Every relationship has two versions. The one you tell later, polished into a story about “red flags I should have seen.” And the one you actually lived, where the lines between immaturity, bad timing, and real warning signs blur together. This episode is about that second version. The one that makes you wonder if it was him, or if it was just that you were twenty-five.

There were the “entrepreneurs” who treated their Notes app like an office. The guitar guys who never made it past Wonderwall. The decent ones too, the men who were kind but never quite right. And then there was the marriage, where problems piled up and I called them quirks, because at twenty-three I thought that was what commitment looked like. Febreze as cleaning, silence as punishment, gaslighting as love.

What ties these stories together is not regret but recognition. Growing older doesn’t rewrite what happened. It sharpens it. Divorce became the education I didn’t know I needed, a crash course in what I will never excuse again.

Looking back is not about deciding if it was all red flags or if I was just too young to see clearly. It is admitting that both can be true. That youth let me excuse things I should have named, and that love can still fail even when you try your hardest. It is not failure to learn too late. It is only proof that now, I see.

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