Dear Lula:

If I understand correctly, you were thinking about telling your best friend that you are in love with him, but you wanted to tell him after your big exam, because telling him would make you anxious and distracted, and therefore less able to focus on studying for the exam.

Your exam was postponed to December, a date has not been confirmed.

Recently, your best friend sent you a message asking you: “I think you loved me somewhere in our journey, am I right?”

Your question today is whether to answer him before or after the exam, if at all.

Did I understand correctly? If I did, remembering that you felt very anxious about the idea of telling him about your feelings for him, I suggest that you do not tell him about your feelings for him until after your exam, be it in December or in January, whenever it will be, or never, as you wish.

At this point, you can either send him a message letting him know that you cannot answer his question/ communicate further until the exam is over, or if it feels too stressful for you to send him such a message, then don’t send him a message until the exam is over.

Do now what you need to do so to be as calm and as focused as you can be on studying for your upcoming exam, and I wish you well with it. Post again, if you need to.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by .

Hi Lula doll,

Humans are social creatures we form bonds and attachments. Some people attach more than others based on their childhood experience. However, we are also naturally made to survive – survival of the fittest. With time, patience and some self love you’ll lose the attachment but it is something you need to choose to do and then commit to.

You need to let go of him because this person is very selfish. He led you on and used you as an emotional support whenever things were going wrong with his actual girlfriend, he was incapable of self awareness. He should never have engaged in the type of talks with you if he was seeing someone else. It is very disrespectful. You may not see it now but you are better off without this toxic mess in your life. It’s down to him being immature and underdeveloped as a human being. The remorse and guilt is something he needs to work through and hopefully it will make him a better man in the future.

You’re a good person that’s why you do not like seeing others hurt no matter how much others hurt you. However you also have very low self esteem for you to continue this ‘friendship’ with someone who shows you how little he valued you through his actions. Do you not deserve a real boyfriend who gives you his full attention or a real friend who will not violate the boundaries especially if they are dating or ‘serious’ with someone else already?

Don’t feed off a person’s breadcrumbs because that will make you complicit. Don’t try to find excuses to remain in touch. Letting go will be hard but it will be the best thing for your self. Look at the effects it’s having on your studies. You’ve made him aware of his actions, the effect on you. You are not responsible for his guilt. He will need to do the work on himself to grow.

I can’t emphasise enough how you shouldn’t be allowing someone who hurt you, used you then initially denied his part until you spelt it out crystal clear to have this much control over you and your future.

Good luck in your studies, may your hard work pay off in your exam. It’s up to you to decide whether you’ll let this impact your life. You have the power to not let it!

Tim

Dear Lula:

I will combine all that you shared on this one thread, including your recent post addressed to me, so to tell your story best I can, and then offer you my thoughts.

You (20) refer to this man (21)  as your “best friend”, a 4.5 years best friend. You “started loving him” in 2016 when you were 16, and he was 17. You thought he loved you back and the two of you sexted (“we sexted”). In 2017, he (18 at the time) told you that his ex-girlfriend is back in his life, and you realized then that “he still loved his ex… she was always there in his heart”.

In 2017, while he was back with his girlfriend, he “still used to have romantic talks” with you. You told him that it is wrong for a man who has a girlfriend, to talk romantically to another woman. His response: he temporarily stopped talking romantically to you, but..  he “never stopped actually”.

In August you texted him: “I’m gonna tell u abt something” referring to telling him that you love him, but later, after your test. He insisted that you tell him sooner. You resisted his insistence and did not tell him.

The day before yesterday, he insisted again that you tell him, you resisted, and he texted you: “I think u loved me somewhere in your journey, am I right?”

You say that in another thread (which is not available to me to re-read), I suggested to you that once you tell him how you feel about him, you should not talk to him anymore (I have no memory of such suggestion, and of the context in which it was given).

When he confronted you with the text above (“I think u loved me…”) the day before yesterday, you were afraid to approve/ confirm what he suggested (that you love him), because that would mean that you would not talk with him after such confirmation, according to my advice to you.  Not talking with him before the test will distress you so much that you will not be able to focus on studying (“now when I know I’m gonna stop talking to him after approving, it’s gonna ruin my preparation for my test”).

You then posted in another person’s thread and then in this one, asking Tim and I what you should do: tell him that you love him and then not talk to him, and therefore be so distressed, lose more weight, and not do well studying for the test or not tell him.

You didn’t receive an answer soon enough, so you decided to tell him: “I opened up to him… I told him each and every thing”. His response: “He is.. crying continuously… He is ashamed that he did this all in my test time… He also said that he hate himself for this.. after listening to my story.. for the pain he had caused to me”, “He said, do u think after all this, I would be happy after she and I get engaged?”

You then regretted to “have gone in that details.. I felt bad that I shouldn’t have gone in that details”, “I don’t want him to hate himself”, and you were relieved that you didn’t tell him “many other things that caused me pain bcz of him that I still remember but he may have forgotten.. I just don’t want him to hate himself..  Me being in love with him can’t see him hating himself for anything”.

My thoughts today:

1. After reading this paragraph, please do the following: lift your eyes from the computer and look around you. If you are in a room, look at the walls or window in front of you, look at what’s on the wall, look at what you can see from the window. Put the computer down and walk to a window, take in the air from the outside (if it is not too hot), take a few breaths slowly and naturally. Listen to the sounds:  Do you see how much bigger the world is- way bigger than your head where all these thoughts and feelings are troubling you? Even your room is so much bigger than the short distance in between your ears. Your room is also much bigger than this young man’s thoughts and feelings. You’ve been drowning in your thoughts and feelings and in his thoughts and feelings as if .. there is nothing else out there in the world. I want you to see and hear (take in the images, listen to the sounds) of what is outside of you: things, plants, animal, the many, many other people.. so that you can come out of that swamp of thoughts and feelings in which you have been drowning. Please do so and then return to the next paragraph.

2. You wrote: “he knew.. he thought.. he said… he was crying… he realized.. he is blaming.. he is saying.. He.. he.. he”- practically, he is not important in your life: he is not paying for the food you eat, for the house you live in, for your studies.. he has a girlfriend who is not you; there is no plan of marriage with him.

You have a test to take in December. This test is practically important in your life- it will help you get a better paying job so that you can with you can buy food and other things you need and want. Try to separate your feelings (your subjective reality) from attending to the practicality of life (the objective reality).

3. I couldn’t noticing that you wrote that the two of you sexted. Now, how can it possibly be that he allegedly never considered that you have loving feelings for him while and after sexting???

And, how can he possibly not have considered that you have feelings for him while he repeatedly talked to you romantically???

Unless you can answer these two questions in a way that makes sense to me, I am assuming that he was not sincere with you when he acted surprised that you most recently told him that you loved him.

4. After you most recently told him in detail about how much pain you suffered during the years, while he talked to you about his girlfriend etc., he asked you: “do u think after all this, I would be happy after she and I get engaged?”- well, he doesn’t have to get engaged with her, does he? I mean, if he expects to not be happy being engaged to her.. he shouldn’t. What I am trying to say is that it reads to me that he is not sincere about feeling shame and guilt and regret, but instead- he is trying to make you feel bad,  guilt-tripping you.

You told him in detail about how much pain you were in all these years, and –> he managed to turn it to how much pain he is feeling now- because you told him.

5. You wrote: “He isn’t selfish… he thought I didn’t had any feelings for him.. therefore he used to tell me about his gf”- I think what I italicized is a lie. I can see in your posts how emotional you are, no way your emotions were not evident to another human being with minimal emotional intelligence.

I think that it is time for you to stop believing everything he tells you. Just because he says something, does not make that something true. If he never thought you had romantic/ sexual feelings for him, he wouldn’t have repeatedly talked to you romantically, nor would he have sexted you. He talked to you romantically because he felt that you were receptive for such talk, receptive because  you had feelings for him.

“he now knows that he shouldn’t have done those talks.. bcz he had her in his heart”- well, he didn’t have her in his heart when he talked romantically to you, or sexted with you. “I love my best friend but he already loves someone else”- if you didn’t have a  boyfriend since 2016, if you had only him on your mind and heart, can you see that the type of love you have for him (“I love”)  is different from the type of love he has for his girlfriend (“he loves”).. can you see that he doesn’t have only her on his  mind and heart?

6. The Issue here is what you pointed to here: “the attachment I have with him.. uhhh.. I don’t know how this attachment is gonna end. I couldn’t stop myself from talking to him”- an attachment like the one you have for him is about you being very lonely otherwise, not being securely attached to anyone else. I am guessing that you don’t feel connected and understood by anyone in your family, or by friends, and the only one you feel connected/ attached to-  is this 21 year old young man.

We humans have to be attached to someone, because we are by nature, social animals. If you are not attached to anyone but him, you will keep needing him desperately to be in your life.

“Any ideas/ suggestions of how to end attachment with a person?”- if you are attached only to him, and without him there is no one else you feel attached to, you will not end your attachment to him. If you become attached to someone else, then you have the option of ending your attachment to him. The answer then is to form an emotional attachment to someone else, someone who will honest with you, someone worthy of your trust. Who could that possibly be?

anita