My Heart Was Broken By A 34 Year-Old When I Was Only 17, And Only Now Do I Realize Why
Itzel Ponce de León | CanvaYears ago, the man I loved found another woman to live the life I once believed should have been mine. For a long time, I thought that meant she was better than me.
Over the years, the question would occasionally resurface: Why had he chosen her instead of me?
That man, whom I call Adam in my memoirs, was already building a catamaran when I met him. His life revolved around the boat. It wasn’t a hobby or a fantasy. It was the future he intended to live.
I was 17. He was 34. I believed he was the one for me.
Adam held such certainty. He was intelligent, unconventional, and magnetic. He had left behind his marriage, children, and missionary life, living in a boathouse while building a vessel he planned to sail around the world.
To love him meant sharing that dream. For years, I tried. When we met, I was a high school dropout working in a diner, hoping someday to become an artist or writer, though I had little idea how to make it happen.
Adam, on the other hand, knew exactly who he was and what he wanted. I wanted to create something of my own, too, and watching him turn his dream into reality made me believe that simply being close to him might help me make my own dreams come true.
But looking back, I see many signs that I did not belong in his world.
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I couldn’t quit smoking as he required for life on the boat. When things became difficult between us, I drank too much and angered him. Even the music we liked divided us. For him, classical. For me, rock and roll.
He believed in the discipline required for life at sea: brown rice and miso soup three times a day, every day. No smoking. No alcohol. No indulgences.
I learned to grind whole wheat flour by hand and make chapattis while he worked on the boat. I gave up milk because there was no refrigerator, rinsed dishes in the harbor to save water, and tried repeatedly to quit smoking.
I convinced myself that love meant adapting to his way of life. But no matter how hard I tried, some part of me resisted becoming the woman he wanted to sail beside him. But the truth was, I never cared about sailing, living on a boat, or traveling around the world.
I wanted him without wanting the life that came with him.
Looking back now, I can see how young I was and how much I tried to shape myself into someone I wasn’t.
He and I struggled on and off until I was twenty, and by then I knew our relationship was hopeless. Still, I wasn’t prepared to end it even though I would disappear from his life for months at a time.
Even when he told me he’d met someone else, I didn’t believe it was serious or that things between us would end.
Now, decades later, I pulled out old newspaper clippings I saved from when he launched that first boat, and later the others he built with that woman who became his wife.
I couldn’t help but ask myself: Why could he do it with her and not with me? What did she have that I didn’t?
She was closer to his age, financially secure, and seemingly more at ease in the life he wanted. In the photographs, they looked united by the same dream.
He was already building that life when I knew him.
Recently, I found myself searching online to see whether he was still alive now that he’d be eighty-four. Was he still married? Had he fulfilled his dream of sailing around the world?
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The truth is, I wasn’t only curious about him. I wanted to know whether she had succeeded in the role I once believed I’d failed to fill.
They have almost no digital footprint. No Facebook. No Instagram. But eventually I found her on a sailing app where she had written:
“Let’s build a boat and go sailing,” he said.
“Sounds like a good idea,” she said.
I read it over and over. Two sentences. He said. She said. So short and precise. Almost too simple to matter.
But the longer I let the words sink in, the more I understood. All those years, I’d believed she’d succeeded where I’d failed. What I finally realized was that I’d been asking the wrong question.
It wasn’t about who loved him more. It was about who wanted the same future.
She hadn’t simply loved him. She loved the dream too.
It had never been about what she had that I didn’t. Never about the age difference, whether she was more mature, or whether she was all those things I wasn’t.
After reading those two sentences, the question that had followed me for decades lost its power. I had been comparing myself to the wrong thing.
I had loved him. Wanted him. But his dream was never mine.
For years, I believed that if I had loved him enough, I could have transformed myself into the woman who sailed beside him. Now I wonder if some wiser part of me understood the cost.
During that same search, I discovered the boat was now for sale in Guatemala for “health reasons”. The listing describes decades spent building the vessel and years sailing through the Bahamas and Caribbean. He never sailed around the world after all.
Sometimes I look at those old photos of the two of them beside those boats and wonder who I might have become if I had managed to say yes to that life too.
But now I understand something I couldn’t understand back then.
It wasn’t that another woman had succeeded where I’d failed. It was that she simply wanted the life I didn’t. Loving him was never the problem. Abandoning myself would have been.
Barbara Carter has been writing on Medium since 2022 and is currently working on her memoir series, Barbara by the Bay, a reflection on resilience, self-discovery, and the power of storytelling. Her earlier writing was published in Understorey Magazine. Memoir Magazine, Fictitious Magazine and Art Magazine.
