Dear Jess:

Yesterday, you shared that you had some personal experience, and you witnessed your friends’ experience with guys who left, “never stuck around… doing horrible things in a relationship“. But your boyfriend, now 24, he is “a real ‘man’… a stand-up guy“, and the reason you saw him as your future husband for the longest time.

You shared, as I understand it, that the issue of loyalty to one partner, is very important to you: “I want to have eyes for only one person and vice versa“.

Although your experience as a teenager and onward, with guys, the ones you were involved with and those you witnessed your friends being involved with, although this experience is meaningful, the most meaningful experience by far, in a person’s life, is one’s childhood experience. It is so because as children we feel most intensely, particularly about our parents. And it is then that our core beliefs are formed.

Let’s look at our first exchange in regard to your childhood and the issue that is so important to you: loyalty to one partner (I am re-arranging it a bit):

Jess: “I have seen my mom move on from my dad, now move on from my stepdad because she wasn’t getting what she deserved from the relationship, and sadly that did end up with her cheating in both situations“.

anita: “do you mean that your mother cheated on your dad and then she cheated on your stepdad? And …you don’t want to be like her?”

Jess: “Correct, I don’t want to be like that“.

anita: “Is it that you feel sorry for your dad and stepdad because they were cheated on?”

Jess:  “yes, I feel bad for both my dad and stepdad. I also feel bad for my mom because I wonder if she is happy“.

What this exchange means to me, in the context of your recent/ still ongoing emotional conflict, is that you’ve been conflicted for a long time, ever since you were a child: on one hand you have felt empathy for your dad (and later, for your stepdad) for being cheated on and getting deeply hurt in this way; you believed, or partly believed, that your mother wronged them, you therefore felt angry at her, and you made the decision early on, that you will not be like her, that you will not do what she has done!, but on the other hand, you partly believe that your dad (and later, your stepdad) wronged your mother by not giving her what she deserved from the relationship, and as a result (through no fault of her own), she cheated on them.

From my life experience at this point, I believe that since you were a child, and into your 20s, you have been carrying with you a partial, incomplete understanding of your mother’s romantic relationships and what motivated her to cheat on the two men in her life. Your understanding is so incomplete that it amounts to a misunderstanding. I believe that your confusion in regard to your own romantic relationships are the result of that early-life misunderstanding.

You are currently trying to make the right choices for yourself (in regard to romantic relationships) based on the wrong understanding of the romantic relationships that affected you most: your mother’s.

You wrote yesterday: “I do feel guilty because of what I did to my ex, because I would’ve never thought I would do something like this, I thought I would try to fix it and keep holding strong to keep that long lasting relationship” – part of you have felt for a very long time, that what your mother did (cheat, instead on fixing the relationship with your dad, and later, with your stepdad) was wrong, and therefore you feel guilty for doing the same… except that what you did was not the same as what she he did.

“I feel like I lost something really important which is the trust that we built up for so many years. That’s what hurts me the most I guess… I had such a strong feeling and belief in our trust” – it is the trust in your (wrong) understanding in regard to your mother’s romantic relationships that needs to be broken and a new, correct understanding needs to replace it. With correct understanding, your confusion and guilt will be replaced with clarity and freedom from guilt.

You are welcome to pursue the correct understanding here, on your thread, and/ or in the context of psychotherapy.

anita