling you what to do. So, here's what I've learned so far, and maybe the lessons will appeal to you anecdotally as opposed to being preached at you:

1. Letting go is gradual. I'm learning to let go - not just of a person who was my best friend, but of the idea of him and what we had. We were together for long enough that when considering the notion of being together for the rest of our lives, I sometimes thought: maybe. I'm still letting go of my aspirations of us - aspirations of our futures entwined together - both for the foreseeable and unforeseeable time periods. The holidays we were supposed to spend together in our hometown, the one-room apartment we talked about but never shared. I don't really know how to make this all dissipate, other than with time. I'm relying on time to remove the sticky residue.

2. We should have "checked in" with each other more often. We did long distance on-and-off for the latter half of our relationship, and it sounds like such a formality, but we should have sat down at the beginning and end of each of the segments of time during which we were geographically separated and evaluated our relationship. How did we feel about the time we were going to be separated? What was our plan in ensuring that we remained intimate and in contact? What did we learn over the time we were separated? How are we both different from each other now? We were "high school sweethearts" so our relationship was pretty laissez-faire to begin with, but maybe that was part of the problem - we never propelled our relationship to evolve at the same rate that we both did, after high school.

3. Everything in hindsight is so ideal. It was and it is still so easy to say "we could have done this" and "if this, then things would have been different". Maybe they would have been. Maybe we both just fucked up, and weren't mature enough to handle being in a relationship that could have been ours for as long as we wanted. At the same time, I'm skeptical of our abilities to make dramatic change. I know that at the first realization of loss comes desperation, and with desperation are bold promises. I guess with these things and decisions in general, there is no real way of knowing what could have been, unless we chose the alternative to what we currently have.

4. Everything in hindsight is so goddamn ideal. During moments when I am left alone to stir with my thoughts, I glance backward at our relationship and my mind eclipses at only the best parts: A The Smiths track plays in my head, and there we are dicking around in IKEA, our bellies sated by a 10-meatball meal. It's literally that scene from 500 Days of Summer, somewhere in the in between of the first few hundred days when everything is so blissful. Moments like these are my favourite moments and they are moments I will probably cherish privately for the rest of my life. They're incredible, and part of that is so terrifying to me. When I focus at these moments, they are joyful, but instinctively I fill with doubt. Part of me fears that we made the wrong decision to end our relationship, and I feel broken at the idea that we won't make these memories together anymore. To put it plainly: it hurts. It usually takes a concerted effort for me to refocus, put in perspective the rest of our relationship and re-weight these recollections with the reasons that it did end.

5. Hurt is inevitable. I realized this quite recently. Over the years, we certainly both hurt each other: small nicks, and some salted wounds. Part of accepting the responsibility of being in a relationship is realizing you both have the power to hurt, and are also both exposed raw to the vulnerability of being hurt. I don't have a solution to this. If we shy away from all sources of hurt, we shy away from love. For every unkept promise, there were a dozen handwritten cards and letters. For each unresolved Skype call, there were a countless number of warm, comfortable silences in which we both just felt reassured and safe from the world in the company of each other.

Maybe I'll revisit these five lessons in a few months and deem them invalid in every way, but maybe I'll respect them for their truths at the time of their conception. The experience is new to me; I'm still so uncertain about the way I feel now and how I will feel as time passes. However, there is one thing I am certain about: this denouement of a relationship - it's painful, but I would never sacrifice any of the five years we had just so I could no longer feel this way.