Dear Lea:

It is interesting, how you posted almost exclusively about this young man, and all along you were talking about yourself. Not unusual, to see ourselves in someone else, and to focus on that someone else, when all along we are looking for a missing part of ourselves.

The connection that you feel to him is a connection that you feel to the  part of you that you lost and haven’t quite found yet, still needing to retrieve her and make her part of you.

“Usually people qualify me as the ‘perfect little daughter, wifey material'”, you put these words in quotation marks because you gave up an important part of your true self so to become a “perfect little daughter” for your mother. The entirety of your true self displeased your mother, so you had to give part of you up, and become a “perfect little daughter”.

Your mother was/ is “bossy, strict, old-school” mother (“his mother is a bit similar to mine bossy, strict, old school”). At one point, you rebelled against her, but not as Lea, but as Antifa: an anti-fascist political movement.

The definition of fascism includes words such as authoritarian, dictatorial, forcible suppression of opposition. Antifa is an anti-fascist political movement. You didn’t rebel against your mother’s personal version of fascism: being bossy, strict, authoritarian, dictatorial mother who suppressed the opposition aka a significant part of your true self that inconvenienced her. You rebelled against political fascism.

You shared that you “don’t have a real father’s figure” and that you therefore looked for a father substitute in men who were in average between 5 and 11 years older than you. I think that your mother, having been present and dictatorial in your life, had way more power over your life choices than the absence of a father.

anita