How Did You Not Know?

When the songs were a red flag

Why didn’t I realise the songs were a red flag? A necessary detail to fill in: whenever I hear a song that resonates with me I save it to, what is now, a long long playlist that soundtracks evening meals and drives to the shop. For most of the songs on there I can pinpoint the era of my dating life they were added; for many they were played over and over and over again during times I was particularly into particular men.

Now, months later, when Spotify shuffle puts on one of the songs I added that reminded me of him, that I played over and over because they were so us, I think “why didn’t I realise?!”. Because they are not love songs, but heartbreak songs. All the while I thought and hoped we were going somewhere the songs I saved were about unrequited feelings and one-sided affection and self-blaming. I thought it was romance; I thought it was all romance.

Sometimes I tell my boyfriend what I think are so-bad-it’s-funny stories from my dating past and he just looks at me sadly and says “why didn’t you know you deserved better than that?”. It is a question I’ve been asked before, nearly three years ago when I left a very long and bad relationship. After finally releasing the full extent of what had been going on to my mother, to my friends, and later to men I was dating, they all asked the same thing: how did you not know?

I have never had an answer to that question. Because yes, I should have known. People around me, although they didn’t know the detail, although I covered it up well, still knew. I was going to say, “you can’t know what you don’t know”, which is true, but what is more true is that “you can’t know what you don’t want to know”. I was heavily invested in not knowing, in all these situations. I was invested in believing the excuses and explanations I made for someone’s behaviour, invested in mistrusting and disregarding the parts of me that felt hurt, the parts that questioned. 

I didn’t want to know because what I wanted more than truth was love. So I took what was offered and made myself believe it was everything I needed. Ironically, I wanted certainty. I didn’t want to perpetually search for some great love that for all I knew wouldn’t exist for me. I didn’t want to throw my life into turmoil. I wanted to know that I had what I had, regardless of how good it actually was.

Until I didn’t.

I have been asked another question too. As I tentatively and euphemistically began to talk about the break up online, as people were able to read between the lines to what I was really saying they asked: “how did you know?”. Not interested in what I missed, what I hid from myself, what I excused, they instead wanted to know what had changed that now I did know. Now that I knew and couldn’t un-know and had acted upon that knowing.

People always want to know about the moment you knew, because in films and novels there is an inciting incident around which the drama unfolds, and that’s what we want in life. We want a clean cut before and after where we were certain about one thing and then certain about something else but the crucial part is we were always certain.

But in my experience, you do not know the moments are happening when they are. I could sit here and write about moments and days that I suddenly knew, but the truth is these were only moments in the rearview mirror. I can only pick them out as moments based on what happened next, on information I later gained. At the time they were things that were happening that I didn’t know how to feel about. At the time they were songs being added to a playlist.

Is it because of these questions that I am so interested in the concept of knowing? I think that would be too convenient, too much of a moment applied with hindsight. I have always been interested in knowing, in certainty, even while I was so invested in a mental architecture of not knowing. But it was the dismantling of that - something that started with a few slates on the roof and then the whole rotten structure subsiding - that got me interested in the nature of knowing. The nature of certainty, of truth. How much we all want it, but it can’t really exist.

We seek certainty in all things, but it’s the one thing we can never have. But if we accept that - what can happen next?