Dear Lauren:

You wrote: “I can’t seem to get over the intense infatuation I felt for this man. I miss the caring, attentive, wonderful man he was to me”-

You found out that he is not a “caring, attentive, wonderful man” – your rational mind found that out, but your emotional mind didn’t catch on to that understanding yet. It is not unusual.

The healing process is about bringing our emotional understanding and our rational understanding to a meeting place. You suggested in the title of your thread that he is not real. Your perception of him was a misperception. But what is real is that you need the kind of a man you thought he was. The information, the learning you can gather from this experience is: what kind of a man you need. Your intense infatuation to this man is proportional to the match between what you need and who you thought he was.

You can take notes, if you so choose, about who you thought he was, as a template to what you will be looking for in a future boyfriend. Processing that information, getting more clarity about what you are looking for, will make a future evaluation of a man more likely to be accurate (over a longer time of evaluation of the man, with less assumptions and more gathering of information, a more objective process).

This very learning can speed up your healing process.

anita