Hello all,

I’ve lurked a bit and seen some great advice and I guess I just want reassurance.

My gf of 8 months and I broke up a few weeks ago. I recognize it is a short relationship compared to what most people on here have had. But it was my very first. She is a close friend of my best friend who I moved across the country to live with.

I have had some pretty strong attachment issues that led to me being unable to have intimacy with anyone. From the beginning my friends told me she was a bit unstable, but I was so overjoyed to like someone and at the slight possible possibility that I could actually experience a relationship.

It was quite the saga at the beginning because my friend didn’t want us to be together and Covid hit and she didn’t want me to be exposed to her. This caused drama. But it happened anyway. I was overjoyed. Cannot overstate how happy I was to finally be with someone I was so in love with.

To cut it short, the whole way through was a roller coaster. She is very sensitive and I spent a lot of time managing her moods and anchoring her. At the same time I had a lot of anxiety and stress so I was trying to get a hold of myself. I was processing a lot of stuff, including coming to terms with probably being lesbian.

I wanted the intimacy so bad. Honestly not to be crass, but most of the time I just wanted to copulate like bunny rabbits. I was addicted to the intimacy, to *me* finally having someone that I was highly attracted to, someone I met in real life through friends. Someone I could show off proudly. Someone I could have fun with. Someone who liked me as much as I liked her. We had a really deep connection in a lot of ways, and really felt like we understood each other. We both wanted to heal and become healers. The thing is I had been working on myself through therapies for 4 years and she had barely started.

But the roller coaster was exhausting. I kept waiting for us to get to a point where things were calm and stable and we could just flow. But it was ever elusive. She was not comfortable in her body. My therapist pointed out that the pattern of me being an anchor in order to get connection was a mirror of my childhood with my dysregulated mom.

Sometimes I looked up and was a bit disgusted to see how similar she is to my mom in certain ways. As time went on she lashed out at me increasingly. I did everything in my power to be a Buddha and remain grounded and not get sucked into toxic fighting. Finally one day she reacted so hard to a difference in ideological belief that she was hitting herself and trying to cut herself with scissors. She screamed so loudly and kicked me. She said she was gonna kill herself because I had “harmed” her by having this ideological difference on a belief that she was clinging to, and i really didn’t like.

After that I felt like we had tried everything to make this work and had hit a wall. We had talked about this being a lifelong partnership which is what I wanted even though I was a bit nervous to only have one relationship in my life.

I told her we should probably separate because it just wasn’t fitting. We did, and no contacted for a bit. Then I got lonely and reached out to her, then she showed up at my house, I told her at that point we should be friends for now and who knows about the future. Then I caved and emailed her asking if we could make it work. She didn’t respond for a week and in that time I had the most peace I had had in a while and realized it was better to just move on. I told her this and she didn’t respond again. Earlier this week she contacted me about exchanging stuff. We met at a park and did it and then went for a walk. We had a really nice time honestly. I felt powerful and very drawn to her. We really exerted ourselves not to hook up or be intimate, but somehow succeeded. I got home and felt so lonely and craving intimacy. I felt so guilty about this ideological opinion I had and maybe I was wrong and was harming her. I did a lot of research and was like “The world is mysterious but I have a lot of legitimate points on this issue.” A couple days later I got lonely again and texted her if she wanted to have a calm, deeper discussion about this issue, if she felt up to it. She called me and was asking me “why” I wanted to talk about it. I told her for mutual exploration and understanding. She kept saying I was attacking her and she had to defend herself. For the next hour she came at me and yelled at me and told me off and didn’t listen. She was very much in a defense mode. I kept trying to calm her down and tell her I wasn’t attacking her. I just sat there being like “I’m fine I’m not affected” while she yelled at me.

It honestly reminded me of when I would get yelled at as a kid and I would just dissociate. I started to ask myself “why do I keep walking into this?” After the call I got really depressed and got high and curled up in my bed and fell asleep. When I woke up several hours later she had called me and left me a message saying she missed being around me and loved me and I’m an important person in her life. She apologized for some of the things she said but said “some things I think you needed to hear”. This pissed me off because I don’t know what exactly she thought I needed to hear, I already knew most of the stuff she told me, and she could have told me in a totally different way.

The whole energy of the message felt toxic and wrong on a gut level, I felt like if we continued her acting like this would be the new normal and I would get sucked in as well to the bickering. Just like in my upbringing. I texted her back saying I didn’t get anything positive out of it, and that for us “I love you” seemed to come up the most from a place of fear. She just said “ok” and we haven’t talked.

ive been missing her really bad. She has so much potential to be an amazing partner. Feeling depressed and no energy. Worried that it will be forever before I find someone else who I like that much. Feeling like I’ll never be able to to have a healthy relationship since I have attachment insecurities and a savior complex. Feeling cheated in a way: that I never got the intimacy and stability that I wanted so badly from her. Missing all the good parts.

anyway I know my case seems cut and dried but I feel so shitty so any reaffirmation that this is the right thing will be appreciated