Dear canary,

you’re welcome, and I am glad it feels freeing to you to still love him but not having expectations of him changing. This helps you be free from emotional attachment to him, from the hope and excitement that you feel if he shows signs of improvement, followed by disappointment and anger if he hurts you again. Basically, it frees you from the emotional roller-coaster, where you make your happiness and well-being dependent on his actions. I am sure you know all this, but I am still saying it out loud to make a stronger point 🙂

As for his disorder, there are people who love and care only about their immediate family, and would do anything for them – even lie, cheat and steal if necessary (i.e. behave in an antisocial manner). It seems your ex might belong to this category of people… When you were his friend and then girlfriend, he might have put you in the “loved ones” group and would behave kindly to you, or at least would try. Although you say that even then he lacked empathy, but perhaps he was willing to work on it and become “a better person” for your sake. Even after you broke up, up until April 2021, it seems he had remorse for leading you on and hurting your feelings. He even said he was a “shitty person”. He seems to have regretted that he’d hurt you.

I guess this is the personality that you liked – that he at least saw how some of his actions were hurtful and perhaps showed a willingness to change. But this April, it seems he stopped caring – you say he stopped caring how his actions affect you. I guess this is how he behaves with everybody outside of his “loved ones” group: he doesn’t care about them, doesn’t care if he hurts them or exploits them. This is probably the personality you detest and don’t want to have anything to do with.

It seems to me you saw a potential in him when he was open to change, when he would admit his mistakes and show some remorse. That was attractive to you and got you hooked, got you hopes up. Based on what you’ve written, he never was truly caring and supportive of you, but at least he was “trying”, or he saw that he “should be” more empathic, and this was what kept you hoping. You did say in your last post that you had “a great bond and connection”. But I wonder if that bond was rather around working on his “improvement” and his need to change, and not really a bond in terms of feeling respected and supported by him?