Hi Bruce,

Whilst I’m not usually a fan of making comparisons and pointing out that someone has it worse than you do, I feel like it would be OK this time to put your situation into perspective. There was an American football player who had an online affair with someone. He felt like this person was his girlfriend. I can’t remember the full details, but something happened and she distanced herself from him and told some really sad story why they had to part ways. For some reason this whole thing started to unravel and it turned out that the girlfriend was a guy. So not only was his trust broken, the whole thing was played out in the press. I have to say that I felt a lot of compassion for them both. The football player for falling for the whole thing and the man on the other end, who said that he just wanted to try what it would feel like and that he got hooked and was really ashamed and sorry for what he had done, and that he never meant to hurt anyone.

We’re all human and want to feel loved and we want to believe that the person who entered our lives would be “The One” (if that is what we are looking for). We also all the time assume things and fill in the gaps to be what we want them to be. So of course the person on the other end, who also just wants something, will sometimes allow the other one to make these assumptions. We wish so hard that things would turn out for the best. The person in your case wished so much that even after you said “no”, he still pursued to be accepted by you. I don’t think he now feels like a million dollars either.

When trust is broken it’s horrible, and I know that for me, personally, one of the biggest insults is when I end up looking foolish (I’m also a bit of a perfectionist). But then there have been times when there was just no way out of that feeling of shame, and the only solution was to face it and accept it, and guess what? It’s a great tool for growth as well. I once had a discussion about being “shamed” with someone online. I’m not sure what had happened to her, but she said that all her secrets had been revealed, or something like that. She couldn’t do anything about it, so it forced her to just become completely open. She had nothing to hide anymore, and instead of feeling shame, she became this blossoming individual, filled with compassion for others and deep understanding for humanity. So you know, it can be a blessing as well…

Things tend to blow out of proportion in your own head, and the reality is that what happened to you is a drop in the ocean of life. You’re not the first person to go through something like that and you’re not the last. Both of you got caught up in a perfectly human situation of wanting to be wanted, and there is no shame in that. Try to be more compassionate towards yourself as well as the other person 🙂