Dear Emma,

I am not judging you – you fell in love with this guy even before you knew he was in a relationship, and when you found out, you were already deep in, and you fell for his story: that he’s unhappy with his girlfriend, that she’s controlling, suffocating him, very jealous, and that he wants out. You didn’t see him as a cheater (even though he was lying to you for the first 3 months of your relationship) but you saw him as a victim: “It reminded me of a toxic relationship I was in during my younger days and I emphatized with his plight“.

You wanted him so badly (“I was too emotionally invested and head over heels in love with him.“), that it blinded you to everything else. Even when he wanted to break up with you, it never really lasted because 1) he would reach out to you and you’d accept him back, and 2) he would “reconsider his decision when we meet up for closure and talk things out”. Which tells me that you might have persuaded him not to leave you? That your “closures” would lead to rekindling the relationship, even though he, at least in theory, wanted to end it?

What makes me say this is that after your last breakup, you couldn’t accept it – you texted him and called him from different phone numbers, and you also turned up at his place and demanded explanations and closure. You didn’t want to let him go, you couldn’t believe that he can simply discard you from one day to the other, “like yesterday’s garbage”.

It seems to me you’ve developed a very strong attachment to him. You desperately wanted to be with him, and it seems like you believed your love (between him and you) was real, while theirs was a fake and a lie. You fought for your “true love” passionately – both when he tried to break up with you in the past, and now, when he did break up for good, as it seems.

Am I seeing this right?

It can very well be that their love still isn’t real and is burdened by many things, and that their new-found happiness is fake. But you would need to understand that what you had wasn’t “true love” either, since he was lying to you, and then both of you were lying to her. When there is dishonesty involved, and it’s going on for quite a long time, it cannot be true love. It was infatuation on your part, and it’s what made you react so strongly and passionately, believing you’ve got the real thing.

What do you think about what I’ve just said? Does it resonate?