Dear Annie:

I re-read your previous threads regarding this relationship that ended a couple of months ago. The first thread is from September 2017. In that thread you wrote:

“Recently I’ve been feeling jealous and envious of my boyfriend’s social life. It just seems he meets the right kind of people and hit things off well, while for me it’s hard to meet people.. We talked into his old dance building and saw some people who  know him and were happy to see him… In class, we had to do measurement lab and I was hoping to work with him alone, but he ended up  working and talking mostly with another guy in class. I felt lonely because again I had no other friend and it just seems he already made a new friend there. After class, we went to my house and I still felt upset… His coworkers and manager are always nice to him, giving him free food every break time.. I do feel a  little jealous of him. It just seems he has a lot of people there for him while I don’t”-

– you see: you were angry at him for talking to a guy he just met and jealous of him because his co workers and manager were nice to him two years ago. Fast forward to your most recent post, regarding friends he knows for a longer time: “They would constantly say/ask him questions like ‘does she not like us?’ Because I tend to be a quiet person”-

– not because you tend to be a quiet person, but because you tend to be jealous of your boyfriend for having anyone nice and friendly to him, and you get angry when that happens. It is true that you didn’t like his friends.

Two years ago, you wrote: “Sometimes I’m afraid of losing him because how I am… I have a big reaction to something most people find small or insignificant.. We talked about this many times before and thought about how to deal with it but when I get like this, sometimes it’s like we forget we had that conversation… We were fine in the beginning but after almost a year we started fighting a lot. He told me sometimes when I’m like this it’s hard to be around me”.

Like you feared, you did lose him because of your ongoing jealousy and anger. April 2019, your relationship with him was “emotionally distant”, the relationship by that point was “on and off”, you spent a little time together, “once a week”, and “When we do spend time together, we would have sex and then he sleeps… We hardly ever talk to each other anymore”- the relationship was on its way to the ending.

The reason the relationship ended was not his friends were bad people who said bad things about you. The reason it ended is that you experienced valid jealousy and anger when you were a child, month after month, year after year, as “growing up I did feel a lot of jealousy and envy towards my younger sibling because everyone gave her more attention and care and I felt I lacked affection from them… parents, grandparents, and parents’ friends.. would compare me to my younger sister”.

Your parents and the others really did give your sister way more attention and care than they gave you. It wasn’t fair and you felt intense hurt and anger. Fast forward, you kept feeling that same hurt and same anger in the context  of your relationship with your boyfriend. That led to fights and distance and he eventually broke up with you.

It is very uncomfortable for you,  isn’t it, to think of your childhood experience and you prefer, don’t  you, to lay the blame on your ex boyfriend’s friends. But if you don’t address your childhood experience and resolve- over time and work- that hurt and anger, you will continue to re-experience it with any man you get involved with.

(The only exception may be if you lived on an island with a boyfriend, only the two  of you, and if on that island he would never think or talk about any person who was nice to him before ending up on the island).

anita