Dear lpkR09,

I’m not Anita 🙂 I’ve joined this forum a couple of months ago, and have been catching up with some of the topics here.

I don’t know why i meet people who don’t want to stay.

I believe you’d need to learn to love and value yourself first. Then you’d meet people who also love and value you more than your previous boyfriends. You say both of them said they want to explore other women as well, as if they’d be missing something if they got married. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, but with them.

He wasn’t an addict earlier, it became worse during lockdown…

Possibly he wasn’t addicted to porn, but didn’t you mention he used to drink but he gave that up when the two of you met? He might have an addictive personality, i.e. a tendency to get addicted, and that’s due to some childhood trauma. He’d need to work on that in therapy. If his first counselor wasn’t a good match, he should look further. I’m sure he can find someone to help him,  if he truly wants help.

But kept coming back to me because he said he felt like he could never like anyone else the way he liked me.

You said you could understand each other very well, so probably he felt understood by you, and probably not judged by you either, since you were tolerant about his porn addiction.

I am trying to focus more on work so that I think less of this, obviously, it doesn’t work but trying hard it would.

You said the same thing while you were together – that you should try to focus more on work, rather than thinking about your relationship problems:

“I don’t like the way I am spending too much time thinking about his moves and his behavior. I have my own work and studies to look after but then I am getting bothered.  I want to not care and be as casual as possible.  If it works,  it works.  Doesn’t then doesn’t.”

On the rational level, you don’t want to care, you want to focus on your work. And it appears your work is very important to you because it will allow you to do something worthwhile, and when you achieve that, it will give you the right to marry by your own choice:

“I always knew that I wanted to love and marry by my choice and I also know that to do that I need to assert my place by doing something worthwhile.  So,  getting a job and at least getting one novel published even if it is not very great was on my list.”

So it’s almost as if you believed that a success at work will grant you the right to marry someone you love. Is that right? It appears that when you’re in a relationship with someone you love, and there are problems, you don’t allow yourself to look deeper into those problems, but you look away, becoming somewhat ambivalent, saying “If it works,  it works.  Doesn’t then doesn’t”. You escape into work because subconsciously, you believe that work comes before love, i.e. that success at work will allow you to be with your true love. So if you just focus on work, you believe that the love part will sort itself out somehow. But it doesn’t. It would need to be looked at, and if you see there are problems, they would need to be addressed. Pushing problems under a rug won’t make them go away. I think you’d need to look at this dichotomy in you, where you almost sabotage your relationship by not looking deeper into its problems.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Tee.