Dear Anna:

You presented your story back in April and October of 2021 in your first thread, “A depressed boyfriend“, and during June 2022 in your second, current thread, “How autism works…”, rephrased by me: An autistic boyfriend. It is difficult for me to see the Bare Story in what you presented because the bare story is enveloped and hidden within a thick fog of overthinking, a thick fog of excessive (accurate and inaccurate) interpretations of each boyfriend’s state of mind. In your current thread there’re also excessive details in regard to what the boyfriend said and did and what others said about him, etc. For the purpose of making your bare story visible to me, and hopefully, to you as well, I will peel off the excess and present the bare minimum of your story, all in your words, quoting from your posts in as much of a chronological order as I can come up with. I will boldface what the two boyfriends said to you. The parentheses include my clarifications:

“I am only child, raised by a single mom. She is extremely perfectionist, never happy with what I did because it was never enough… I grew up being over and under-estimated at the same time: being praised for my skills, for being part of the ‘elite’, for being cute, polite and nice, yet everything I did was never enough, I got a B? Oh well, I could have gotten an A if I had put more efforts. I got a new haircut? Oh well, you could have left your hair a bit longer, etc.”, “I went through depressive phases which led me to go to hospital due to suicide attempts”, “He (depressed boyfriend) wanted to break up because ‘he didn’t feel like it‘”, “he said stuff such as ‘no sorry I don’t think I feel comfortable enough with you anymore‘, ‘no sorry I don’t think I am ready for anything serious right now‘”, “We once decided to take a break around December (2020) and it lasted one month, I felt like a complete wreck. I can’t imagine my life without him”, “he doesn’t respond to my messages for days and sometimes for weeks… I became extremely fed up and I told him that I wanted to take a break if not breaking up definitely”.

(June 2022): “I met a guy in September (2021)… Me and this new guy worked together at the same student pub….From December (2021)… we spent a lot of time talking in real life only the two of us… In December (2021) we had a ball, he invited me to waltz… Around mid-January (2022) we started to also become very close physically, a lot of teasing… In end of February, he organized a party… I was basically the only one from this student pub who got invited…”we dated from March (2022) to April (2022)…  Here are the reasons he invoked to break up: ‘.. I realized that I couldn’t develop romantic feelings for you and that I just wanted to be friends with you.’ I was astonished. I asked him… what was missing out? ‘Romantic attraction‘… One week later, on the 8 of April (2022) we got into a 5h conversation at our student pub… At the end, we both ended up crying a lot… during the rest of April and May (2022), we kept bumping into each other because we belong to the same student associations… On the 26 of May (2022), we had a pub event, I wanted to talk to him… he was being distant.. Later in the evening I think my world crumbled. I saw him going outside of the pub to meet with a girl…  I stormed between the two of them, he got mad, I got mad and then I left…

“The day after we talked about the situation, he told me that he didn’t want to hurt me, that he owed me nothing anymore and that he didn’t feel like we had more to discuss about the past. I told him that he didn’t understand how seeing him with her made me feel… He didn’t reply…I sent him a message where I wrote EVERYTHING I wanted to discuss in real life with him and then I blocked him…Ever since I keep seeing him around a lot… two days ago (June 21, 2022) when I bumped into him at our association’s building… I nodded to say hi.. I was being nice and polite. YET, he couldn’t say a single word to me…  he didn’t even nod”.

This is it, the bare story. The rest is your overthinking and interpretations. Your main theme of interpretations (paraphrased by me, using the 1st person, with quotes): both boyfriends broke up with me not because I was not good enough but because they felt that they were not good enough (1st boyfriend: “he feels unworthy of being loved, unworthy of my love because I am successful and he is being afraid that I would realize that he wasn’t ‘worth it‘”, 2nd boyfriend: “I know he didn’t feel worth it of being loved“), and because they both suffered from mental disorders: the first from depression (“I know most part of this kind of behavior is due to his mental illness… it was his illness speaking.. he withdraws himself from everything and everyone including me”), and the second, because of autism.

It is clear to me that that the idea that you are rejected in the context of a romantic relationship has been too painful for you to accept, and so, you refused to accept it, desperately and at great lengths rationalizing the rejections as non-rejections.

The second ex-boyfriend at one point, told you that he did not want to talk with you about the past, and later, he did not speak to you at all, not even a “hi”. This is a clear post-break up rejection, yet you were not able to accept that he rejected you. You rationalize his rejections as non-rejections, as reaction not to you, but to his poor nutrition and poor mental health.

Let’s look at the message you sent him before the incident where he didn’t even say “hi” to you: “You always felt that you had to over-compensate with me, that you weren’t good enough… you felt that you weren’t enough” – this is a repetition of a rationalization that you expressed repeatedly, restated: he broke up with me not because I was not good enough, but because he felt that he was not good enough.

When the second boyfriend told you that he was not attracted to you romantically, you refused to believe him and researched romantic attraction online, posting your findings here on your thread, arguing that he was (!!!) romantically attracted to you. In your message to him, you wrote: “I refuse to believe that you didn’t feel this flow and connection between us. Because it was as obvious as the nose in the middle of the face“- you refused to accept rejection and argued that you were not rejected! You asked a few times regarding the men who rejected you: “what is wrong with him?“, “what is wrong with them?“, all to deflect from your feeling-inside that there is something wrong with you.

In your most recent post, yesterday, you wrote in regard to my suggestion that you felt that you are not worthy of love: “I am genuinely afraid to not be worth of love. What attracts me in those broken boys, I do think it is a mirror effect: they are afraid of being loved and loving someone because they don’t feel good enough about themselves. Birds of a feather flock together, right?.. I did share strong and deep emotional connection with the last one, because… we knew we were broken… How sweet it was to finally find someone who would maybe understand“-

– see, you felt broken all along, and you chose these two men, both university dropouts, both appearing broken… so that together with each one, you will no longer be broken and alone, broken and misunderstood …so that together with each, you’d be two birds of a feather flocking together, how sweet that would have been to find someone like you.

Growing up with your mother, you were “over and under-estimated at the same time: being praised.. (as) the ‘elite‘… yet everything I did was never enough“-

-this leads me think that the praising and the feeling of superiority for being a member of a social elite, these placed you on a higher elevation platform from which you fell each time you were criticized as a child (and each time you were later rejected in the romantic context). The falls therefore were longer and the crash at ground level was more painful than if you were not praised or thought of yourself as a social elite (“I went through depressive phases which led me to go to hospital due to suicide attempts”).

My closing words for this post: you are worthy of love, Anna! And you are good enough! Your mother criticized the child that you were because she (your mother) wasn’t good enough: a good enough mother would not have criticized a vulnerable child who needed acceptance and love, not criticism and who looked up to her mother for what she needed most.

I can’t think of  better use of your money/ your mother’s money.. (that social elite money) then to pay for psychotherapy/ counseling with a competent and high-quality, and dedicated therapist so that you learn to feel and experience life no longer as either standing on the elevated platform of social elite, praise and prestige- real or imagined- feeling Superior, or falling hard on the ground, feeling Inferior. Instead, you can learn to experience life standing on equal grounds with everyone: not superior, not inferior, but Equal, and definitely good enough and worthy of love!

anita