Love is blind. Hindsight isn’t. The signs were there. I just loved her more than I trusted what they were telling me.

For twelve years, Karen Milena Abarca Hernandez was a part of my life and she was my best friend. She was the only woman I imagined marrying, building a home with, raising children and growing old together. We always talked forever but for more than a decade, our lives ran parallel. We each dated other people and somehow we always found our way back to each other. The timing was never right until, finally, after ten years of friendship, it was our time. We finally had our chance and I remember thinking, This is it.

I wasn’t casually dating someone to see where things would go. I believed I had already found the one. She had been my crush for years and I loved her long before we ever became a couple. Being with her was one of my dreams I had waited a decade to live. I was happier than I had ever been and I was walking on air. When you love someone that deeply, you don’t stop seeing their flaws. If anything, you see them even more clearly. You notice all of their mannerisms and habits, the good, the bad and the ugly. You pay attention to the comments that sting, the moments that make you uncomfortable and the little things that don’t sit right. The difference is that genuine love changes how you interpret them. Instead of confronting these so-called red flags, you tell yourself they’re honest mistakes and it convinces you to compromise these imperfections.

You excuse their behavior because literally no one is perfect. I had to remind myself that love requires patience, forgiveness and sacrifice. I still believe that. I believe God created us perfectly imperfect, with all of our flaws and idiosyncrasies that make us unique. Some of Karen’s quirks were exactly what made me fall in love with her, while others slowly became things that bothered me but I chose to ignore them. Those moments stayed buried long after the relationship ended. It has taken me nearly two years to fully process and understand what I experienced.

I left my home and moved to the U.S. to heal on my own. That distance gave me the perspective to see patterns that were almost invisible while I was living through them. Many of the things I dismissed as jokes, personality differences or harmless habits were actually warning signs. They weren’t dramatic enough to end the relationship overnight but together they painted a picture I refused to see because I loved her. When I look back at the relationship, I realize the red flags appeared almost immediately. Each one seemed small enough to dismiss but I see they weren’t isolated moments. They were consistent patterns of behavior. This chapter isn’t about blaming Karen Abarca or pretending I was perfect. It’s about documenting the red flags I overlooked, what they taught me and why I hope someone reading this recognizes them in their own life before they spend years convincing themselves that love requires ignoring the things that are killing you softly

I don’t hate women or stopped believing in love but when you give someone your complete trust, your future, your heart, and your life, only to watch it disappear, rebuilding that trust takes far longer than falling in love ever did. I still believe in my words actually mean something. I believe if I tell the woman I love that I will stay beside her through everything, then I intend to keep that promise. Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s an every day commitment, a deliberate choice and a responsibility. That’s why I don’t take relationships lightly and why betrayal such as this leaves wounds that take years to heal.

For a long time, all of these thoughts and memories have been trapped inside my head. I kept them to myself bottled up and I’ve been unable to express myself properly. They repeated themselves over and over like a broken record, creating stress to the point where I couldn’t sleep or eat because I was angry, so I decided that the best way to channel the negative energy is by transferring down the full story and organizing the events that happened over the years.

I want to release the weight I’ve been carrying and writing has become a way to clear my mind, to transform anger into reflection and turn all this disruptive chaos into something meaningful. My hope is that someone, somewhere, reading this story will recognize similar situations in their own life and learn from the things I failed to see. Before I go back home after all this time, I need to close this chapter completely. I need to say what I’ve been holding inside, tell the truth as I experienced it and then let it go. So, here are Karen Abarca’s Red Flags.

🚩 Red Flag 1: The instinct to escape

The very first red flag appeared on our second or third date. After work one evening, around seven or eight o’clock, we met at Llao Llao for frozen yogurt. Back then it was her favorite place. It was my first time there. We had both worked a full day and we wanted to sit down, eat some ice cream and catch up.

While she was talking, I yawned once. Immediately she looked at me and put her hand on her purse aggressively saying, “Si quieres, nos vamos.” “If you want, let’s leave.” She genuinely assumed I wanted to end the date. I told her no. I wasn’t bored, tired or trying to leave. I had simply worked all day and like most adults you yawn! A yawn after a long workday isn’t unusual.

I was there because I wanted to spend time with her. What stood out wasn’t the misunderstanding. It was how quickly she wanted to escape. Instead of asking whether I was okay, laughing about it or simply continuing the conversation, her instinct was to end the evening altogether. It revealed whenever she sensed the slightest discomfort or thought something might be wrong, her first reaction wasn’t to work through it. It was to leave.

Over time I realized this wasn’t an isolated incident. She openly admitted that whenever she attended parties, work events or social gatherings, she rarely said goodbye to anyone. She would simply disappear. Sometimes she’d tell people she was going to the restroom and never return. Other times she’d quietly walk out without telling anyone. Even her coworkers joked about it. “Karen just leaves.” People would eventually notice she was gone and know if she’s not coming back.

I saw the same behavior firsthand at one of her friend’s weddings. When she decided she wanted to leave, she simply told me, “Bebito, let’s go.” We walked out without saying goodbye to the bride or anyone else. I was used to it by then. Her instinct was always the same. Leave. Ditch. Bail.

At first it seemed like an odd personality trait but it reflected a much broader pattern. Whenever situations became uncomfortable, emotionally uncertain or simply inconvenient, she didn’t communicate, it was to avoid. Being unable to confront conflicts, to face your own problems in an amicable manner is a red flag.

🚩 Red Flag 2: Insecurity turned into defensiveness

Karen’s insecurity extended to my female friends and coworkers V, J, G, K and A. She would repeatedly ask whether I had ever slept with them or whether something had happened between us. She wanted to see my WhatsApp conversations and go through my phone. This was the woman I had waited years to finally be with. Why would I throw that away by cheating on her? Yet instead of feeling trusted, I often felt like I had to prove my innocence when I hadn’t done anything wrong.

Another red flag I didn’t fully understand at the time was how deeply insecure she seemed about herself. It wasn’t just one thing. It showed up in different areas of her life, from comparing herself to her friends and becoming defensive when criticized about language and the way she spoke. We’re both from El Salvador but I spent most of my life growing up outside the country. When I moved back as a teenager, I had to learn Salvadoran Spanish. Every Spanish-speaking country has its own vocabulary, slang and expressions, and El Salvador is no different. I made mistakes constantly (I still do 🤷‍♂️). Sometimes I used words that were technically correct but sounded foreign to Salvadorians. I remember calling a large cargo truck a camioneta when the word everyone used was furgón.

People have always corrected me all the time. Of course it was embarrassing. Nobody enjoys being corrected but I also understood that every correction was an opportunity to learn. I never saw it as an attack on my intelligence or my character. It was simply part of becoming better. That’s my mindset. Karen saw it differently.

Whenever I gently corrected the pronunciation of a word or suggested a more natural way to say something, she immediately became defensive. She would tell me not to correct her, insist that she had said it correctly and become visibly upset. Then I had to start calming her emotions rather than helping her improve. I learned it was easier to say nothing at all because I didn’t want a simple conversation to become an argument.

The issue wasn’t pronunciation, it was insecurity. The correction itself felt like a personal attack instead of educational. That taught me humility allows us to grow because all of us are born knowing nothing. When someone can’t receive even constructive criticism from the person that loves them the most and tuns defensive, growth becomes difficult.

Her jealousy also became harder to ignore. One day my mother adjusted the passenger seat in my car. When Karen noticed the seat had moved, her first question was immediately asked what woman had been sitting there. Another time, while close friends were visiting from Europe, I met them for a few hours to catch up over some beers and play Smash. Around midnight, Karen called and gave me an ultimatum. She told me to leave immediately or our relationship was over. She wouldn’t let me hang up until she watched my location on my iPhone and saw that I had arrived home so she could finally go to sleep.

🚩🚩 Red Flag 3: The double standard hypocrisy

One thing that always bothered me about Karen was how quick she was to judge the way other people chose to live their lives. We all work hard for the things we have. Whether it’s buying groceries, furnishing a house, saving for a car, replacing old clothes or finally treating yourself to something you’ve wanted for years, those purchases usually mean more than the object itself. They represent long hours at work, sacrifices and the satisfaction of finally being able to reward yourself.

I remember one of my friends bought himself a pair of Gucci shoes and Karen told me, “Eso no cuadra con su vida. ¿Para qué compra zapatos Gucci si maneja una Mazda?” In other words, “That doesn’t fit his lifestyle. Why would he buy Gucci shoes if he drives a Mazda?” I remember being a little speechless because I never expect someone I love to talk that way about someone close to me. He worked for his money. If buying those shoes made him happy, then good for him. It wasn’t hurting anyone.

The irony was that Karen drove a 2015 Kia Sportage herself. When we traveled to New York together, we went shopping at Coach and Kate Spade. She bought herself a handbag and more than one pair of shoes, including a pair of Mary Jane flats. Coach and Kate Spade aren’t Burberry or Louis Vuitton, but they’re still luxury brands. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself about the double standard. She had one set of rules for everyone and another set of rules just for herself. I noticed she always seemed to have something to criticize, whether it was how people dressed, what they bought, who they dated, what job they had or how they chose to live. Perhaps it was easier to focus on everyone else’s flaws than to confront her own.

Karen once told me her ex-boyfriend became upset after learning she wasn’t a virgin. She said he acted as though she was somehow “less pure” because she had been with someone before. I remember telling her that I thought he was wrong, we all have a past and I never believe someone should be judged for relationships they had before meeting the person they’re with. Months later, Karen became upset because I had more experience having also been in previous relationships before her. I remember thinking, How can you get angry at me for doing the exact same thing you defended yourself for? There was always a double standard and I began noticing that this wasn’t the only time the rules changed depending on whether they applied to her or to me.

🚩🚩 Red Flag 4: She wanted the destination instead of building the Journey

One of the biggest red flags I noticed was that she seemed more focused on reaching life’s milestones than on building the relationship that was supposed to lead to them. She wanted the marriage, the house, the engagement ring. She wanted the picture-perfect life. There’s nothing wrong with wanting those things. I wanted them too. She didn’t understand that you don’t just wake up one morning and suddenly have all those things. You build them. You learn how to live together first.

You have to figure out what it’s like to be adults together. Buying groceries, buying furniture, buying utensils for the kitchen, paying the bills, figuring out insurance, learning how to manage your money and slowly figure out what life as a team actually looks like. Those aren’t obstacles, that is marriage. She didn’t know how to cook anything, not even how to prepare Maruchan soup at 30 years old.

From where I stood, we simply weren’t there yet. We still had so much to learn about life and each other. We still had to grow as individuals and together as a couple before making a commitment that would hopefully last a lifetime. I wanted us to build that foundation one brick at a time because I believed that was the only way to create something that would endure. Not simply because everyone else was doing it.

But she was frustrated. She was upset that she still lived with her mother and fought with her and have a house to call her own. She was upset that she wasn’t married. She looked around at her friends, seeing engagement rings and their husbands gifting them jewelry. She felt like she was falling behind. She wasn’t measuring the quality of our relationship. She was measuring whether our timeline matched everyone else’s instead of letting ours develop naturally.

I understood where those feelings came from. I felt that too but I am patient, she is not. Society puts a tremendous amount of pressure on people to reach certain milestones by a certain age. It’s easy to feel left behind when everyone around you appears to be moving forward. I couldn’t ignore reality just to satisfy a timeline. I wasn’t willing to promise a future that we hadn’t earned together through shared experiences. And looking back, I think that was one of our biggest incompatibilities. We weren’t just moving at different speeds. We fundamentally disagreed on what the journey was supposed to be. I believed love was about building a life together from the ground up. She wanted to arrive at the destination more than the journey itself.

🚩🚩🚩 Red Flag 5: Speaking Negatively About Everyone

Another pattern appeared very early in the relationship. She spoke negatively about almost everyone in her life. Friends. Coworkers. Family members. Eventually, I realized there was almost no one she consistently spoke highly of.

Our very first fight as a couple was a warning ironically, wasn’t about us. It was about her best friend, F. I don’t remember exactly what they were fighting about anymore but I remember telling Karen that I thought she was wrong. I told her F deserved an apology and that’s when Karen got upset with me.

She said I was supposed to be on her side. That in a relationship your partner always has your back. I told her, “I am on your side. I’m telling you the truth, not what you want to hear. I’m telling you what’s right. What’s fair.” She didn’t want to hear that. She wanted loyalty over honesty.

Karen spoke badly about almost everyone in her life. F had a sister named D. Growing up, D dated a woman for a year or two and they eventually broke up and years later she met a man from the Middle East, converted to Islam, married him and now lives as a traditional Muslim wife, wearing a burqa. Karen couldn’t stand it.

She said it was disgusting that D had been straight, then a lesbian, then straight again. That she didn’t even know who she was, she’s was just experimenting. Then she criticized her for converting to Islam, saying she had abandoned Christianity, renounced her faith to Jesus Christ and that she was going to hell. There was no other way around it.

Karen was an Evangelical Christian who attended a church in El Salvador called Toby. I’m telling you the facts, Toby is exactly like one of those mega churches you hear about in the United States with a “charismatic” pastor and thousands of devoted followers. A pastor who becomes incredibly wealthy while preaching sacrifice to everyone else. It’s a cult and everyone knows it. It attracts the poorest and most uneducated, vulnerable people who simply don’t know much about the outside world, other than what they had always been taught. This environment shaped the way Karen saw the world. Either you were right or you were condemned. That third-world mentality carried over into the way she judged people.

She talked badly about people at work constantly. There was T, her manager at the British Embassy. T was Black, from London, married to another Black man named Dw. Karen would tell me things like, “Black people smell.” One day T showed a picture of her son and his girlfriend, who happened to be white. Karen immediately commented that she didn’t like it because he was dating a white woman. That was one of the moments where I realized Karen carried a lot of prejudice and she knew. Un negro saliendo con un rubia. A black guy dating a blonde. She wasn’t comfortable with interracial relationships.

She once went to T’s house and came back horrified because she noticed urine stains around the toilet. She told me she never wanted to go back again, one visit was enough. She also mocked Dw because he was unemployed at the time, looking poor by always wearing the same suit to events. She described him almost like a beggar.

Then there was L. Karen was L’s manager and she was over fifty years old, married with children and, ironically, lived one block away from me in a very good neighborhood called Santa Elena while Karen was in La Const the ghetto. Karen constantly talked down about her, saying she was “old and less successful”. She saw herself superior because she was younger and more beautiful.

She hated another coworker named Xavier. She called him a fucking idiot more times than I can count. X was dating a woman named P who had earned a job in China. Karen would say, “She’s so smart. Why is she with this dumbass? He’s in his forties, going nowhere in life and doesn’t do anything right.” There was always someone. Always another person she looked down on, another flaw to point out.

Then there was Dv, one of the directors at the British Embassy. Karen had worked there for five years and when we traveled to London for a business trip, she asked Dv if he would write her a letter of recommendation and he said no. She couldn’t understand why. She asked me, “Why would he say no after I’ve worked there for so long?” I wasn’t surprised. Not after everything I’ve heard her say about everyone in that office. You hate your job and coworkers. Why would someone recommend a person who spends so much of her time insulting people behind their backs? They knew.

Another example was her best friend, M. Karen often complained about the sacrifices she had made for her, saying she was carried $10,000 in cash from Miami back to El Salvador because M was in debt while trying to grow her business. Whenever M launched a new handbag or wallet, Karen felt obligated to support her by buying the first editions. Those early products often had defects with the leather cracked, the materials didn’t hold up over time. Karen eventually became frustrated for paying hundreds of dollars for products that weren’t finished when better versions came out later. She minimized her friends business, saying it only appeared successful on social media and that she sold only a three handbags each month.

Then there was that one dinner, around Christmas, the three of us went out to Brutto together. During dinner, M openly confessed that she had cheated on her fiancé with a Salvadoran politician who had helped her get a job. Karen was bothered that I had to learn about the affair, worried I would think differently about her best friend.

As I listened over the months, I noticed whenever someone wasn’t present or didn’t agree with her, she almost always had something negative to say. If someone speaks badly about everyone, eventually you have to ask yourself: What did she say about me when I wasn’t around?

🚩🚩🚩 Red Flag 6: Contempt replaced respect

I noticed a red flag through the way Karen spoke and treated me. At first, I dismissed it as teasing but it stopped feeling playful and started being disrespectful. She criticized even the smallest things. Whenever we disagreed about something, she would speak to me as though I knew absolutely nothing, as if my opinion carried no value. She would tell me, “You know nothing!” like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones.

There were plenty of things she didn’t know and I never used them to make her feel stupid. She never had a microwave because her mother believed they were dangerous due to “radioactivity.” I actually brought it up to her one day and her mother bought her one after New Years. One day, Karen heated a glass of milk in the microwave and wrote to me shocked that it had exploded. I was surprised that at 31 she didn’t understand something I remembered learning as a child but I didn’t ridicule her.

When we visited New York and I pointed out the skyscrapers and she asked me what that word meant until I said, “Rascacielos, these tall buildings.” She had never even heard that word in Spanish. If anything, those moments made me realize how fortunate I had been to learn and experience certain things she hadn’t.

She also expected things out of the blue. Only one month of being together, I had to travel to New Jersey for a work trip. She asked me to pay for her plane ticket so she could come with me. I told her I would love for her to join me but she would need to buy her own ticket. Since then she called me cheap. She was rushing me, as though I was already expected to provide for her financially. She would even tell me, “What’s yours is mine,” and she meant it. It wasn’t something she said playfully.

When we went to see MJ: The Musical (I planned and paid for), she kept trying to have conversations with me during the performance. I quietly told her to watch the show and she became upset because I wasn’t paying attention to her. During a Coldplay candlelight concert (I planned and paid for), I quietly applauded the musicians with a soft golf clap for the performers and she moved my hands apart telling me it looked “gay.” After spending an entire day walking together, she complained that my old shoes smelled and told me to put them away in the closet. Even holding hands, she complained that my hands were too sweaty and told me I should go to a doctor to get them checked.

If I moved while we slept, she would wake up and sometimes tell me to sleep in the other bed because she couldn’t fall back asleep. Yet the next morning, she came to where I was sleeping to make love, as though what she said from the night before had never happened. She would tell me how beautiful she was, that she could get any man she wanted, and that before me she had supposedly received marriage proposals from men in France and Germany.  I never understood why she felt the need to tell the man she supposedly wanted to marry that other men wanted her too. It made me feel less like her partner and more like someone who should remember how easily I could be replaced. At the time, I couldn’t put any of this into words. I loved her so much that I didn’t want to believe she could be losing respect for me.

So I ignored the little moments that made me uncomfortable and convinced myself they weren’t worth fighting over. Individually, none of these moments seemed relationship-ending. Together, they slowly changed the way I behaved. I found myself trying to avoid upsetting her instead of simply being myself, as if I needed to be fixed. I began walking on eggshells, thinking twice before speaking, making decisions or even relaxing. I wasn’t comfortable being myself around the woman I loved anymore. I was becoming careful around her, and love isn’t supposed to make you feel that way.

After she broke up with me, Karen said she still wanted us to be friends and even continue following each other on Twitter (X). When I asked for my Coach hoodie back, something I had lent her, she called me pathetic.

🚩🚩🚩 Red Flag 7: Seeing my mother as competition

One of the reasons Karen gave me for ending our relationship was something I never expected to hear. She told me she didn’t want to compete with my mom. I remember sitting there completely confused because, to me, there was never a competition to begin with. A mother’s love and a partner’s love are two completely different relationships. One doesn’t replace and shouldn’t threaten the other.

Karen told me that my mom would always interfere in our decisions and I immediately told her that wasn’t true. Every parent gives advice because they love their children. That’s normal. My mom has always shared her opinion with me, just like any caring parent would, but she also knows that my life is my responsibility. She raised me to think for myself and at the end of the day, the decisions I make are my own, not hers.

Karen didn’t believe me. Instead she said, “I know she will.” That response stayed with me because she had already decided my mom would become a problem before she had ever done anything. She was reacting to a future she had already imagined in her own mind without knowing who my mother is. My mom was born in El Salvador. She was the second of six children. At 22, she earned a scholarship, immigrated to the United States by herself without speaking English, attended an Ivy League university, worked while studying, learned English, graduated, built a career, bought a condo, and then later one home and another, and then moved, and eventually gave me a life that she herself never had.

She has told me stories about not having enough food to eat, living through winters without heat and wondering how she was going to make it through another month. Those stories break my heart today because I look at the life I have right now and realize how much of it exists because of my mothers sacrifices. I have a comfortable apartment, a car, access to endless information through the palm of my hand, groceries delivered to my doorstep the same day and opportunities she could never have imagined when she first arrived in this country.

She built that life from nothing. As my mother grew older, she traveled to more than forty countries around the world. She retired comfortably after decades of hard work and became the kind of person I admire because of the strength, generosity and sheer determination she showed throughout her entire life. She is my hero. When Karen spoke about my mother as though she were someone to compete against, I knew she lost the plot. Not because I would ever choose my mother over my wife, but because Karen misunderstood the role my mom played in my life. Karen’s mother never did that for her.

Loving my mother never meant loving my partner any less. There was never a competition. It was the mindset she Karen had to assume before conflict existed. She saw a threat where there wasn’t one. It was then I realized that if someone can convince themselves that a good person is already their enemy, they’ll see everyone as an enemy, which she did.

🚩🚩🚩 Red Flag 8: She wanted marriage only on her terms

Only two or three months after we started dating, Karen was already frequently asking me for an engagement ring. I loved her and wanted to marry her but we needed more time. Whenever I mentioned dating for one year and then moving in together, she would throw a berrinche and question whether I truly loved her, or act as though my unwillingness to propose so soon immediately meant I wasn’t serious. She also began saying things like, “Your free time is only meant for me.”

Our religious differences made the situation even more complicated. I’m Catholic and my faith is to Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, God, the guardian angels and all the saints. Karen Abarca is Evangelical and said she didn’t like depictions of Jesus and didn’t believe in the Virgin Mary because she isn’t important or sacred, whether they were paintings, statues or carved figures. I dreamed of getting married in a church, surrounded by our families and friends. Karen wanted only a civil wedding in a quiet room. Sometimes that made me wonder why she wanted something so private. 

We also disagreed about alcohol at the wedding. I wanted champagne for a toast and a beer for our guests. She said there could be no alcohol because her mother wouldn’t attend. What pissed me off was that Karen drank with me, my mother and our friends. I met her drunk and have even taken care of her when she drank or smoked too much. Yet she was afraid to have a drink around her mother. After we broke up, she changed her IG profile pic to an image of herself at Brutto with a glass of Prosecco. I remember looking at it and thinking, Are you fucking kidding me?

We had different beliefs and wedding preferences. She wanted to rush into marriage while expecting me to accept her rules and conditions. She viewed the wedding as a ceremony centered on the couple while I viewed it as a celebration that united two families and two communities. Neither perspective is objectively wrong, but neither person was willing to accommodate the other’s values. I don’t think the warning sign was that we disagreed about a church, a glass of champagne or even how long to wait before getting engaged. Couples disagree all the time and move forward. The red flag was that nearly every conversation about our future ended with one of us having to give something up. More often than not, that person was me.

⚠️ Major Incompatibility #1: She didn’t want to start a family

One of the hardest things for me to accept was that love isn’t enough by itself. Two people can genuinely love each other and still not belong together if they want completely different lives. Another major incompatibility between us was that I wanted a family, at least one child. Ever since I was young, I imagined myself becoming a father one day. I want to raise kids, teach them everything I have learned in life, watch them grow into good people and build a home filled with values, centered around God, food and laughter.

She didn’t want children. Neither one of us was wrong. It wasn’t that one dream was better than the other. We simply wanted different futures but during the relationship, she later wanted a child. When you’re young, it’s easy to think that love will solve everything. You tell yourself that somehow you’ll figure it out later. Certain things aren’t small compromises. You can compromise on where to live, on what kind of car to buy but you can’t compromise on having children. Eventually, one person has to sacrifice something that means everything to them.

If I gave up having children like her sister and brother-in-law did, I knew that years later I might wake up wondering what my life could have been. I might resent the decision and if she had children just because I wanted them, that wouldn’t be fair to her either. She wouldn’t love them and quite frankly, she was never the maternal loving kind. She hated kids and most people anyways.

⚠️ Major Incompatibility #2: We didn’t share the same food culture

I’m not saying someone is wrong for not liking seafood but if you don’t like sushi, there is something wrong with you and it matters to me. I’m part Japanese, I grew up in Japan. I’m from El Salvador, a tropical country where seafood is also a huge part of our culture. Some of my happiest memories involve sitting around a table eating fresh seafood with family and friends.

It’s one of those things that makes me feel at home. Edward loves sushi. I love oysters, squid, octopus, lobster, crab, salmon, tuna, ceviche, anchovies on pizza and caviar. One of the best ways to build a friendship is to sit with a plate of sushi and a cold beer and just talk for hours. That’s sacred to me. That’s how I bond with people. It’s one of life’s simple pleasures.

For a long time, I honestly hesitated to date Karen because of that. It sounds silly now, but I knew how different we were. At the same time, I also believe that relationships are about compromise. Just because two people are different doesn’t mean they shouldn’t give each other a chance. So we did. When I took her to a Japanese restaurant, I’d order my sushi while I ordered for her edamame, vegetable tempura, ramen, tofu and white rice. There’s always another option. That’s the way I approach problems. I don’t immediately think something can’t work. I try to find a solution, another path instead of obstacles.

I remember for our anniversary I ordered octopus sashimi. I offered her a piece, hoping maybe she’d end up liking it but she took one bite and immediately spit it into her napkin. I just remember letting out a big sigh and thinking, Well… I tried. I realize it represented that sometimes compatibility isn’t about the big things. It’s also sharing the little moments that make life meaningful and for me, good food has always been one of those moments. She always had bad taste in food anyways.

⚠️Major Incompatibility #3: She never understood what I’m creating

This one is about passion. When Karen Abarca and I met in college, the only game she really played was a little mobile game called Pou. It’s basically a Tamagotchi. You feed this little creature, dress it up, play a few mini games, and that’s about it. I actually thought it was adorable. I didn’t judge her for it.

The difference was that video games have never been just entertainment to me. They’ve been one of the biggest passions of my entire life. I’ve spent years studying them, writing about them, designing them, building this website around them and now creating one of my own. I don’t just play games. I think about how they’re made, I analyze mechanics, stories, level design, music, psychology and user experience. It’s what I want to dedicate the rest of my life to.

As our relationship grew, I started realizing that Karen didn’t really understand any of it. She wasn’t interested in the creative process. She didn’t understand why I’d want to spend entire weekends working on a website, designing a logo, writing a blog that only a handful of people might read or building a video game that could take years before anyone ever played it. She never understood why I’d willingly sacrifice my free time and money to create something that might never succeed.

Ironically, two of her closest friends F and M, were content creators. They spent hours filming videos, editing content, taking product photos, planning posts and trying to build something of their own. I knew exactly how much work that required because I live in a similar creative world. Creating anything meaningful takes time, money, sweat, blood and tears and an unbelievable amount of persistence. People only care about the results. They never see the countless weekends, late nights, failed ideas and self-doubt that happens behind the scenes.

Karen Abarca never experienced that. She didn’t know how to edit a video or manipulate a photo or video. She had never built something from nothing or chased a creative dream that demanded years of sacrifice before seeing the fruits of her labor. Over time, I realized I wasn’t looking for someone who loved to play Zelda. I simply wanted someone who understood what it meant for me to create art.

I didn’t need someone with the same hobbies. I needed someone who could understand why these passions had become my purpose because when you dedicate your life to creating something, you’re not just asking your partner to appreciate the final product. You’re asking them to understand the person you’re becoming while you build it and to join you on that journey.

🚩🚩🚩 Red Flag 9: Emotionally Checked Out Without Saying Anything

I realize the breakup had already happened long before the breakup. When she finally ended the relationship, she told me she had already cried and gotten everything out. She said she was already over it. She had already prepared herself. At the time I was too devastated to understand what that actually meant. Our 1 year anniversary was 3 days ago and my birthday is in 13 days. What a great way to break someone’s heart.

The delayed clarity two years later, I realized she had unintentionally revealed something much bigger. She had processed the end of our relationship without me. While I still believed we were planning a future together, she had already been grieving its ending. A day before, she was telling me she loved me and we were still talking about forever. Yet forever had already ended for her and I had never been invited into that conversation. The hardest part wasn’t that she decided to leave. It was realizing that I never knew she had already left.

The most painful moment came two weeks after we broke up when I reached out to her one last time to tell her I missed her and still loved her, she replied with words I will never forget. She told me she had never loved me. She said she had been lying to herself and lying to me throughout our relationship.

Multiple times every day throughout our relationship, Karen Abarca would ask me the same question: “Bebito, do you love me?” And every time, I would answer, “Yes, bebita. I love you forever.” It became such a normal part of our relationship that I barely thought about it. I assumed she needed reassurance, and because I loved her, I was always happy to give it to her. That’s why her words after the breakup hurt so much. After a year of asking me again and again whether I loved her, she was the one who eventually told me, “I never loved you.”

Her words shattered me. They forced me to question every memory we had built over twelve years of friendship and every dream we had shared together. How do you know someone for twelve years, call them your best friend, tell them you love them, talk about marriage, children and living happily ever after forever, and then treat them as though they meant nothing? You don’t get to rewrite twelve years because walking away is easier than confronting what you did. You don’t get to hurt someone, insult them, manipulate their trust, erase them from your life and then convince yourself that because you moved on, none of it mattered. People are not disposable. I’m not disposable.

My love and trust is not something you get to take, break and leave behind without consequence. For a long time, I stayed quiet. I carried the humiliation, the anger, the confusion and the fucking pain by myself. I questioned absolutely everything. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I couldn’t think straight, my head and thoughts were in a daze. I couldn’t stop reliving the memories, the promises, even whether the woman I had loved for so long had ever really existed in the way I believed she did, or was it all just an illusion of who I thought she was but I can no longer carry it anymore. It will continue to hurt me.

If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. 🙏

I had a plan. I thought I knew exactly what my life was supposed to look like. I was going to marry the woman I loved, build a home with her, have children and somehow, somewhere along the way, finally make the video game I had dreamed about creating for years. God had other plans.

Life has shown me that time heals all wounds. I cannot control whether she will ever understand what she did to me, whether she regrets it, apologizes or spends the rest of her life believing she did nothing wrong. That’s not my life anymore. What I can control is what I do with what happens to me. She erased me from her life but she doesn’t get to erase what I learned from mine. After everything that happened, I’m the fortunate one who somehow managed to build another life.

In less than two months, everything changed. I left my country, moved to New Jersey, lost my job, found another one, bought a car, furnished my apartment piece by piece and got myself a new computer. I’ve caught myself walking through New York City thinking, Holy shit, dude. I’m here. I’m eating incredible ramen and sushi. I’m going to museums. I’m discovering new places, drinking good beer, buying clothes I like, building my career, creating my own home, and working on the video game I’ve dreamed about making for years.

There are opportunities around me that an earlier version of myself could only have imagined.

Life sucks sometimes but goddamn, does it get better.

I’m tired of feeling sorry for myself. I’m tired of giving so much space in my head and my heart to someone who chose not to be there anymore, to someone who stopped believing in me. What the fuck happened to the guy who had dreams before all of this? The guy making his video game? The guy who wanted to write, create, travel, build something and see where this life could take him? He’s still here.

I had to let her go. Holding on eventually becomes another way of hurting yourself. Maybe God really doesn’t want me to have my cake and eat it too but I finally have the opportunity to chase one of the greatest dreams of my life. I just always imagined I’d be building that life alongside the woman I loved. I don’t get both. God gives you the road to one dream while closing the door on another. Whatever demons follow you when nobody else is around, I can’t promise you that everything magically works itself out. Life doesn’t work that way.

But I can tell you this: I kept going. While I was busy believing my life had fallen apart, I looked around one day and realized I was building another one. We think we know where life is taking us, but we don’t. On this roller coaster, there will always be another drop, but there will also be another climb.

As painful as it is, I’m enjoying the ride. (Did I mention she also hated rollercoasters?)

Welcome to my backyard. My life in New York City and New Jersey has been full of adventures, all because I chose to believe in myself and take a chance. Sometimes I still can’t believe this is real. Here’s a collection of random moments and places.

This blog serves as a small glimpse into a much larger story. I have already written a book and it will be available through Amazon Kindle on December 8, 2027.

My hope is that by sharing these experiences, someone else going through a similar struggle might make sense of their own and feel a little less alone. I’m looking forward to writing more but I also want to focus on my video game, Abyss.