Cugan breaks up with me–College Memoirs: Life At Roanoke–April 1995, Part 2

by Nyssa McCanmore
Posted on May 20, 2015May 24, 2022

I’m not sure when I found out that, while I was out of the room one day during Easter Break, Cugan’s parents told him he shouldn’t have a girlfriend while looking for a job. (He recently lost his job.) Cugan disagreed, and they argued.

But after that, he began acting distant and easily upset with me. I knew I couldn’t possibly have done anything, yet whatever I did was wrong. I’m not going to “throw him under the bus” like Dr. Phil’s wife supposedly did with him in her new book, so I won’t give details.

On Monday afternoon, Cugan drove me back to Roanoke, stopping to get some fast food, which we ate in a S– park. We had a long conversation; I remember seeing deer off in the distance as I shocked Cugan with accounts of the abuse I’d suffered from Phil.

In the parking lot, he said he had to get back, I forget why. He almost left me at the Campus Center, but I got him to take me to the apartment parking lot. I didn’t want to leave him right away, since I couldn’t bear saying good-bye and not seeing him again until Thursday.

That’s only natural at the beginning of a relationship, but he yelled at me for not letting him go right away! That shocked me, and was uncalled-for.

He sometimes got mad at other times, when I had trouble saying good-bye at night, even though I certainly didn’t intend to stop him from leaving. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel the same way I did about him leaving, or why he would treat me like I was doing something wrong just for not liking to say good-bye.

After all, in the first few weeks/months with Phil, every time he left me at my dorm for the night, we’d spend forever saying good-bye. He’d wave even as he left.

I expected Cugan to be the same, but instead he treated me like there was something wrong in being sad to say good-bye!

This time, it seemed even worse, and it colored the rest of the afternoon with melancholy and an unease. I knew I did nothing wrong, so why was he so cold all of a sudden?

Catherine explained that she had the same problem with her old boyfriend, that it was a guy thing, and that guys seem to think girls are manipulating them into not leaving right away, when they’re just mourning the fact that the guy has to leave.

Yeah, it’s crazy, I know. Guys seem to have a strange tendency to think women are manipulating them when they’re not. I just don’t understand guys. It’s like you’re not supposed to show you care.

I talked to Cugan on the phone on probably Tuesday, but he seemed distant. There were long silences. I felt very uneasy about this. He made a date with me for Thursday, but didn’t sound enthusiastic about it.

I told Catherine about it on probably Wednesday, and said I feared he was going to break up with me. She waved that fear aside.

She told me to make a little card for him, so I worked on it that night. I covered it in Celtic knotwork on the front, including a yellow snake with a knotwork tail, and colored it with marker.

Around dinnertime Thursday afternoon, Cugan showed up. We were to get dinner at Burger King. I went out with him to his car and gave him the card; he sat there reading it. He later told me that card made what he was about to do, so much harder. (I was glad to hear that.)

He then said he was breaking up with me because we were too much alike, we had too much in common. But the way he treated me afterwards was far different from the ways Peter and Phil had acted: He was actually nice to me. So I knew he was different–which made it even harder to say good-bye to him.

He said, “I may change my mind: I’m always second-guessing myself,” and to call him on Monday, when he got back from an archery trip to Canada with Donato. He would be gone all weekend.

No guy had ever told me to call him after a breakup. If anything, they didn’t welcome my calls, or want to hear anything I had to say, even though I had a right to say it.

(I go into much more detail in my private journals, but since he is now my Hubby, I don’t want to put it here on the Net.)

We finally parted. I took my food inside to the study room, where I could barely choke it down. I called Catherine and left a message on her answering machine.

I needed to talk to someone, so I asked Sharon to come talk to me. However, I had a hard time getting anything out, though my tears had abated. I think I had this weird feeling like things weren’t so bad. Before I could say much, I heard the phone ring from the bedroom: Catherine.

I told her what happened. She said about my suspicions, “Well, you were right.” Then I called Mom.

Mom was mostly cheerful, thinking it wasn’t hopeless and she didn’t think this breakup was going to last.

Dad had a similar attitude. When I told him Cugan said we were too much alike–which was odd, because Phil and Peter said, “We’re too different”–he said, “I’ve never heard of people being too compatible.”

Incidentally, the date was April 20, 1995. The day before was the two-year anniversary of the fire in the Branch Davidian compound, in which David Koresh and his followers were killed. April 19, 1995 was also the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. I don’t remember if I knew about the bombing; I may not have watched the news that day.

Two years later, April 19 was our wedding date. We had no idea that it was the anniversary of these two horrible things.

We just wanted an April wedding, the pastor gave us two choices for dates, and we picked that one arbitrarily. How’s that for irony?

When I first discovered it was the two-year anniversary of the bombing, I wondered if it was a sign not to get married, along with the terrible out-of-season snowstorms that kept hitting whenever we tried to go to Indiana to get wedding preparations done.

(Once, we even had to stop, stay with Cugan’s parents overnight, and reschedule the next morning’s premarital counseling for the week of the wedding.)

Index
Cast of Characters (Work in Progress)

Table of Contents

Freshman Year

September 1991:

October 1991:

November 1991:

December 1991: Ride the Greyhound
January 1992: Dealing with a Breakup with Probable NVLD
February 1992:

March 1992: Shawn: Just Friends or Dating?

April 1992: Pledging, Prayer Group–and Peter’s Smear Campaign

May 1992:

Sophomore Year

Summer 1992: