Hi Elizabeth: I read your response and most of the others who have responded to you. Something stuck out in my mind which I had not appreciated before. Somewhere you say you wish you had treated him better which puts a new focus on the problem for me along with the fact that he said you were negative and nobody wanted to be around you. From this, I am guessing that he was possibly a mild mannered man, a soft man, what some may call a “weak man”. It sounds like you were under pressure at work and financially carrying the burden. I am wondering if you did not respect him at the time and were consumed by your own unhappiness and took it out on him. If this is the case (and if I am misreading this I am sorry), it’s likely that he confided in the employee/friend and it grew from there. This may have happened in years to come, so on some level you have had a chance to re-evaluate and grow. From everything I’ve read it would appear that he has moved on, even to the point of getting an apartment in the same building which has probably developed into practically living together. I think that on some level this could be a lesson for you in your interpersonal relationships – maybe he wasn’t strong enough for your personality? You sound like you are an achiever who gets things done, a strong woman. Maybe you need a strong man, one that isn’t afraid to take you on and disagree and set boundaries. The fact that he didn’t tell you that he thought you were negative etc. etc. until his secret came out leads me to believe that he didn’t have the courage to sit you down way before that and express his feelings, because he didn’t have the ability to confront you. Oftentimes “weak” men are attracted to strong women (like their mothers) and reenact their own parents’ relationships with a downtrodden man and overbearing/controlling woman. I believe it’s a hard pattern to break. I could be overstepping the line here, and am just guessing from the little I know about your situation.

I wish you well going forward, and from someone who has had her heart broken…I can tell you that you can love again, just differently. We are all growing and changing and you spent all of your young adult life with him, there are many chapters to be written. “Everything’s will be okay, if it’s not okay, it’s not the end”. John Lennon