Dear Rhaenys:

You are welcome. I can see in your most recent post how important it is for you to get better, to heal, to change, and to improve: “I’m getting better..  still gave some healing to do… have to change my behavior.. I’m improving”.

It is encouraging to read from a person with such ambitions. But as I studied your posts this morning for over two hours, I now believe that a big part of what you want to change and improve about yourself does not require change and improvement: I believe that you carry guilt that does not belong to you, that you take responsibility for what you are not responsible for, that you believe that there is something bad or inadequate about you, a belief that is not true.

“He was really nice to me”, you wrote about the second boyfriend who broke up with you by sending you a message. A “really nice” guy doesn’t break up with a woman over a message.

About your third boyfriend, you wrote: “He was really nice, really kind… he was still really kind and nice.. Last 2 months, I couldn’t recognize him. He, a person who always put me first and was always so nice and patient and kind with me, suddenly put other things before me”-

– I think that you magnified each man’s niceness and kindness so much that your image  of each man was too far from who he really was. I imagine that each man was nice and kind at times because there is no way for a man (in the great majority of cases) to get a girlfriend without smiling to the woman, without saying nice things to her, without taking her on a date, without performing nice and kind gestures to the woman.

I believe that you took those nice gestures and words to mean that the men were genuinely nice and kind, and they were not. The one who was overly nice and kind was you, not them (regarding 3rd boyfriend): “I did put him first, I never went with my friends instead of him.. I still helped him with his exams.. I did not complain.. he blamed me for a lot of stuff.. I was guilty.. did not have an opportunity to say I’m sorry and try to change that”-

– I think that he blamed you and you were to eager to believe that you were guilty. But you were not guilty with this man, nothing for you to apologize to him for. You were a saint to him. You didn’t need to change into more of a saint!

More of you being a saint to him: “I helped him with college a lot, I have him my laptop so he can go in the apartment and prepare in quiet, and I even went there and supported him during most of his online exams, I made that a priority”.

On the other hand, he was not at all a saint to you, not at all the really-nice-really-kind image you had of him: “We went on dates, and he wanted to stay in the car and be intimate after midnight, I needed a sleep and rest. He even had an apartment, but he never proposed to go there even, maybe sleep together and be intimate in the morning- he would left me home and hang  out with friend”-

– he was a selfish young college student, selfish and inconsiderate of his unselfish, overly considerate, saintly girlfriend.

“All my relationships ended with my partners going distant and breaking up with me”- in real life, saints don’t do well, they are not appreciated by most people.

“I’m aware that I wanted a boyfriend in my life for a long time, as a kind of a ‘savior’.. I felt that for years.. I can’t be happy without (a partner), and that if I have a partner everything will be ok”- so you see the “partner” as a saint and a savior, you magnify his kind words and gestures to the point of seeing him as the savior that you need.

If you want to, share with me how life was for you as a child, how desperately you needed a savior then.

anita