Dear aphroitte1:

“something feels very strange because his words are that I am the one for him but we can’t be together in any way“- reads to me that the first part, that you are “the one for him” is a lie, that he didn’t mean it. I am sorry for suggesting this.. but people do say things they don’t mean, especially when breaking up with someone.. so that the one broken up with doesn’t get angry.. you know, to soften the blow.

anita

Dear aphroitte1:

I don’t think it’s possible for you to not get hurt by him moving on and having another girlfriend. I am guessing that when that happens you will be hoping he’ll break up with that future girlfriend and get back with you.. and maybe he will, for a while at least.. Better find a man who wants YOU, who really wants you and only you. Can you imagine that.. do you want that?

anita

Dear aphroitte1,

I also understand that it might not be easy for you to let go, because 1) you like him a lot, he feels like a great match, even soul mate, and 2) you don’t see his behavior as manipulative because you don’t value yourself enough to demand for your relationship to be in the open. He managed to convince you (and his previous girlfriend) to keep your relationship in secret, as if there was something to be embarrassed about. Is there anything embarrassing about you? No! But if you don’t value yourself enough, you’ll agree to such scams and take part in his lie. And even believe that “we can’t be together”, when deep in your heart, you know it’s not right.

Dear aphroitte1,

After all I gave up yesterday because I saw his true colors and I knew that something was very fishy. I don’t feel that it would be possible to stay friends after this. Maybe if we broke it off months ago yes, but now it seems like I saw all the layers that he had been hiding.

Good decision! I am glad you broke up with him (without agreeing to remain friends) because he is just continuing with his excuses.

he openly told me that his ex is still an option in the future because everything would be easier (they can be together without hurting someone else). But that freaks me out because now he seems very selfish : in order not to hurt two friends he will hurt me

Yes, it shows that he doesn’t truly care about you. As I said earlier, I don’t think he is worried about hurting those two people, but rather, he is worried about his reputation – to be viewed as someone who tends to date people in secret. Because, following his logic, one could say that he didn’t want to hurt his best friend (he felt some loyalty towards him), and that’s why he dated you in secret. So I can understand his discomfort about the situation, although if he truly loved you, it could have been solved, it wouldn’t be the first time that people date their best friends’ exes. BUT, how can he explain the fact that he dated his ex in secret? What was the reason for keeping that a secret? Was she another friend’s ex, so that too was a “taboo”?

As for your previous ex coming into the picture and you started feeling stressed when he stopped texting you  – it could be related to abandonment anxiety. Do you feel bad alone and can’t really stay single for a long time? If you need to be in a relationship to feel safe, or to feel loved, or to feel worthy, those could all be the reasons why you’re reacting like this. The thought of being alone causes you stress and anxiety, which probably causes the stomach acid problem.

Anyways I am scared and I don’t like to be like this. Attached to people. I want to be okay to accept and let people go and not to feel this level od anxiety. I really want to be independent.

I hear you. It’s not pleasant to be so attached to people, I know from experience. But I can tell you right off the bat that your anxiety is most probably related to your childhood and the relationship you had with your parents or care-takers. If you felt unsafe or unappreciated in that relationship, if you craved love but never truly received it – that would have influenced your present-day relationships as well. If you’d like to share some more about your adult relationship patterns, or about your childhood, please do, and I’ll try to help.

Dear aphroitte1:

I don’t want to interrupt your current promising communication with TeaK for too long, so this is a supplementary post, if you will, following my re-reading of all your posts on your three threads. I will be quoting from you and commenting, often typing away whatever comes to my mind, and I hope this will be helpful to you somewhat:

In January 2018, at 19, you shared about a boyfriend: “When we met him, everything was beyond perfect. He was exactly the guy I was dreaming“- it is very, very common for teenage girls who were not loved much as children, and who were anxious as children,  to dream about a perfect love with a perfect boy.. to dream a lot about such perfect love. A lack of parental love as children creates an intense thirst for love that expands into the romantic context.

“I always tried to make things right, doing everything so I can prove him that I love him and I want to be with him. I did literally everything… I was always begging for attention“- just like an unloved child tries to make things right, beg for attention, literally doing everything in her power to change an unloving parent to a loving parent, so does the teenage girl and young woman in the romantic context.

“I always bought him presents doing stuff for him, while I had nothing.. I love him so much“- this is how thirsty for love you were ever since you were a child.

In March 2021, at 22, you shared about your current “complicated situation” made complicated by a man within a group of friends, a man with whom you had a secretive intimate/ sexual relationship. Likely, he insisted that his intimate and sexual relationship with you remains a secret because you were not the only person within the group, or associated with the group,  with whom he had such a relationship.

“he says that they were on friendly terms now and everything is okay… saying that I was the perfect girl with every trait that he was searching for in a girl.. (saying) there were no chances for us to be a public relationship because it’s not moral.. and he says that..  and he said maybe.. He told me… he was saying…he kept saying “- I don’t think that he is in the habit of saying and telling you what is true, lying to you instead (intentionally telling you what  he knows to be not true). I imagine he lies to others in the group and elsewhere, hence his demand for secrecy: with secrecy his lies are protected from being exposed.

“before me they were dating secretly, I found out about the dating after we hooked up. And she still doesn’t know anything about me and him dating.. he keeps dating secretly“- other than his words, supported by his ex’s and your secrecy, do you have any reason to believe that the two of them did not hook up at the same time period that you and him hooked up…

“he told me such stuff, romantic“- again, do not assume that anything he tells you is true.

“believing him that we will find a way”– better to not believe a person who is in the habit of lying.

“I have problem now that I don’t know how to stay friends, close (he want that“- can’t be truly close friends with a person who hides the truth and tells you lies. He wants not to have a close friendship with you, but to keep you close so that you don’t expose his lies.

“we felt like we found our soulmates“- You felt that you found your soulmate, and you believed that he felt the same way .. because he told you…

“we were absolutely compatible“- except in the area of telling the truth..

“we have found factors that are not letting us be together. 1… 2…“- these are the factor he stated, and you believed him…

“he says that we are very happy together.. He is very hurt by his decision.. “- so he says.

“I even ask myself if that is the problem or there is something else behind all of this“- something else= lies.

“How do I not get hurt by him moving on and having another girlfriend?“- it will take getting over the hurt of him repeatedly lying to you, and the hurt of him likely hooking up with others in addition to you.

“he openly told me that his ex is still an option in the future because everything would be easier“- when a person habitually lies, not every single thing they say is a lie (that would be impossible). I am guessing that his ex is not really an ex, and that what he means by “everything would be easier”, is that it is getting too difficult for him to keep his lies and secrecy going on and on and on, particularly when you argue with him, confronting him with his lies.

“I started not believing anything he says. Something always felt wrong because his words don’t match his deeds.. I saw his true colors.. very fishy.. I saw all the layers that he had been hiding (Nov 9)“- congratulations! And better that you continue to not believe anything he says.

“I have very serious codependency/emotional attachment issues. I believe so, because when my other ex texted me.. I was able to be rude and not to care, because I now have attention of someone else“-a child unattended to, left alone is a very scared child, and understandably, all alone, she is not selective as to who she wants to take away her alone-ness, who she wants to keep her safe from harm: anyone will do!

For as long as the only someone-there-with-you was your lying “friend”, you did not feel safe enough to admit to yourself that indeed he is “very fishy”. To remain with him and feel relatively safe, you closed your eyes to “his true colors” best you could. But once there is another option, another guy, you feel safe enough, at least for a while, to smell the fishiness and see the true colors of the previous guy.

“when my ex stopped texting today…I’ve started feeling anxious, stressed again. I have this psychosomatic problem with my stomach and I have stomach acid“- this is how a child feels when she finds herself alone, particularly, in a scary situation: scared, anxious.. and anxiousness (fear that goes on and on for too long) harms the body.

“my parents were fighting very bad at one point. There was one night with a very dramatic fight including words like: suicide, divorce, you don’t love me, you don’t need me.. there was dramatic pushing, running, going away with his car and not calling back. Total disaster that escalated“-it was not only one night when disaster escalated, and your fear extended from one night to the next and the next.. which is what anxiety is about. The words you heard your father say that night kept repeating in your head following that night. Nothing scares a child more than watching or hearing violence (or the scary promise of violence) involving a parent.

“I often felt not understood at home. I’ve never had close relationship with my parents and our love language is not physical touch at all. Sometimes, even today if my dad hugs me I don’t feel anything loveable I feel cold and weird in that situation and it bothers me”- scared from one night to the next, there was no one to calm your fear, to quiet your anxiety. When your father hugs you, his hug cannot calm your anxiety because it is his voice that keeps replaying and scaring you. Parents who scared and traumatized a child cannot be the same people to provide comfort (at least not without having the trauma resolved over a long time, such as in the context of family therapy).

My mother touched me “lovingly” in between the times she traumatized me, and like you feeling about your father’s hugs, I too felt “cold and weird” by her touch, and I too was very bothered by it.

“their over protective attitude“- same with my mother’s attitude: she protected me from a few other people, but not from herself.

“I developed OCD“- interesting, following a traumatic fights between my parents, when I was about 5 or 6, I too developed OCD.

“The boy was doing everything to make me happy, he was sincere and he would do literally everything, but I was not attracted to that“- as teenagers and adults, following a troubled childhood, we are attracted to romantic partners who remind us of a parent, and we are driven to make the relationship with them work with the same intensity that we were driven as children to make the relationship with a parent work.

When you met a guy who was sincere and loving toward you were not attracted to him because, being too different from any of your parents, he did not offer you the (retroactive and therefore doomed) opportunity to try again and make a parent (an unloving, insincere and scary parent) love you and keep you safe.

anita