Thank you for sharing your story. I am younger but I have been going through a similar situation that I hope you can relate to. About 2 and a half years ago I met an extreamly beautiful girl, I was 22 and she was 19. I was intrigued that she was younger and “hot”. We hit it off right away. a few months down the road I started seeing her real personality. She was rude to my friends, people on the street, waiters and waitresses. She would fly off the handle really easily. She also had a lot of baggage, just self esteem issues and normal life issues that a more mature person is used to. she came to me with all of her problems and I would give her advice or just fix them myself, I had someone dependant on me and she would tell me that she was so madly in love with me and it fell nice…for my ego at least. But I started to feel resentment towards her because it was just problem after problem and before we went out I was already expecting her to be rude to some one so I was on edge all the time. Finally I started trying to get her to be more independent and start being responsible for herself, she looked at this as controlling (and I can admit that it was to a certain point). finaly when I stopped providing all of things for her and tried to help her be more dependant, she left me. I was in love with the idea of her as you put it. She was hot and she loved me more than the world but ultimately she was mean and she really had some work to do on herself. I now know that I will never let another relationship go on the way that one did. I will never date someone solely because of their looks and I will never let a relationship to on longer than it should. we learn so much more from our failures than or success. As long as you learn from what you believe to be your mistakes, then I think it has been a victory.