Dear Anna,

Congratulations on your graduation! I hope you are having a wonderful time at the cruise with your friends!

You were (and are) trying to understand your boyfriend’s motives for leaving you and also for his current behavior. I agree with anita’s assessment of him (post No 402380): that he had romantic feelings for you and liked you a lot, but when he found out about your background, he started feeling inadequate, because that is his core wound and a core belief (“I am not good enough”). And then he rejected you before you (in his imagination) would reject him.

He did that even though you never gave him any reason to feel bad about himself or his financial/social status. That’s the power of false beliefs – they distort our view of reality and make us reject things (and people) that are good for us. They make us work against our best interests.

Unfortunately there is nothing you can say or do to convince him that he is good enough for you, or good enough in general. He would need to heal that wound first. The best thing you can do at this point is to distance yourself from him and wish him well.

I know it’s hard for you not to be angry at him. But it might help if you saw things a bit differently: that he didn’t leave you because he hates you or he is evil, but because he is wounded. And his defense mechanism was to run away, and to even hook up with someone less “challenging” (in his view), to probably feel better about himself. It’s a quick fix for a much deeper problem that he has: a sense of inadequacy and lack of self-esteem.

Anyway, I know it’s hard not to be angry at him, but try to understand him. Try to understand that he cannot go against himself. And then let go of him. Because you cannot save him from himself. Only he can “save” himself, if he chooses to. But it’s not your responsibility. It’s his.

As for him not being polite, not even greeting you but just staring at you, maybe he cannot or doesn’t want to pretend that he is fine, when he is not. If I understood well, your communication stopped completely when you wrote him a long message spilling out everything you had (I assume your outrage and disbelief about his actions), and then blocking him on social media. He probably didn’t take that well, even if what you said was mostly true. I imagine there is a mix of feelings in him: anger at you, a sense of embarrassment at himself, perhaps even hatred and disappointment in himself, combined with resentment towards you, perhaps also a sense that life in unfair etc etc…

There could be a storm of conflicting emotions inside of him, perhaps he isn’t even aware of all of them, and this makes him kind of stuck, like a deer in the headlights – frozen and unable to respond. If this is true – if he is an emotional mess right now and doesn’t know what to think or feel, it would explain why he can’t even utter a word to you. Or he might be resenting you for the things you’ve said – things that in fact might be true, but he doesn’t want to admit them. And so he “punishes” you with his silence.

Whatever it is, his behavior is immature, driven by his emotional issues and wounds. I’d say don’t take it personally because his rejection of you is in fact his deeper rejection of himself. Try not to blame him and judge him, but at the same time, let him go. You cannot save him, he needs to do it for himself….