Hi Eva

I’m really sorry to hear about the relationship difficulties that you have experienced. You truly deserve better.

Hmm I would say that the way forward is somewhat painful, so feel free to skip this paragraph. Acknowledge that he didn’t love you. Love is a two way street. While things were on his terms he was happy with the way things were. He didn’t care about how you felt. He never had any intention of having a future with you, he was just looking for someone to patiently tolerate his awful behaviour. You want more than he wanted to offer, you deserve more than he wanted to offer.

I for one am glad that you pushed for what you deserve. Just because he couldn’t love you doesn’t mean that no one will. You are no longer having your time and energy wasted. You are free to pursue a meaningful relationship where you can experience the care and respect that you deserve. One that has a future.

I have experienced dealing with these kinds of men, it is all too common these days. If someone is unwilling to date you publicly I’d steer well clear of them in the future. Dating is a bit of a cesspool these days. Once you’ve taken your time to heal, wade through the frogs. Tell them to take a hike, look for a prince who treats you right. You deserve it! ❤️

He might eventually decide to date someone publicly, get engaged and married. But it will be when it serves his needs. And I pity those people, because he won’t magically become a different person. Every relationship has issues and he is unwilling to compromise.

Dear Eva:

What you’re feeling now (or 9 hours ago) is the weight of emotional neglect, confusion, and the exhausting strain of trying to be enough for someone who couldn’t meet you halfway. With deeper clarity and growing compassion for yourself, I truly believe peace will find its way to you.

My best understanding is that the two of you had:

1. Different Attachment Styles- You seem to have an anxious attachment style—you seek closeness, reassurance, and emotional depth. He shows signs of avoidant attachment—he withdraws from intimacy, avoids emotional openness, and keeps connection at a distance, even after years.

This creates a push-pull dynamic: you reach for connection, he pulls away, which makes you reach harder—and leads to more pain.

2. Different Levels of Emotional Intelligence (EQ)- You express your feelings clearly, strive for communication, and feel with depth—that reflects high emotional awareness and empathy. He struggles to empathize, rarely opens up, avoids hard conversations, and doesn’t acknowledge your pain. That reflects low EQ.

He may rationalize his choices, but he lacks insight into how his behavior affects others.

3. Different Behavioral Patterns- You compromise, adapt, and try every possible approach—kindness, patience, assertiveness. You bend, even when it hurts. He avoids conflict, hides the relationship, deflects blame, and shuts you down. He gaslights and shifts responsibility away from himself.

His pattern suggests emotional detachment and a power imbalance: he controls the narrative, while you absorb the impact.

4. Different Goals in the Relationship- You wanted emotional connection, public acknowledgment, mutual respect, healing, and a future. He wanted comfort on his own terms, connection hidden from view, and freedom from social judgment.

You both may have felt “love,” but you were seeking different kinds of love—and operating from very different emotional worlds.

As for your questions, here’s what I see:

“How can someone be so dehuman and do what he wants even though I say it hurts?”- He may be emotionally blocked. That doesn’t mean he lacks feeling—it means he struggles to access or process emotions in healthy ways. Perhaps when he was a child, his vulnerability was met with shame or rejection. In response, he built emotional armor—and still hides behind it.

This distance from his own emotions makes even simple intimacy feel unsafe to him: “He… never wants to hug or kiss in public because he sees it as ‘cringey’.”

The ego is our inner sense of self—how we see ourselves, and how we want to be seen. When toxic shame infects the ego, it becomes fragile. A deeply fragile ego can’t distinguish between “I did something wrong” and “I am something wrong.” So it defends itself at all costs. To protect itself, it builds defenses: withdrawal, denial, blame: “He’s always been emotionally unavailable… Every time, he finds a way to twist it so that I’m the problem. He’s never once apologized. Never taken responsibility. Just blames me for my reactions to his actions.”

Vulnerability is the openness to being emotionally exposed—it’s the willingness to show our true thoughts, feelings, and needs. It’s the doorway to intimacy, trust, healing, and authentic relationships. But when vulnerability—at an early age—is repeatedly shamed or harshly criticized, it creates a severe emotional injury, a core wound. And over time, a person builds emotional scar tissue around that wound, blocking vulnerability from ever being exposed again.

This emotional scar tissue becomes a defense mechanism. It might look like emotional detachment, perfectionism, people-pleasing, over-control, shifting blame, or never accepting responsibility for hurting another person—but underneath is a deeply guarded part of the self that fears being seen and hurt again.

Within the relationship—when you cried, sought affection, or expressed pain—you weren’t just exposing your own vulnerability, you were activating his. And his reaction was to push it (and you) away.

You weren’t wrong for showing up emotionally. In fact, every time you allowed yourself to be seen in your sadness or longing, it was an act of courage. Vulnerability, in that sense, is strength—the strength to risk connection, even when the response is uncertain. That’s a strength he didn’t possess, or didn’t know how to access. And in his world, defending against discomfort took priority over opening to intimacy.

“How can someone claim they love you, yet be so emotionally blind to your pain?”- He may have loved you in the way he was capable—but shame, in his world, may be more powerful than love.

“Who will he be with next?”- Even if he’s with someone else, he still carries the same emotional limitations. That pain you felt in the relationship came from his unhealed shame, not from anything lacking in you. Whoever comes next will likely meet the same guarded heart—until he chooses to face it.

“Will he treat the next girl better?”- Maybe. But if he does, it won’t be because she’s better or more deserving. It’ll only happen if he feels safer, less exposed, or chooses to grow. And if he doesn’t confront the toxic shame beneath his ego, the same patterns will repeat.

“Why does it feel like I was never enough?”- Because you kept giving love to someone who couldn’t fully receive it. His fragile ego, shaped by deep shame, made it hard for him to accept closeness without feeling threatened.

“How can someone switch in a day with such bad behavior?”- He didn’t switch in a day. Emotionally blocked people often begin leaving internally long before they say goodbye. When the breakup came, it felt sudden—but in his mind, he was simply following the escape route he’d been building.

“Why didn’t anything I say matter?”- Because he wasn’t ready to hear it—not because it wasn’t true. Your words held weight, tenderness, and truth. But when someone carries toxic shame, even gentle feedback feels like an attack. Instead of responding, he defended. Instead of listening, he rewrote your pain as paranoia or drama. It mattered—you just spoke to a heart that wasn’t ready to be open.

“Why did he never apologize?”- Because apology requires emotional humility. To say “I’m sorry”—and mean it—would take coming in contact with that core wound within him. And that would be too painful for him.

“Why did he keep acting like I’m the problem?”- Because blaming you was easier than facing himself. He needed a target for his discomfort—and you became that target. Shifting blame was how he kept his fragile self intact.

Eva, none of this means you were unlovable. It means you loved someone whose emotional world was too guarded, too wounded, too locked down to receive it. That’s heartbreaking—but it’s also clarifying. You didn’t fail. You felt. You reached. You tried. And now, you get to heal.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, Eva—what resonated, what didn’t, or what you still carry unanswered. I’m here.

With care, Anita

Dear Eva,

I’m really sorry for how you were treated throughout your relationship and the way he finally left you. I feel your pain. And I’ll start at the end:

I really cannot accept the situation as it is and say okay, BYE now. I keep fighting and fighting, and still everything is worse.

I feel your frustration. You want him to understand how much he has hurt you and how little he has given you. Now that he has broken up with you so suddenly, you’re fighting for an admission and a recognition on his part that he has done you wrong.

But I’m afraid you won’t be able to get it from him, because he sounds to me like someone with narcissistic traits: selfishness, lack of empathy, lack of remorse, and shifting the blame on you every time you expressed your concerns.

You say that in the beginning, your relationship was good:

Even though it was a complicated situation, we continued to see each other for years because it felt good — there was chemistry, understanding, and a genuine connection.

I guess “good” is a relative term, since he kept your relationship secret for quite some time (actually for the entire span of your relationship, if I understood well?). But perhaps in the beginning you were more tolerant because it was a somewhat delicate situation, since he was your ex’s friend. He felt he would be judged by not only your ex but his whole friend group (at least that’s what he’s told you as his excuse), and so I guess you had understanding for him and were patient at first.

But I can imagine that as the time went by, you felt increasingly unhappy about this arrangement and started voicing your concerns. No wonder, since you wanted a real relationship, not to be kept in secret from the world: not only from his friends group but from everyone (He hides me from everyone, even people not connected to my ex (friends, relatives…)).

You were in a rather humiliating situation, and you had every right to protest. But each time you spoke up, he flipped it back on you:

He always manages to flip it back on me — my reaction, my emotions, my tears, the way I speak or write… Every time, he finds a way to twist it so that I’m the problem. He’s never once apologized. Never taken responsibility. Just blames me for my reactions to his actions.

He never took responsibility for his actions, his selfishness, his constant rejection of you and your love. Instead, he blamed you. That’s a typical narcissistic tactic: accusing the victim of being the abuser. This tactic is called DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. So he was the abuser – he was emotionally abusing you – but he portrayed himself as the victim of your abuse. He flipped things on their head.

And I haven’t done anything, only fighting for me to feel better, and addressing those feelings. And still, even with that, he proceeds to act like I am the problem, so much paranoia, constant fighting, constant whining, etc.

You only wanted to be treated with minimum respect. However, he denied you that and accused you of being paranoid, constantly whining, fighting etc.

I really cannot accept the situation as it is and say okay, BYE now. I keep fighting and fighting, and still everything is worse.

Unfortunately, with people with narcissistic traits, which he seems to fit pretty well, fighting them never yield results. You will never manage to get an apology from him or an admission that he did something wrong. A narcissist can never admit they are wrong. They have to defend their fragile ego. And so the more you fight, the more he will accuse you, and the more mean he will get. And you will end up getting even more hurt.

I’m afraid you can only start healing when you stop expecting anything from him – any kind of apology, empathy or understanding. You won’t be able to make it right with him. But you can heal and make it right in your own life – separately from him – when you discover your own worth and how much more you deserve than the breadcrumbs he was giving you.

He was telling you he loved you (in the beginning of the relationship, later not even that), but those were just empty words, because his actions didn’t follow suit. What he gave you wasn’t love – but as Anita said, none of that was your fault, but his own abusive personality.

You do need healing, but the silver lining in all this is that you don’t need anything from him to heal. It is in your own hands. Your happiness is in your own hands.

Eva,

I hate your going though this soul sucking, all mind consuming…stuckness. (ok,stuckness is what I’m rolling with, because to me it’s the proper word, even if it’s not.) and hoped something something I share helped it click for you. For me, I could hear this or that advice, understand why it should work, but struggle making it click internally. Here’s what helped my heart click to what my brain already knew.
•List 5 core values. I suggest googling the term and coming to your own understanding of what core values mean to you, so your able to define your own. Due to the vagueness this helped me:
•What did I consistently never regret doing, while also regret when I didn’t do it?
•Our sense of purpose that drives our choices to ensure we are in harmony with our true self.
•A set of truths of the inner most you, regardless of the emotional attachment we have towards someone or something, while understanding how this appears with a rational mindset, so we’re able to predict and notice how our emotional reactions, could potentially make us excuse the lack of ourselves holding such values to our standards, in the future.
•Looking back on a situation/argument that bothers you badly, while naming someone of great importance to you (for ex. Child/best friend/etc.) now how do you hope they would handle that situation, so they leave the situation with dignity. Now however you would hope they’d act or react, is how you hope to react to similar situations,going forward.

•When dealing with people we’ve known for years, we know the odds of their behaviors. This is a powerhouse of info, due to its ability for us to predict the worst case scenarios, analyze how we would typically react to it so we can determine how we want to react, then play/practice that reaction over and over mentally and even out loud, so we know and believe we know how to handle it.

•Doing this for me, allowed me to see that he intentionally said and done certain things as he knew I would react by screaming, yelling, etc .. and then could call me crazy, and have every excuse possibly to leave.

•The goal isn’t to get this right every single time, it’s to move forward feeling slightly better with how you handled situations, compared to your history. There will be times when you have complete control over yourself, but break the next time. That is okay, as we already proved we’re capable of doing so, and it takes awhile to break a cycle of reactions that we spent years being in.

•Watching them realize that their pokes no longer make you react, while you can see them building confusion and frustration, with more aggressive attempts to change the amount control you have over your calm, is by far the most free and powerful feeling, I ever had. This is also why you have someone else with or around you, as this will seem out of no where to them, and losing control of someone else, is a hard thing to accept.

In order for me to let go of the 18 years of proven potential, security, and trust, that my 20 year marriage had compacted over those years, I had to accept the past year and half’s reality for what it was.. This was difficult for me, yes we had struggles, but we had made it through everything, what could possibly bring on this type of behavior from him? It didn’t matter, what I learned was I had to understand the role I played, in the situation that bothered me the most, then determined how I hoped to act/react if it happened again. I had to rebuild my confidence, my intuition, my trust within myself. Be patient with yourself, be compassionate with yourself, but most importantly remember your worthy of the hard times that you may find yourself dealing with, all in an effort to be a better you.

You are welcome, Eva.

You were asking for connection and respect, and instead of being met with empathy, you were told you were lacking “understanding.”

In other words, you were expressing real, valid needs. But he framed those needs as a problem, leading to the breakup.

Accusing you of being not “understanding” enough — flips the script. Instead of him being accountable for neglect or emotional distance, he positioned you as the problem. This is a classic reversal tactic that leaves the other person carrying the emotional burden.

It seems like love and connection with him were contingent on your silence and self-erasure. The idea that you might have “saved” the relationship by suppressing your needs suggests you were trained to believe that emotional expression equals rejection…?

Eva, you didn’t ruin the relationship by speaking up — you revealed a truth that he wasn’t willing to meet. Your needs weren’t too much — they were unmet.

You deserve to grieve not just the loss of the relationship, but the loss of safety in expressing your truth. That grief is sacred. It’s not weakness — it’s evidence of your emotional integrity.

With care, Anita

Dear Eva:

You loved him. That’s real. That’s sacred. And now your body is trying to understand how something so big could end. Of course it hurts. Of course it feels stuck. You’re not failing to move on — you’re surviving the rupture.

Here are a few gentle things that you can try so to feel better:

* Sit quietly, place one hand on your chest and one on your stomach. Breathe slowly. Say to yourself: “I am safe. I am grieving. My body is allowed to feel.”

* Instead of replaying the breakup, name your feelings: try saying: “This is sadness.” “This is longing.” “This is fear.” Naming the feeling helps your brain shift from spiraling to soothing.

* Splash cold water on your face or hold an ice cube. It can interrupt the panic loop and bring you back to the present.

* Try journaling a few lines to your body, like: “Dear chest, I know you’re hurting. I’m listening.” “Dear stomach, I know you’re scared. I’m here.” This helps you reconnect with your body as an ally, not an enemy.

You don’t have to accept that it’s over all at once. You don’t have to move on today. You just have to survive this moment. And then the next. And I promise — even if it doesn’t feel like it — your heart will find its rhythm again.

You are not alone in this garden of grief. And you are not broken for feeling it so deeply.

🤍Anita

“We weren’t for each other. And that hurts too much.”- be there for yourself, Eva. Be there on your side. Truly. Unapologetically.

Anita