Dear hopeful33:

I am sure the “reported for inappropriate content” is a mistake someone made. I read your whole post and it is totally appropriate.

You asked for help seeing the forest because you recently focus again on a particular tree in that forest (the I-am-unlovable tree).

When you focus on that tree, as I have been the great majority of my life, you don’t see much elsewhere. You definitely don’t see much of him. You are simply too scared and too desperate.

Obviously his mother applied pressure on him to not get together with you and instead to marry a woman from their culture and country. This is most likely. The fact that she contacted you on skype, was it? means that she was scared to lose her son to you/ different culture. She was scared because he was serious about making a life with you. I say he was serious because he wouldn’t have told her about you, about plans to move in with you if he didn’t intend to do those things.

The last email he wrote to you, well, there might be some truth in it, not the whole truth. He probably struggled a lot and did a lot of thinking, had a lot of turmoil. Maybe he was trying to convince himself that he didn’t love you that much after all; tried to convince himself of that so to make it easier for himself to move on and … be with another woman. People use a lot of “convenient thinking” so to feel better about an undesirable situation, twist the truth some to make life more bearable.

When he was in a relationship with you and there were difficulties, your jealousy, for one, the questions… at times he probably thought to himself: maybe I should end this relationship, and then maybe he felt guilty, thinking something like: if I end the relationship, she will be so hurt because of her father leaving her.

Long time after, in his country, struggling, his mother pressuring him, he remembered that guilt he felt at a moment or two, and … that was “the tree” he focused on. So a bit of the truth, far from all of it.

Most likely, he too had plenty of insecurities- and his insecurities are the trees you didn’t see because you focused on the I-am-unlovable tree. He may have had the same kind of tree.

When we feel unlovable, we want proof. We want to be the Only One, past and present. We want to erase the man’s past of any other woman and be The One and Only. This is not doable, impossible, unrealistic. This is why it is a good idea for you to attend psychotherapy with a competent, caring therapist, so to unearth and examine your hurt from childhood, your hurt for having been unloved then and process that hurt so it doesn’t hold you hostage.

Once you heal, you will find out what I found out: that when a man loves you, when a person loves you, it is because he or she is a loving person, not that the loved one is worth that love. We are all worthy of love, all born lovable. When a parent doesn’t love us (as often is the case) we figure we were not worthy of their love. Reality is the parent was not a loving person. Nothing to do with who we are.

Does this help?

anita