Dear Jenny:

I spent a few hours re-reading and studying your posts, looking for new insight:

At 28, you had only one romantic partner. You did not have a sexual relationship and/ or a romantic relationship with any other person but this one man, to whom we referred to as R.

When you were about 21, one of the people in your social circle was R. There “wasn’t much interaction” between you and him. Common friends told you that he liked you, and he asked you out for the first time when you were 22. Two months later, he moved for his work, and for five years (ages 22-27), the relationship was long-distance, “since it was a long distance relation, calls and skypes were literally all we had”.

The long-distance relationship lasted 2014- September 2019. From the very beginning of your “first physical and emotional love” there were lots of taking a stand, arguing, breaking down into fights, losing calm, breaking down, shouting, etc.: “I would take a stand from the beginning.. We had arguments since the very beginning”, “I would break down in a fight… he’d say I’m fighting and avoid me… he’ll be like I’m busy, people are over, I’m with my parents.. I would just lose my calm and call him repeatedly.. I would literally break down and then he’d start shouting… Later.. he would just walk away amid arguments or just shout at me and ask me to shut up… By the end of it, I felt like I couldn’t express my displeasure without him saying ‘again you go’, the moment I would say something that he didn’t like, he would just snap at me and ask me to shut up”.

A month after the breakup, in Oct 2019, he called you, but you did not answer his call. Then he called again and again, you did not answer his calls. From October 2019 to July 2020, he called you about 32 times, and you answered about 8 of his calls, “picked around 1 out of every 7-8 calls, mainly telling him to stop contacting… so in all, in the 9 months that he called, I spoke to him around 3-4 times”.

In nine months he called you on average once a week or once every two weeks (3 or 4 times per month). At times he told you that he was lonely and reminded you of things the two of you did when dating, but he never asked to resume the relationship. One time he asked to meet you and you refused. A few times in between those calls you texted him to stop contacting you.

In Sept 2020 you wrote this about those talks: “All talks were generally like random… All conversations were about him talking about random things… I would generally stay quiet”. Impatient with his random talk, you confronted him, saying things like: “I was very hurt by the way you left me hanging”, and “”you left, now you cannot call whenever you want”, asking him, “why are you calling”? and telling him: “please stop contacting me”!

He reacted angrily to your statements and question, “sounded bitter throughout though his volume would be low and get higher as the conversation”, and eventually, in August 2020, “he would get angry, he’ll call me an idiot, a b***, say f*** off/ get lost, at which point I would hang up the call.”

* This what you wrote about the same talks in February 1, 2021: “What kind of a person that has been showing a girl he loves her for a year… he has begged to speak to her for a year.. the year long calling that he did”- a different depiction of the same calls.

“it was my first emotional and physical love and I remember telling him that he is my own fairytale… I feel like my fairytale is slipping away. I think that is why I want to keep a part of it alive within me and can’t bring myself to let go.. it was after all my first relation and the fairytale that I’d wanted since I was old enough to understand romance”- a fairytale filled with anger.

You shared that when you were a child, your mother told you: “look at Elise, will she ever argue back with her mother, all children are so disciplined… Improve your nature Jenny, I am your mother so I take it but if you don’t change it, your friends and partner won’t take it”-

– You were an angry child, arguing with your mother, just as you argued later with R. By “nature” your mother was referring to your Anger: “I take it but if you don’t change it, your .. partner won’t take it”, and R did not take it.

This is my new insight today: I wasn’t aware before of how angry you have been ever since you were a child, and how angry you have been throughout your first relationship, from its very beginning. And how angry you have been after the breakup.

If R was as calm and emotionally healthy as a person can be- your anger alone would have been enough to destroy the relationship.

You wrote regarding your nature and R: “I have a bad nature.. I am irritating him with my bad nature”- replacing bad nature with a lot of anger, I think this sentence is true: I (Jenny) have a lot of anger.. I am irritating him with my anger”.

Regarding the relationship, you wrote: “I began feeling so inferior and low that from fights and arguments, I went to pleading and begging… I saw myself as causing everything and he said the same thing”- I didn’t realize this before: you did cause a lot of the arguments and fights (although you did not cause “everything”).

Sept 5, 2020: “was I bad? Was I a bad girlfriend and did I ill-treat him? Was I the wrong, abusive, narcissistic one? Will he be better-off without me?”- you came into your first romantic relationship with a lot of unresolved anger, and therefore, you were indeed a bad girlfriend and you did ill-treat him. You were wrong and abusive and he was a bad boyfriend, angry, impatient, wrong and abusive.

February 1, 2021: “I want him to see that I am one High Value Woman that HE LOST… to feel a sense of LOSING a girl who really loved him and was special”- you are a high value woman, you are special, but you are also angry enough to destroy a romantic relationship even with a patient man.

I have no doubt that your long-term anger as a child was valid: that any child in your place would have gotten repeatedly angry. Do you remember being angry as a child, arguing with your mother?

anita