Dear IkO9:

I am glad to read the following regarding your sister: “I am not seeking her approval, comfort, or support ever in my life again”!

Regarding your ex-boyfriend who posted yesterday on his own thread- I will not refer to, or repeat here, on your thread, what he shared, and what he may or may not share there in the future on his thread.) There is one exception: if he posts on your thread, indicating that he wants to communicate with you and with other members, and if you are okay with it (or if you post on his thread, etc.)

On December 20, 2018, on your second thread, “I taking a ‘break’ okay?”, I wrote to you about your fear of men leaving you: “There are no guarantees, but you can maximize the chances of  a man not  leaving  you if you get to know him thoroughly over time, in person, in different contexts, and then figure (if).. he is..  honest and  trustworthy, and therefore highly unlikely to end the relationship”.

On that same day, you wrote about a previous boyfriend: “I think I saw him (my ex) as more caring and loving than he actually was.. Because of the fear of being alone”-

– putting the two quotes together: you need to get to know a man and not let your fear of being alone interrupt the process of getting to know him. You saw the first ex as more caring and loving than he actually was because you needed him to be more caring and loving, so to feel safe about him not leaving you. You made believe that he was more caring and loving than he was.

Let’s get to know the most recent man in your life based on what you shared about him  most recently, without making-believe anything, April 8, 2021: “he is addicted to masturbation and did not feel any pleasure whenever we did it… he uses webcam services when very aroused during a hangover”, and “he says.. I haven’t been with a lot of women and I want to be with them”, and “His addictions- it just doesn’t stop. Once it is drinking, it is smoking, it is porn, it is masturbation. Anything, absolutely anything that he can put his mind off things, our things”-

It is clear enough to me, based on the quote above, that getting to know him as a candidate for a love relationship/ marriage has been concluded with certainty: if you want safety with a man, he is not the one.

He may be honest in that he told you about his problems and troubles, and that is a good thing. The bad thing is that he is not trustworthy. A reasonable woman will not trust him to .. be different from who he is. You can’t have safety, which is your number one need, with a man who is addicted to substances and activities, a man who tells you that he wants to be with other women, etc.

Believing otherwise is a make-believe exercise, a wishful thinking, which is believing that he is different from who he is because you need him to be different. Believing he is different, or that he will soon be magically different, can give you momentary comfort, but it is not realistic, and therefore, the comfort will not last.

You wrote yesterday, April 13: “When we met, I could feel him struggling to talk to me but he could not open up. He had a hard time deciding if he should talk to me about things troubling his head or not. The constant state of emotional instability was present and his eyes spoke of the pain his head received because of this.. he was so troubled internally”-

– he is a troubled man, and has been troubled way before he met you and throughout the time you knew him.

“He did love me initially but then he stopped”- if you think of love as a feeling, then he loved you sometimes and didn’t love you at other times. If you think of love as a solid motivation and ability to participate in a healthy relationship/ marriage- then he never loved you. He is too troubled to love you- or any woman- this way.

You can feel empathy for him and if you were a psychotherapist (who did not have a personal history with him), then maybe you could have helped him. But you are not a therapist, and if you try to be his friend/ girlfriend/ wife- you will get more hurt, and end up alone, again and again.

“Maybe It was all in my head”- making believe and wishfully thinking that he is different from who he is, or that he will magically change and be who you need him to be- is indeed all in your head.

“each time we stop talking, I feel it in my heart that he will come back and we will talk again. He said he could feel it too- a weird intuition that we will speak again”- a supernatural, weird feeling/ intuition.. I sense your faith in fate here, believing that this relationship is meant to be. I would like to remind you that in May 2018, you wrote about another man, a previous ex: “I never felt so strongly as I did when I met my ex four years ago… I felt this was meant to be because we were both in love with each other at the same time and it felt like fate”-

– It felt so strongly, it felt like fate, and yet that relationship is long gone.

anita

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