Justice B. Hill

I could hear the hurt in his voice. I had heard it before a couple of months earlier when he called late one night to talk to me.

His call this time came midmorning.

The night earlier started merrily, he said. He attended a scholarship program at his college with his parents, who drove in for the event. He walked away that night with a couple of hundred dollars in free money. He, his parents and his friends celebrated afterward.

But somewhere between the celebration and his call to me, his night took a bad turn. He ran into his girlfriend. They had been dating about nine weeks or so, and he was into her in a big way.

It was easy to see why: She was blonde, fit and comely, almost in a Hollywood way. He had the cover-boy looks that rivaled hers. Shortly after having his heart broken when his last girlfriend decided she wanted her space, he let her into his life. The couple seemed a good match.

Now, at 4 in the morning, his new girlfriend was telling him the same thing. She said she didn’t want the structure of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. She got plenty of structure from her parents. As an 18-year-old freshman, she preferred freedom over structure.

Her words left him confused.

How could she talk about love and then discard those feelings as if they were yesterday’s wardrobe? She made no sense – not to him.

Breakups like his have three sides: his, hers and the truth. I had just heard his side, and perhaps it wasn’t the gospel, only his varnished version of how things in their relationship had played out. He easily could have left the warts unstated.

No matter the truth, the hurt in his voice was genuine. He told me he didn’t know what to do next. She had betrayed him once, but he had decided to forgive and forget and move the relationship forward.

She made that simple for him. He told me she did everything he asked her to do. She wanted to be in his life as much as he wanted her in his life. So forgiveness seemed the right choice.

But forgiveness without soul-searching can cause more hurt, particularly when you have rushed to fall in love with somebody. The issues that led to the first betrayal didn’t disappear because she apologized.

Now, he was in his house off campus, drowning in melancholy. He started to question who he was, what he was about and whom he could trust. In a rash move, he cut off his Facebook account, his friends’ best access to him. He then did what too many college students do: He leaned on alcohol.