Dear hopeful33:

You are welcome and thank you!

I think what you wrote to him before his last email to you was not his focus at all when he wrote you his email. The fact that you emailed him may have pushed him toward emailing you back when he did, but when he chose the content of his email, I don’t think he had your words in mind. He didn’t think: this is what hopeful33 wants, so I am going to give her the other thing, or anything like that.

I still think he was (and probably still is) under great distress and he composed his email with two goals in mind:
1) To be as kind to you as he could, telling you that you were a gem in his life, showed him the path (from my memory of yesterday).
2) To cognitively, rationally and emotionally, on his part, close the chapter on his relationship with you. In so doing he was going to relieve himself from the great distress that he has been exposed to day after day since he went back to his home country, and proceed with his mother/ culture plan for him (country of residence, career choice, arranged marriage- a whole different life, a new chapter).

To cognitively close the chapter on what he had with you, he put into practice the contribution of the “therapist”- not so to hurt you and not with you as his focus- but to help himself move on.

— So what I see is that you have been a bit too focused on your end of things, misunderstanding that email and the whole situation to some degree all along. Once he was back in his home country, it was hardly about you, what happened. It would have taken a very exceptional man to not roll over to the pressure. You had a man’s mother against you. If that was not enough, you had a whole culture on her side.

There have been quite a few threads on this website submitted by people in or affected by arranged marriages and it hasn’t been a pretty sight. Not at all. I can tell you stories.. and they are all here on the record.

Back to the I-am-unlovable-tree and the forest in this relationship: lots of the trees in the forest are His mother/ his culture/ his country and those trees took over. There is one tree, the I-am-lovable-tree that I would like you to focus on. When you relaxed with that man; when you finally relaxed into believing he loved you, it was because he did. Don’t let his mother, his culture and him rolling over to the great pressure he was under take that away from you.

He loved you. There is no other way to explain the pressure- it was proportional to how attached he was to you, how he loved you. Take that in, relax into it again. You were loved; he loved you.

And you can and will be loved again. Your next boyfriend (I don’t know if you are seeing someone at any capacity)- your next boyfriend, who may be your partner in life- will be as decent as that man was but of course, not one in a similar circumstance to his. Plans in this regard?

anita