Good Morning Susan,

I wanted to start by saying this: you’re not crazy. Your feelings are warranted and very real to you. These are not feelings of a crazy person! These are feelings of someone who is hurt and wants answers.

I read the whole chain, the comments between you and Anita, and I also found myself wondering if there must be something else going on his life. Some other type of crisis he needs to figure out on his own. It doesnt sound like he has only shut down from you, but has also shut down from family and friends. Clearly the breakup is painful for him, but I think there is something else there. Something else he is trying to understand about himself. I would bet anything that he is not entirely sure why he broke up either. He fought for a long time, and I think something must have made him crash. Something in his own life back home. Something you had control over.

I know this next piece of advice is significantly easier said than done, but here are my two cents. I think you need to decide for yourself that this is over. Stop holding out hope that it may work out because he’s not communicating and you will simply be left miserable with a mind swimming of unanswered questions. It may be easier to move forward in life if you make the choice for yourself. It’s possible he will come back later in life with answers, as so many in difficult situations do, but the only way that can happen is with a complete break. In my experience, the tighter you try to hold on to someone who is suffering, the more they push away. I want to give you an example of my own life.

I once dated someone who I was madly in love with. We were so compatible and everything seemed wonderful, but all of a sudden one day he changed. He became distant and accusatory. I had no idea what had changed in his life, and he was too proud to admit it to me. All I knew is that he was treating me differently, out of the blue, for reasons I could not understand. One day, seemingly out of nowhere, he accused me of cheating on him, and shortly after broke up with me. He then told me he was too depressed about circumstances in his own life to bring pleasure to another person. I was heart-broken, upset, and could not understand why he wouldnt let me work through this with him. So, I left him alone. After some time he came back and asked for a second chance.

My point here is not that he came back, but that the break happened over something that was not in my control. The point is, sometimes you just have to let people figure it out. Yes, he told you a piece of it was your controlling nature, but this had been happening since the beginning, and he decided it bothered him at a very strange time: right as things were about to finally move forward. My hypothesis is that there is some kind of commitment issue there. Some fear of the relationship becoming a huge scary reality.

I hope this helps. I know how hard these things can be and I’m rooting for you 🙂