Dear Natie,

In terms of what im planning to do. i guess since we’ve already broken up , i just need to accept it and try to make peace with this fact and start holding myself more accountable to be a better person. do you have any better approaches that you can point me to?

Actually no, I believe it’s good you’ve broken up because he wasn’t respecting your career plans (which he earlier agreed on) and saw his needs and goals as more important than yours. He said:

”no guy waits all that long , all i want is to be with you , i dont see why you cant make that happen even if it means to change your entire career you can always find another job..”

He asks you to change your entire career so you can be with him and probably “mother” him in the States, or wherever he is currently living. That’s why he refused a long-distance relationship:

i asked him to continue doing our long distance relationship like any other couple but he said that this is not love and im not putting him as a priority then

He probably needs you by his side, to help him, support him, solve his problems, comfort him (the last part he wasn’t getting so much, that’s why he was complaining), in short he needs you to serve as his care-taker. And you’ve been doing that vigorously because that’s what you’ve learned at home. You were a mother/care-taker to the entire family.

Anyway, if he can’t respect your needs and only cares about his own needs, it’s not a healthy base for a relationship. Don’t blame yourself for the failure of the relationship, don’t think of yourself as a bad person. You do have the right to follow your goals and dreams, you do have the right to work in your preferred field. You don’t need to sacrifice that for anybody.

What you can work on is releasing this role of being a care-taker, or a mentor for others: being responsible for others, and also pushing them to be their best (and in that, perhaps controlling them, or not empathizing enough with them). You said:

i am the eldest child and so if i got a bad grade at school my mom would be really sad and i felt like i had to write a letter to her to apologise or when my siblings were growing up I was always up till now uptight and worried that if they satyed out all night they will cause problems at home so i kept calling and chasing them and felt it in my bones because if i didn’t there will be a fight at the house between my parents.

It seems you felt responsible for your mother’s happiness, and did whatever possible not to upset her. One was excelling at school – you felt so guilty for getting a bad grade, that you felt you needed to write her a letter and apologize. You also felt responsible if your parents had a fight, and you tried everything to prevent it – and so you tried to control the behavior of your younger siblings.

I can imagine how much pressure you were living under as a young girl, trying to keep your parents happy, looking for solutions all the time, trying to minimize damage, and feeling guilty if you haven’t succeed. It was a big burden, and this is a girl you need to empathize with first. You yourself, as a  young girl, eager to make her parents happy.