I chose my peace over disappointing love..
We meet in high school junior year, we had history together during 5th period, but we started talking on Instagram. He was the one who sent the first message and from there we got to get to know each other. Then he switched his sit and sat next to me for the rest of the year, sometimes we talked during class, he would walk me to all of my other classes. Then he started to offer to bring me home after school. Little by little I fell in love with him, but the problem was that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be in a relationship because I was scared that I was going to end up getting hurt somehow.. The day he asked me to be his girlfriend, I panicked and didn’t know exactly what to tell him, so I asked him for some time to think about it. I talked to my mom about him. On Valentine’s Day I said yes. I decided to give him a chance. Everything was perfect, he treated me so well, he made me feel like the most beautiful girl in the world, and he acted like a gentleman. We even shared the same religion so I thought he was the one for me. We did everything together, he would bring me to school and back home, he would bring me to work, we would hang out every day and whenever we could. And on days I couldn’t see him my day would be ruined because I loved being with him. We would watch movies together and talk to each other about life and every day we would learn something new about each other. We FaceTimed every night and if we argued we wouldn’t go to bed mad at each other. I was so “in love”and naive that I actually thought we were going to last and have a future together. But one day everything changed.. I remember that when we first started talking we had a conversation and I expressed my feelings about why it took me a bit to say yes to being his girlfriend, I was scared of getting hurt in any way possible and he promised me that he wouldn’t hurt me.. We also had a conversation about smoking and drinking, he asked me if I was into that and I said I don’t do none of that and he said the same thing. I told him that if I ever found out that he was involved in anything like that, I would break up with him. One day we were walking to my first class and I got a gut wrenching feeling on my stomach and I felt like I was going to puke, I knew that something was off, but I knew that the problem wasn’t that I was feeling sick, I knew that it had to do with him. I felt like he was hiding something important from me. I felt like that all day so after school I went through his phone and I found out that he was into vaping, he was buying vapes behind my back and I found out on my own about it. He was not honest to me about it, he hid it from me, so I took that to heart and it hurt me because I already had people in my life that are affected by some type of addiction and I didn’t want to have another person in my life that could be affected the same way and I cared about him a lot. I didn’t want him to be involved with that kind of stuff because I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. I would say that the day I found out about him being involved with those stuff, was the day that ruined our relationship entirely because it took me a long time to be able to trust him and let him in my life, so founding out that he was into those stuff and the fact that he wasn’t completely honest with me, caused me to feel betrayed, it made me feel like I didn’t actually completely know him because he hid that part of him from me. It also caused me to lose full trust in him and I was so hurt because like I said when we first met it took me a while to be able to fully trust him and let him be part of my life. I told him that the only way I wouldn’t break up with him was if we told his and my parents about the situation and he agreed. I also made him promise me that he would be honest with me if he ever thought about vaping or thought of buying a vape and he promised me he would be completely honest with me about it, but he lied to me about it many times after that day. From there our relationship changed a lot. We argued almost every day and I wasn’t able to fully trust him. I genuinely loved him and cared about him so much, so I kept giving him many chances and tried to trust him every time he promised me that he would be honest with me about it. I remember one of our arguments he told me “So what I vape, I don’t get why it’s such a big deal to you,” those words hurt me a lot because of course it was a big deal to me, I loved him, I cared about him, I cared about his health and the fact that he lied to me about it many times even after he promised me he would be honest with me, made me feel so angry and disappointed. He knew I would never be okay with him vaping, but all I was asking him was to at least be honest to me about it and he constantly lied to me about it. Our relationship got worse. He lied so many times that I had no trust for him and our relationship was draining me. I was slowly losing myself trying to keep us together and trying to make our relationship work. Me not being able to trust him anymore got to the point of me not being sure if he would ever be honest and completely loyal to me. Not only was his vaping addiction tearing our relationship apart, but I also found out that I wasn’t enough for him to respect me. One day I found out he was being disloyal to me with a girl he met during seventh grade. It completely destroyed me. I knew that he was already lying to me about something so there was a possibility of him being disloyal to me as well, but I was so naive that I told myself that he wouldn’t be capable of hurting me that way. I learned the hard way that once someone lies to you about something, they could lie to you about anything. That day even though I loved him so much, I realized that he wasn’t the right person for me and no matter how much you love someone and how much you try to care about them, they wont value that and will end up disappointing you some how. Even though I loved him so much and wanted a future with him, I couldn’t make the mistake of being miserable for the rest of my life and lose myself for him. I had to let him go and it was the most painful yet best decision I’ve ever made in my life because I chose my peace over someone that wasn’t willing to value my love for them or respect me and my boundaries.
(Sorry, I thought I’d commented not his earlier. It’s fine if it takes you a few days to work on final draft.)
This works fine as an essay centered on family/relationships. The Main Idea seems to be about trust and how broken trust can ruin a relationship (or maybe when *should* it ruin a relationship).
This is told over quite a long period of time, though, and as a result much of this is summary, with a lot of general statements about love and trust and lying, but not much that brings us *into* the relationship. I’d encourage you in revision to focus in on a specific event or conversation (maybe when you finally made the decision to cut things off) and try to write it as a scene, slowing down to describe where you are, who said and did what (much like a short story). You can still include some of the background info abut start of relationship, but I’d cut that part way down. And you might include in a conclusion how you feel about that relationship now, what it taught you, how it changed you.
The other thing to work on in revision is to structure this as essay by breaking into paras. As i said din class, it’s fine to do a long strip of a para for rough draft, but in final draft consider places where shift focuses, a change in time or place, move from summary to scene, etc (paragraphing is a little more flexible in memoir than some more formal types of writing).
Watch out for run-pins in proofreading, places where you could chop the sentence and have two sentences that can stand alone. For example, here there are three sentences strung together: “ Then he switched his sit and sat next to me for the rest of the year, sometimes we talked during class, he would walk me to all of my other classes.” You don’t always need to separate them; you can also add some connecting word or revise so the two halves are no longer independent.