Dear Anna,

I’ve read the last message you’ve sent to your ex, and it’s mostly fine. You expressed your feelings and your appreciation for him and the time you’ve spent together (I am really sad that you couldn’t see how much you brought to me, how much I just needed you in my life because for what you genuinely are. … My sadness was about what I lost, you and these times together. … I wanted to be with you, my feelings for you, it all comes from because you opened up about yourself, not only the brightest side of your personality but also your past, your scars, not because of the nice social picture you give to the crowd.).

You said you don’t understand why he left you if he was happy with you ( I was mad at you because I never understood how one could jeopardize something which makes them feel genuinely happy).

At the end, you told him he owes you nothing and that you are accepting the fact that he rejected you. You also wished him well. (You don’t owe me anything, this is your life and I am accepting that you didn’t want me to be part of it. … I sincerely wish you the best in your life.)

One part of the message is accusatory though – you accuse him of pursuing you even after the breakup, of not avoiding you like he claimed but seeking your company (No, let’s be real, none of us were avoiding the other. We both know how we are when we REALLY want to avoid someone.), and of not doing enough to push you away when he was already dating someone else (Why did you not push me away out of respect for her, as you told me, you did with her when we were together?)

I would like to explore that part a bit more. You said that in the first 2 weeks after the breakup you remained pretty close because he wanted it, he sought your company (The two first weeks after the breakup he was always around me and if during our first 5h of conversation I didn’t insist of the two of us taking our distance for my own sake, he would have kept being around me.). He even told you: “I totally picture the two of us in a near future, catching up once our lives will be on track”.

On one hand you didn’t want this closeness because it hurt and you have a bad experience staying friends with your exes (I said, no, there is no way, if I wanted to move on and heal, I couldn’t afford to stay around him, because I did this mistake in the past and it never ended well and that we needed to cut the ties completely.). But on the other hand, I think you were hoping that he still wants to be with you, and so you wanted to stay close to him (“I realized that I was still looking for you, I still wanted to be around you. It was not the smartest choice but it was the one which felt right.”)

His friendliness and even giving you hope about the future made you believe that he actually doesn’t want to break up with you. So you were seeking him out, watching his every move, every glance, every detail… trying to find a sign that he might still want to be with you.

I don’t know when exactly he changed and became more distant, but it appears he stopped answering your messages at some point (how can you feel that it would not bring any good to answer a simple supportive message yet thinking that staying around each other in real life was less dangerous?). But you felt that he still wanted to be with you, or at least around you, even though he later told you “I was avoiding you.”

The culmination was when you stormed between him and his new girlfriend, after which he got mad at you. It seems to me  that in your mind you couldn’t accept that he lost interest in you – you interpreted his behavior as still being interested in you even when he wasn’t replying to your messages. You told him he should have pushed you away when you were in his vicinity – to prove that he really isn’t interested in you. Anything less than physically pushing you away wasn’t enough of a clue for you. This is how strong your conviction was that he still loves you.

Please don’t get me wrong – I am not judging you in any way. I totally understand your reactions. I used to be like that myself, seeing things which didn’t exist, believing that the guy is interested when he wasn’t etc. I know what a strong yearning and a strong desire is. This guy was at least interested for a while, and even gave you false hope about the future, so it’s not that you misinterpreted everything. You only misinterpreted the end and his behavior after the breakup. You wanted him so badly that you refused to see that he has actually moved on.

This still doesn’t mean that the main dynamic that we’ve discussed – you falling for “broken” guys – isn’t true. I think it is. And I would like to ask you, similarly like anita did, in what ways do you believe you are broken?

In your last message to your ex, you said you both were “very dysfunctional“. Could you explain this a bit more – how were you dysfunctional?

Because you believing that you are broken and dysfunctional may be just a belief, a consequence of feeling unworthy of love, which is a consequence of your mother’s upbringing… Or if you are really broken and dysfunctional in certain parts of your life, it’s actually the consequence of believing you aren’t worthy of love, that you are bad, that there is something wrong with you. Once you heal that main wound and main core belief, the brokenness and dysfunctionality will lessen too…