Dear Kat:

I went back to read your previous threads, thinking it may help- it is an opportunity, when we look back at our lives, to learn from past experience so to proceed to make better choices and live a better life. I don’t know if I will come across such an opportunity as I proceed with this post, but we’ll see.

December 2014, you were about 22 at that time, you shared that a year before (at 21) you were “in a loving long term relationship” with “big plans to move abroad together”. He broke up with you “without warning” and you were devastated. A week later he wanted to get back together but you refused. You then moved abroad alone, to Spain, , got a “great friend group” there and met a nice guy who wasn’t ready for a committed, monogamous relationship, and that was a problem because the two of you were “monogamous relationship types of people”.

A year later, December 2015, you were about 23, you wrote about a male friend you had for ten years, mostly long distance, since you were about 13. He helped you with the ending of your long term relationship 2013-14, and you “developed feelings for him”. even though he was very attentive to you, has told you in the past that he was attracted to you “physically  and mentally”, and was unhappy with his then troubled relationship of two years with another woman, he rejected your romantic interest in him and said that his relationship with “was platonic only”. You felt crushed and took it very hard, you wrote that it affected your self esteem negatively.

February- April 2019, three years later, about 26 at the time, you wrote about a guy you dated for three months, a guy with whom you “connected deeply &.. felt closer to him than” to your ex boyfriend.

This man “really struggled with the intimate side of the relationship”, told you that he has Asperger’s, and that he suffered from depression and anxiety. He broke up with you as a boyfriend and asked to be your friend. You agreed and he proceeded to be an attentive, caring friend, but you missed the intimate part of the relationship and struggled, “still having loving feelings toward him every so often.

“A part of me feels.. like I’m not good enough”, you wrote. You wanted to end the friendship but you were afraid to lose him completely, something that was “almost too much to bear”. At one point you told him that you wanted the two of you “to give the romantic connection a chance”, and he agreed.

“I feel much calmer and better about things and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens, day by day”, you wrote.

June 2019, two months later, you shared that you were considering moving to where this man was living, a new country. You’ve been “learning the language.. practicing (it) together every week”, and you booked a trip to visit him there “with the notion that I would be exploring his city to see if I could envision living there”.  What happened next is that you visited him, the two of  you were romantically and physically intimate during the visit, but soon he told you: “this is getting too serious. I’m not ready. I just want ‘casual'”, and he asked you for an open relationship, telling you that he has already been in a date with another woman. You refused the offer, “said goodbye and have gone no contact”.

October 2019, a few months later (at 27), you shared that you left Spain for financial reasons in June (the time of your last thread), “came back to the UK to recover”, to your hometown (“a soulless place”), been unemployed for three months, had 3 interviews, your “family is a wreck trying to cope” with the fact that your grandmother is dying in a hospital, and your mother tells you that you “need to sort my life out before ‘everything will pass you by'”.

You miss your life in Spain and “feeling bitterly lonely.. crying as though I’m suffering a bereavement… feel life isn’t worth living”. You are a writer, half way through a novel.

My thoughts: this “soulless place”, your family, your hometown is clearly depressing to you. There is a long history of lack of bonding there, lack of intimate connection with family and strangers alike, in this soulless place.

In the context of your friend/ romantic relationships with men, seems to me, generally, that you viewed the connection as more intimate than they actually were, viewed the men as more loving than they actually were,  because of the vacuum that was your growing up experience at home. In comparison to that vacuum, that emptiness, that lack- a little intimacy felt like a whole lot, in comparison.

I wonder if this input from me can possibly be of any help to you.

anita