Dear Tineoidea,

thank you for sharing about your childhood. It hasn’t been easy for you, you were exposed to multiple stressors: frequent moving, poverty and starvation, your father betraying your mother and leaving when you were just a toddler, humiliation and abuse by your father’s family, including their attempt to kill you and your mother (?!) It was a very harsh childhood, and I am sorry you had to go through all that.

I basically spent them growing up online, which to me was a good way to escape the pain of daily life, make actual long-term friendships and so on.

Have you met your former friend also online, or you knew him in person?

What comes to mind is that loyalty might be important to you because your father wasn’t loyal to either you or your mother, and you didn’t want to be like him. And constantly moving didn’t allow you to form deep bonds with people, so you craved for loyal, long-term friendships, for people who would be there for you through thick and thin and wouldn’t abandon you. And so you ended up with your former friend, who truly was “loyal”, but to the point of possessing you and not letting you breathe. So his loyalty was distorted – but at least he never abandoned you… and you appreciated it.

What do you think? Would you say this is true?