Dear Caz:

You shared that sometime mid February this year, you ended a 1.5 years relationship. Seven months into the relationship, winter 2019, he told you, “he wasn’t sure he could stay with me if I didn’t lose weight”, the 5-6 pounds you put on during the first seven months of the relationship plus more weight. He also criticized how you dressed, being “very vocal when I wore something he didn’t like and would expect me to stop wearing it even if I liked it because ‘that’s what people in relationships do for each other”. In addition to this, in the beginning of the relationship, he wasn’t okay with you having an evening alone, without him. He expected you to text and call him very often. When you were with a friend, for example, and you didn’t reply to his text quickly, he would send you a message like: “not feeling the love”, with an lol or an emoji. In total you declined to have sex with him three time in 1.5 years or so, he “would throw tantrums”. When you told him how bad his tantrums over the issue of sex made you feel, he told you: “I know it’s wrong. I don’t need you to tell me”. At times, when you were in the bathroom, “he would just walk in and talk to me”, even though you asked him not to.

Now that you understandably ended this relationship, (and even though you understand rationally it was the right choice),  you are struggling because you “miss him terribly because he could be so wonderful and loving”, and you believe that at the beginning he put you on a pedestal and then got disappointed  because you “couldn’t live up to whatever his expectations” he had of you.

My input: first, emotions have their own logic- when you hurt a lot,  you are hurting, and logic will not take the pain away.

The fact that you miss him terribly does not mean that you made the wrong choice. All these things are true: he was loving and kind to you, and you had great times with him, and he was inconsiderate, disrespectful, demanding and cruel, and you did the right choice ending it, and you miss him. All these are true and exist together, neither one contradicts the other.

You may very well be correct in your understanding that at the beginning of the relationship he put you up on a pedestal and then he got disappointed. But that didn’t happen because you were not good enough as a woman and person, but because his expectations were probably unrealistically and fictionally high: any woman that he will put on such a pedestal will disappoint him.

If he was never loving toward you, if you didn’t enjoy intimate time with him=> you wouldn’t miss him now. If he wasn’t repeatedly inconsiderate, disrespectful, demanding and cruel to you=> you wouldn’t have ended the relationship.

No matter how kind he was to you in the beginning, or in between his unkind times, he couldn’t make up for his disrespect and cruelty because disrespect and/or cruelty void the love. If you went back with him, you may have moments when you will enjoy being with him, moments when you forget the cruelty, but those would be moments only, the suffering will take over sooner than later.

Do post again, anytime you want to.

anita