Anita

You wrote :

“There is no indication in it of affection or intimacy on his part, only politeness and social graciousness.

There is no indication of him having an intent to resume any kind of relationship, be it friendship or otherwise.”

I feel the same way as you.

I was …. presumptive about the whole friendship thing. During the relationship, I mentioned to him that I have a very good relationship (platonic) with all of my exes.

Me and my exes do not stay in contact, but I still consider them friends because I feel like we shared a lot of memories and affection together.

I still have a pretty good relationship with my first love, the one I dated in high school, we still follow each other on social media and have nothing against each other what so ever. We have a good platonic friendship. We can share a happy birthday message once a year, and that is it.

Upon hearing this, Gyunnie was confused. He did not understand how exes can stay friends. He only had one real ex girlfriend, they broke up in such awful terms that they never spoke to each other again or even have each other phone number / social media. He is not familiar with the concept that exes can be your friend.

He never agreed to be my friend, Anita. I just realise that. I forced this friendship thing to him. Even during the break up talk, he never said anything about staying in contact as friends. His personality is “all or nothing” so MAYBE to him, either I am his girlfriend or nothing. It is hard for him to find a middle ground, sometimes. That side of him was the main reason why he easily decided to move college and wasted one year of his life.

Regarding the words “dating” and “relationship” – I cannot really give you assurance because of the translation. Maybe he was referring to “dating” as it is the proper words to use, you cannot say “I do not know the right manner in a relationship” because it sounds really weird in Korean, but I will not defend his choice of words, you can assume that for him it was only dating.

He did tell me that he loved me. After some pressure from me, I guess.

I asked him whether in the past, to friends or family or ex girlfriend – did he ever say “I love you”?

He told me, only to his close friends as a joke when they did something good for him. He asked if this was my way of asking him to say “I love you” and I said no. It was a lighthearted conversation, I was not serious. Yes, I was fishing but I never really excepted him to say it.

He said I love you after the night of that conversation. I did not say I love you back.

Later on, after a few weeks, we kissed and he asked me why I never told him that I love him.

I told him at that point.

Nothing about future, only tiny bits when he told me how he was willing to postpone his military service for me and come down to K University from Y University every week, it is something involving his future that he was willing to change for me. That was it.

You wrote : “Fourth item is your perception that you have close friends while in reality you don’t share your intimate thoughts and feelings with anyone (so you wrote)”

During my depression period or episode, I refused to reach out. The truth is, most of my good friends (at least 10 people) knows what is going on with me in general. They are aware that I am depressed and always tried to reach out but I was always … very closed on them, I guess. I have 2 best friends named Jessica and Henderson – I talk to them in a daily basis. They also knew that I almost killed myself during these past few months. They tried to make things better, tried to made me feel involved but we are so far away. Distance is the real problem here. They asked me to seek professional help, forced to go out with people so I won’t feel so lonely but I was just very negative and refused to listen.

Yesterday was the first time that I can truly see my friends effort in helping me, their support has been super amazing.

Henderson in particular, as a guy, helped me a lot with seeing things from Gyunnie perspective. He mentioned that I was too serious with him from the very first day. We are only 19, and I am very rushy to get married – in a way maybe Gyunnie feels it as well. That I was taking the relationship into a very serious manner.

The truth is, we almost broke up when Gyunnie told me that he was moving college. I CLEARLY told him that it would be better to break up now if he is not all in. Gyunnie told me that he was all in, he was willing to commit to me LONG TERM regardless military service and the distance between Y and K University (which is a 2 hour bus ride)

He promised me that. He broke it off himself. That was why maybe he apologised during the birthday message, because he is aware that he was not consistent with his own words. He did it out of his guilt.

To give you more context, I think the break up trigger was when I told him that I am not the type of girlfriend that can go without seeing my boyfriend for a long time of period. Something in Gyunnie snapped after I say that. From that point, he realised that the relationship is doomed. He was and still is a bad liar, so the shift was very visible.

-Monica