A
female
age
36-40,
*arkeyedgirl
writes:It's been about six months since the end of my relationship and I am still in agony. Get got very close and very deep very quickly. Everything feel apart so fast I had whiplash. I loved this person with my whole soul.When we met I didn't want a serious relationship and he did. He'd just been dumped twice and was hurting incredibly badly. He told me he felt like people were just shit and no one really cared about anyone else. He told me people always just run away. People only cared about themselves. He had a lot of pain from his childhood and his past. So I opened up my heart to him. I tried to give him enough love to balance all the pain in his heart and show him there were people in the world who loved. And a million times he told me how amazing I was. He was a good person, but filled with a lot of fury. Sometimes I felt like he could be very unfair. But tried to break cycles of abuse and hate where he saw them.After initially begging for me to "give my heart" to him and building a serious relationship with a fervor, going so far as to tell me he wanted to marry me, he came home one night out of the blue and told me he had something to tell me. He said he'd kissed someone else and wanted to come clean. I wasn't angry, but he had always been extremely outspoken about his belief in monogamy, and I simply wondered and asked, "do you still want to be with me?" He replied that he didn't know.I'd been extremely sick for three months, was taking full course load and working, and was exhausted. All that I could handle. I was always smiling and happy. But this broke me. This hit me like a brick wall. I sobbed for days. It was my first relationship and I was so in love and so lost. I was definitely a mess. He'd never seen me like that, I'd always been strong and smiling. I'd never seen myself like that. He told me afterwards he DID want to be with me.... but I was unsure.He was a traveller and I could suddenly feel him yearn to get on the move again. The three nights after he told me he was a ghost, he went out to parties. He read a zodiac out loud once saying that "romance will try and distract you from your career" and he laughed saying even it agreed. A week afterwards my birthday came and went and he didn't do anything for it, got up, went to work, and then went home to bed. He said he was planning to get me flowers but just never did and I told him it was alright, that all I wanted was to cuddle with him when we woke up. He got kind of angry at me because he'd been hungry and I didn't take him up on his invitation to go out for eggs. I'd offered him some of the food in my kitchen but he never went in there. He felt this was neglectful of me and not supportive of the hard work he was doing. He missed a very important event I'd wished so badly he would join me for. I never got mad about any of these things he missed or neglected because I wanted to be understanding and supportive. He went out partying all the time and never invited me. I never seemed to see him smile anymore. Seemed a million miles away.All the while he was working long hours for the Olympics and so I forgave that he was letting so many things that were important to me go.The day after my birthday he was transfered to Whistler for three weeks for the Olympics. When he came home I was cooking him his favorite dinner with ice cream and he said he had to go pack. He was gone for six hours, came home at midnight and said he had to get up early and had to go straight to bed. I asked him where he'd been and he said he'd went to a pub with a gal friend after packing. ......And I just started to sob. Uncontrollably. Shaking. Everything inside me told me he would go have so much fun he wouldn't be back. He held me but was angry at me for stealing his sleep.He left the next morning and didn't call for days. When I called him on Valentine's day he told me he'd been angry at me. He wouldn't answer my texts and wouldn't call me. When I called him he just sounded disappointed.... "Oh...... hey."After two weeks of living this way someone told me he had been bragging to them about a new girl he'd found and told them it was ok because we had an open relationship. Looking back now I feel like this person had their motives, but I will never know. I called my boyfriend to ask him about this. He told me he was busy with clients and hung up. I texted requesting he call me.... he never did. So the next day I opened an email and just wrote.... and a lot of pain came out. I am not an angry person. I almost NEVER lose my temper. We'd never had a single fight. But I wrote him in anger and told him how hurt I was at length, told him I felt lied to, betrayed. I told him I felt like the only reason he hadn't broken up with me was because he must still need something. I guess I said some pretty hurtful things. But in the end I told him I wanted to make things better and that I loved him more than anyone.He called me almost immediately. He told me he'd never cheated on me. I dropped it and just asked him about how things were going, just being so happy to hear from him.Two days later I went up to Whistler to see him and he broke up with me. He told me he didn't need all this drama. Said I made a big stupid deal out of nothing. He told me I was too smart to have been this emotional. He said I'd pushed him so far away. He told me he'd worked for the Olympics to find a travel job to support us and that it was for us. He told me I must just be this way. He said he didn't want to share his life with someone who didn't support him. He said he wanted me to be happy for him. And he told me he didn't want to bend his life around anyone anymore and since I was in school I couldn't immediately travel. He told me I obviously wasn't strong enough for a long distance relationship. I begged him not to break up with me and apologized for everything. I begged him to let me kiss him goodbye and he said no.He came back to Vancouver for a week and agreed to meet me at midnight on his very last night in town and dragged me to McDonald's because he was hungry. Then just told me what was even the point of sitting down to talk and just turned and walked away. I walked behind him the whole way begging him to see my side and have compassion for why I'd acted the way I'd acted and he just threw everything back in my face, to the point of being nonsensical. I apologized for everything.I begged him for forgiveness and he just told me "I never forgive."Told me he still loved me but that he was angry.After breaking up he came and got his surf board and left town without saying goodbye. He moved to Whistler and had tons of fun skiing and partying. He basically stone walled me for months.I was ripped to shreds. I cried every single day. I could barely eat. I missed him so badly. Suddenly after two months seemed to see how hurt I was and kind of half-assedly tried to be nice. Invited me for coffee but then never made it. Chatted me up on facebook. Told me not to worry because we would always be friends where ever he traveled. And I was just too hurt to respond. I felt like if the cost of being his friend was accepting the blame for everything, as badly as I wanted him in my life in any way, I shouldn't make that compromise out of self respect.In the end I just told him that for someone who felt like no one really cared about anyone and that everyone just cared about themselves and ran away, he'd done exactly the same thing to me. I told him no one had ever hurt me so badly. Now he's removed me from facebook. He's angry and says he doesn't want to talk to me. And again, it's me begging him for forgiveness.I know I made a lot of mistakes. A crying girlfriend is hard to deal with, I know. I know he feels like he just wanted what was best for him and that I've just dumped on him for everything and made him out to be a criminal. I know I should never have assumed his guilt or written him in anger about supposedly cheating on me. I know I made mistakes. And I can see his side of everything.I see my side of things clearly too. The first time you get hurt and feel like you're going to lose the person you love it's horrible. And he never took the time to rebuild my trust or make me feel special in any way. He completely ran from his responsibilities.I just feel so bad. I'm still aching. I feel like in so many ways he was right, and I've made a situation so poison that he hates me now. I miss him so badly.This has been the hardest six months of my life. I had struggled to pick myself up and put my life back together. I am learning the meaning of the words "move on." But I am still filled with a lot of self loathing.So that is why I am here. I don't want to be this pathetic person. I have been learning as I go but I was hoping you all might have some constructive coping strategies for me about dealing with this guilt and this sorrow. Any reflections or insight would be amazing.Thank you all.
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female
reader, darkeyedgirl +, writes (30 September 2010):
darkeyedgirl is verified as being by the original poster of the questionOh, also, after weeks of crying and being told we could meet and talk, I found out he was going to be leaving the country. I begged him to just see me one last time and finally he just said he didn't think it was "such a good idea." I asked him why he'd kept tellig me we could and he said he thought it would just be easier that way. I called my mom and sobbed for an hour. She wrote him an angry letter of her own and told him she thought it was morally wrong to do this to someone, and said she thought he had less compassion than a Nazi. He was livid.
If there is anything I really DO feel horrible about it's this. It must be what a divorce feels like, when everything just turns to hate and badness and the fight gets dirty.
It gave him something to throw back at me for sure and he said that with that he'd OBVIOUSLY made the right choice.
It makes me feel like maybe I am a wrathful person if I learned it from my mother. It makes me feel like he has a far better case, because no one should have to take abuse like that.
Ridiculous though it is, I really feel horrible when I think about that part and I know when he looks back on our six months, it's not going to be the incredible times we had or all the ways I tried to give to him, it will be the word "Nazi."
A
reader, anonymous, writes (30 September 2010): Okay WHAT THE F**K? How can you not see what is happening here? You did absolutely nothing wrong. NOTHING!
Not one single thing in your story that you did was in any way wrong at all. The only thing you did wrong was fall for all this absolute douchebags, lies, deflected blame and mind games. Let me make this clear to you he is an absolute asshole, everything that went wrong was his doing and you love him so much you let him turn every single little thing back on you and now he has you messed up blaming yourself.
Reread what you wrote, change Vancouver to Denver, Olympics to rodeo, whistler to rockys and then reread it from an outside perspective. Really, I just don't understand how you can blame yourself for any of this. You can blame yourself for not seeing the person he is sooner, you can blame yourself for believing his bullshit, you can blame yourself for allowing him to emotionally abuse you for so long and you can blame yourself for getting involved with an emotionally retarded, mentally deficient complete prick of a man. But only for a little while can you blame yourself for those things.
None of the things he got angry with you for are reasons to get angry at all. NONE! He has you turned from a smiling happy confident woman into a quivering mess of self blame. This isn't you, you didn't just wake up and become that, it wasn't in you all along, you're not some crazed psycho like he tries to have you believe, you're a woman in love with a guy that has cheated on you, walked out on you, told your worthless, told you your crazy, at every turn has emotionally abused you to the point where you don't even know who you are anymore. Who do you think is to blame for that? HIM!!!
Wake up and smell the coffee Darkeyedgirl, him leaving was the without doubt the best thing that has happened to you in your life. Him blocking you on facebook is the second best thing.
He spent his time out partying and did nothing to ease your mind, he showed absolutley no respect for you, he kissed another girl.He definitely cheated on you on Whistler by the way. His reaction is absolute proof of that. You know if my girlfriend came to visit me at work even if it was to check up on me, I'd be delighted I wouldn't turn around and make myself look like some angel by emotionally blackmailing her with some absolute bullshit about doing this for her. What was he doing for you? Nothing, he was sleeping around partying, laughing at you behind your back and loving that every time he did something wrong he could just everything back around on you and you believed him.
Remember those things I said you could blame yourself for, well time to stop, you can only blame yourself for those for as long as it took you to get from that part of my post to this. Look love is not blind, love is more of an ostrich. You see what's happening but you don't want to believe it, you hope so much you're wrong that you're willing to ignore certain small things. The problem with that lies with amount of little things you let go. The signs you saw but ignored.
This guy was a weirdo from the start, it was very obvious from the beginning of your post that this guy had severe emotional issues, you shouldn't have gone anywhere near him. The red flags were all there. Any guy who will use sympathy as the foundation for a relationship is messed up. Any man or woman that gives you some sob story about abandonment and abuse, who doesn't trust people, who thinks everyone just walks away. Is fucked in the head and in no state to maintain a healthy relationship, you learned that the hard way.
I suffered some horrendous emotional and physical abuse as a child, I too have had people walk away from me, you know what the difference is? I will own up to my flaws some of those people walked away because of me others because of them for various reasons, but I always just saw it as not meant to be. I will assign blame equally and where it is necessary but not for long. I'm never bitter and resentful about how things happened, I'm not even bitter or resentful for my childhood, I'm simply thankful for who it has made me. You need to understand people that get abandoned by people a lot, are themselves to blame for that. It's a pattern of behaviour, not everyone they've ever met can possibly have been a bad person that's a given so it must be them right?
Every single detail in your question is evidence of his systematic emotional abuse of you. The guy is simply sick in the head, he's become the person that he was raised to be.
He's selfish, egotistical, abusive, doesn't take the blame for anything, makes others blame themselves for the things he's done, and no point in your question did he ever consider your feelings, it's all about him.
You want a coping strategy for guilt? The best strategy is to assign the blame to the person that is to blame, which is him. He used and abused you and you still think he was somehow right about you. It's not pathetic to feel that way by the way, he's had a lifetime of practice in this and he learned from the best he did this over the long term and he has shattered you and your perception of you.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, figure this out, you really are not the person he has you believing you are. You're that smiling strong confident woman you always were, you've just been fooled, tricked, manipulated for so long the lines are blurred. He's completely fucking wrong! Everything he said and did were manipulations.
You want a coping method for sorrow? Time is the best but switching it to anger for a little while too helps, because frankly I have no idea how you can't be angry at him. That should be your strongest emotion now. You're free of this psychos mind games and craziness. Do whatever you can to make sure every single little reminder of him, photos, presents, clothes, every single little thing is burned or destroyed. Make sure he never comes back into your life to poison it the way he has done for so long now.
Be happy because you're free of this prick and remember you had very good and valid reasons for everything you did you do not deserve to blame yourself for anything.
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