Dear canary,

are you talking about the same man your other thread was about, with whom you were in a relationship from August 2019-April 2020?

In your previous thread, you were mostly blaming yourself for the failure of the relationship (“I was suffering from severe depression & anxiety and it made me difficult to deal with which caused me to think that he did not truly love me”). But in the meanwhile it seems you’ve realized that he had issues too and that his behavior was hurtful (I understand why he did all the hurtful things to me).

You say he is suffering from antisocial personality disorder – was he diagnosed by a medical doctor?

You say a part of you is “still holding onto the hope that he’ll be the happy person he once was”, “a person that was genuinely trying to be a better person and make his life better.”

I imagine that when you’re daydreaming and creating fake scenarios of you being together (you mentioned this in your previous thread), you’re focusing only on the good times and forgetting about the bad times when his behavior was hurtful. That’s quite common – we often see the person through rose-colored glasses because we fall in love with our idea of them, a romanticized version of them, instead of the real person. We want them so much that we overlook the bad sides. And the reason we want them so much is often because they remind us of one of our parents, whose love we’ve always craved but never really received.

That could be why you feel so very attached to him, feeling that you love him unconditionally, no matter what he does to you and how he behaves.

Can you relate to any of this?