Dear Ishita:

You shared that you had a male friend (“a real nice guy, an overachiever yet humble, although a bit emotionally inexpressive or reserved”) whom you met in college. He had a girlfriend at the time but last September, his girlfriend of two years broke up with him, saying she was feeling stressed around him. He was broken hearted but “was eventually getting closer” to you, more emotionally expressive, trying to get to know you and be supportive of you. But you were anxious, insecure, “that  maybe he is so perfect he would never understand why I am a mess”.

During the winter vacation last December, three months after his breakup, the two of you facetimed almost every day, talking for hours,  and at times he flirted with you, calling you “bae”, a term reserved to a girlfriend. By January 2021 you were strongly attached to him/ in love with him, “but he started pulling hot and cold” on you, at times not calling you for 2-3 days. When you complained that he didn’t call you, he said that you were not being demanding, that he is lazy and that he “should definitely call you everyday”.

But he kept going with “his hot and cold behaviour”, not calling you every day. There were fights between the two of you, followed by no contact, followed by him apologizing to him, or you apologizing to him until the next fight. You were into him but “he was mostly more into his life”. During this time, you were very stressed and not able to focus on your studies.

In March, you told him how you felt about him, and that you felt this way because of his previous “overly caring and supportive behaviour”. He told you that he was sorry, that he does not want a relationship for at least a year, that he was “just being a good friend”, and that he was not aware that he crossed the limits from friendships to more: “I am pretty dumb when it comes to knowing when we were crossing limits”.

You told him that you needed distance to reset your boundaries, “since I didn’t know the friend I trusted the most was dumb enough to not realise what he was doing”. He then kept calling you, you spent less time talking to him, “restricted to what a general conversation between friends should be like”, he thought you were behaving weird and eventually said that he would wait until you were “ready to go back to being normal”.

Twenty days later, you are heart broken, “but somewhere I feel he did have feelings for me just that he is not confessing it… still hoping he will come back to me, with this realisation”, and this thought and hope is stopping you from moving on”.

Your image of him changed from one who was “a humble, good and caring person” to “a self-centered and selfish person” who never really understood you, who is “kind of narcissistic” and who messed you up.

My input: I agree with teaK, and will repeat/ expand on the following:

1) Your very positive image of him Sept 2020- Feb 2021 is probably overly positive. When a woman (particularly a teenager/ young woman) is in-love with a man, she sees him as better and more than he really is, and she sees his behaviors as more caring and loving than they really are.

In-love feelings and wishful thinking go hand in hand, including your wishful thinking that he will come back to you with the realization that he is in love with you after all, and that he wants a relationship with you.

There is no way for me or for you to predict the future: there is some possibility that he will have a change of mind and heart about you. If he was an emotional and impulsive young man, that possibility would be greater. But you wrote that he is emotionally reserved, an overachiever and a workaholic who is very busy with his studies, and that he told you that he is not interested in being in a relationship for one year (so to focus on his studies and his future career life, I assume)-

– this suggest to me that unlike in the case of an emotional and impulsive young man, the chance that this career-oriented, ambitious and self-disciplined man will change his mind is unlikely.

2) From what you shared, I believe that he did indeed flirt with you and had fun doing so. Also, I believe that he shouldn’t have flirted with you when having no intention to have a relationship with you- he led you on, and you ended up hurt. It is very important that in the future, when a guy you like/ are interested in,  is flirting with you, or you suspect that he is flirting, ask him about what is underneath his flirtation: is it just the fun of flirting, or is he interested in a relationship with you?

It is a forward question that can save you a lot of time and hurt!

3) Regarding your earlier thought/ sentiment: “he is so perfect he would never understand why I am a mess”- he was not perfect and everyone is a mess some of the time, to one extent or another. Lots of people are a great mess a lot of the time. It is just that any one person is very familiar and intimate with his/ her own mess, not with other people’s messes, so  one imagines that his/her mess is much greater than other people’s messes.

anita

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