Dear laelithia:

I read all your post thoroughly.

On may 11 he told you that he was “taking it slow with this new woman, and not rushing into things like he did with (you)”- seven days later he is already with a new woman. Nonetheless, I changed my mind about him: I think he truly loved you, in the context of  those 13 days spent together and a month or so total. I don’t think he tried to fool you or lied to you and therefore, what you perceived was truly happening. Thing is, he is truly loving to a series of “the one”(s) and you are no longer “the one”, and most likely, neither is the current “one”.

Now to the more important part of my understanding, I will be quoting you, not necessarily in order, and commenting.

What happened is that “he was able to truly get (you) to believe” that you are loved (and you were).

“He was looking me in the eyes lovingly saying he would never want another woman other than me…how excited he was to be with me…I was special…one of a kind… the one for him…that he was 100% mine, that he didn’t even care about other women anymore… that he loved every part of me, that he felt we were always meant to be, that he had never felt this way about anyone before”

He said those things with emotion and so, he was convincing. You believed him (“convincing me I was special…I can’t get over how convincing he was…he was able to truly get me to believe…I just can’t shake how sincere he seemed then”).

Again: he didn’t only say things to you, he said them with emotion, and therefore, with conviction. But he didn’t only say those things to you convincingly, he also behaved in ways that gave his words power (“all the time he spent making sure I was feeling good and positive and checking in on me throughout the day. He remembered little details about my life, he seemed genuinely interested”)

The key sentences in your posts are: “I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so safe with someone… I’ve never had someone pay that close attention to me and my needs before” and “I have never felt so intimately connected to someone before”-

And that includes in your relationship with your parents, as a child. You didn’t get the attention you needed and you craved it. You weren’t made to feel special and you craved it. You finally got it, in these 13 days, in person, and total one month or so. It was intoxicating: the craving satiated.

I am thinking that the reason that seven years relationship you had before was boring to you is because the craving was not satiated.

Of course you wanted more of it, but there is none, not from him. You wrote: “I just don’t want to believe the awful truth”- I think that the awful truth is not about the guy lying and pretending (I believe he was sincere, in the context I mentioned above). I think that the awful truth is how unattended to you were as a child, how not-special you felt. The intensity of your craving to feel special and attended to is proportional to how un-special and unattended to you were as a child.

You wrote of late: “I’m starting to feel like this really has nothing to do with him at all, but something to do with myself”- I agree.

anita