Dear Milly:

I re-read and studied your posts on this thread. The following quotes are from your three posts here.

First part of my post:

Your high priority goal is “to experience a warm, stable, and loving relationship with a wonderful guy… to experience true love and know what it feels like to be loved back.”

You wrote: “I literally did anything for him and always put my own interests behind his… When I was hurt or sad, I hid my feelings from him, worried that he might get upset and stop liking me…I was very careful around him and worried a lot about what he thought about me in general.”

You identified these as your mistakes and concluded, “in my future relationships, I know that I need to put my needs at least on the same level as my partner’s”- I agree with your conclusion and I know, from experience, that it will not be easy to behave differently next time you are in a relationship: the tendencies will still be to hide your feelings, to be careful, to worry a lot, and to put your needs on hold while attending to his needs.

It will require ongoing attention on your part, willingness to practice a new behavior even though there is distress inherent in such practice; forming the intent again and again to behave differently, expecting to not perform as well as you would like to, patience… and it will also take an honest, willing and capable man and an ongoing, honest, clear communication between the two of you, one based on Empathy, Assertiveness and Respect (EAR).

Second part of my post  (includes questions, and if you would like to answer them, please do. My purpose is to understand better so to be helpful with your high priority goal, stated above):

1. You wrote: “He pretty much talked me into breaking up… That’s why I eventually agreed (to the breakup)…he said these things just to convince me to break up with him…I eventually gave in and agreed that a break up”-

I was wondering, as this is unclear to me: do you believe that you had to be” talked.. into” breaking up, that you had to “agree” to it before a breakup would take effect, to be “convinced first… seems to me that all it takes is one party in a relationship to choose a breakup, not two.

2. You wrote: “Most of our mutual friends actually also cut their ties with him after what he did to me… I am still very much shocked and hurt by what happened.” It is unclear to me what is it that he did to you, didn’t read to me that he mistreated you. Is his getting involved with another woman AFTER the breakup shocking…and a reason for his friends to cut ties with him?

Third part of my post, more comments:

You wrote: “After that (telling him he was inattentive to you) he made an effort to contact me and see me more often again, but I felt like he was only doing so because I had asked him to, not because that was what he actually wanted. And after about 2 weeks, those efforts also stopped again.” It reads to me that you discouraged his renewed attentiveness to you and that your expectations for how attentive and the motives behind a man’s attentiveness may be exaggerated, unrealistic.

anita