Dear Sunset:

Your resolution expressed in your last two lines, acknowledging her “right to decide what she wants to do for herself & give her the opportunity to get to know him better if she feels that strong about him” makes sense to me, seems right.

You wrote earlier in your last post: “I had some lovely caring people with me.  However this guy believed I was selfish & stated that I was ‘not the only one to be tired and emotional’ & that I was all about myself”-

It would have been a nice world if everyone in it was “lovely caring people”. Unfortunately this is not the world we live in. What happens so very often is that a person is hurt, let’s say, this man was hurt by his parents. Next he hurts another person, passing on the hurting. This is, unfortunately, business as usual. And this seems like what happened here.

When he stated that you are “not the only one to be tired and emotional”- reads to me that his parent/s accused him, when he was a child, of being … tired and emotional, disapproved of him crying, or expressing hurt in any way. When you were emotional, you behaved in the way that was unjustly denied in his early life, causing him understandable hurt and anger. Anger at this parents. It is that anger that he projected at you, as if you were his parents denying him his right to act emotionally.

I hope you recover from this experience. Such an experience, in one form or another, is likely to happen again. Be prepared: people’s behaviors with you, often enough, are not about you, not something you caused, but something established in their minds long before they met you.

anita