I dont have any solid advice brother, but i just had to reply and tell you that you are not alone or the only one going through this, life sucks sometimes. i have a very similar story, on another thread am still looking for the answers you are too. I hope you get some peace of mind and strength to get out of this mess. I ll pray for you,
Take care
C

There’s a consensus here, that first love is pretty intense. First off, accept that, but also accept that “never” getting over her, doesn’t mean never moving-on to other healthy, happy relationships. It’s unhealthy to obsess over past mistakes and “what-if” scenarios. In all that self-annihilation, we can caught-up in the guilt and over-romanticize the past as a result – not even that person could live-up to the myth we’ve created, if they did come back. You already acknowledge that, and that’s great!

Realizing and accepting that will help to propel you forward. But, also, realize that propelling forward doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re ready to seek a new relationship, and that’s okay, too! I think too much emphasis is placed on finding love in another. Family and friends can be too pushy and expecting in that area. You’re your own person, and will heal in your own time. You should feel free to carry-on exploring yourself, and learning to love the guy you’ve spent the past few years beating-up. You’re not that person anymore, like your ex…you’re changing and growing, too. It may not seem like it to you, but that’s because your using her as a too,l of measurement. You’re advancing in your own way, but it is advancing….even if you can’t see it right now. :0)

Understand, too, there’s a difference between loving someone and pining for a memory of happier times. That’s a memory, a phantom of the past that haunts you. It’s only real in terms of your inability to let go of the ghost. You are replaying memories as if it were your favorite movie, over and over and over, and wishing yourself into the film. It’s fruitless, so stop the rewind. There’s nothing in all that replay that will change where you are today, and you need to know and feel confident that you are exactly where you should be. You are on a journey to create new experiences and new memories with or without new women that’ll be just as rewarding. Just accept and allow it, without perpetually comparing it to your favorite. You will discover new favorites.

Don’t dwell on ghosts, or worry about the future and where you are “supposed” to be in your healing.

You’ll be all right. :0)

i started all this when was 22 i m now 35 and still piniing for my ex bf, though its very true that he is not a god which my memories have made him his reality is very different from the myth that i have of him but still i m not able to forget him. if u want to know n detail u can read emotional bondage, in emotional mastery.

Thanks for sharing your battle, T. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for you to still feel this way after such a (long) time. I don’t presume to know any details about the situation as you haven’t particularly divulged but what is ostensible is that (a) this girl was your first actual love and (b) you’re a highly sensitive person (HSP), very emotive, and intensely sentimental. I’m not diagnosing you, I’m just commiserating with your situation because I too am the same, reeling from a much more recent breakdown. Our situations cannot be compared on paper, but by relativity I believe I have many things in common with your story.

I had an exceedingly intense 2-month relationship (about 6-months ago) with a girl who was 5-years my junior and dealing with wardrobes full of demons and past hurts. She could not be mature, rational, or accountable near the end and chose to end it because it had become unhealthy, without even the slightest observation of her own involvement in its demise. The more I dwell on it or recollect for purposes such as this, the more I tend to gloss over my own insecurities, trust issues, inferiority complexes, and other neuroses that contributed to the relationship being untenable. But where I failed in the early stages of not knowing how to deal with her panic attacks, nervous breakdowns, and general manic depressive tendencies, I succeeded in my will to improve, become more sensitive to her past, and support her as best I could. On the other hand, she became resentful of this and completely emotionally inaccessible because she honestly felt sick every time someone tried to help her or felt sorry for her. She explained to me that every time someone tried to be close and supportive, sympathetic, and apologetic of her past it actually pushed them away because it ran the assumption she was weak and hadn’t surpassed it.

Anyway, to summate with a little concision: the relationship ended when I had to go overseas for a university exchange semester. We left on a good note, having evaluated what we wanted and deciding to use my time away not officially in a relationship but working toward one by getting to know each other even more. This went well for about two weeks before she quintessentially back-flipped and suddenly couldn’t deal with my being away, proceeding to erase me from all social media and any possibility for contact. At this point, all our mutual friends hated me, I received threats of violence from her family if I ever tried to contact, and the church and workplace we both shared scapegoated me for being, as translated from her, ‘manipulative, selfish, lying, and emotionally aggressive with not the propriety to care and consider others.’ I went into a deeply depressed state whilst overseas with little direct support and seldom an ear to vent but for online mediums like this. Those 5- or 6-months were demonstrative of the hardest period in my life bar none. Not only had I lost something I’d invested so much spiritually, emotionally, and physically into but I’d been handed absolutely no closure or chance of recourse. I had no idea what happened. Nothing made sense. Suddenly the very thing that had protected me from harm had become the harm. And I couldn’t move on until I got back and met her in person. So, essentially I waited half a year just to get back to her and begin to move on. I couldn’t do it over there in that metaphorical prison because I maintained the hope that this had all happened due to her inability to deal with my absence.

When I got back home, I couldn’t hold out. I went straight to see her, to get her back, to at least be granted an answer to my ‘why?’ When I saw her for the first time my heart hadn’t changed for half-a-year, I was still in that same place. To my surprise, she was hugely interested in both updating me on her goings-on and finding out about mine. We talked and flirted for that entire day. She contacted me the next and we rinsed and repeated the day prior, with the addition of remorse and genuine requests for forgiveness on how she had acted. She said she was in a bad place and told me she wanted to go back to how it was before I’d gone overseas. My heart was renewed. That cold, black thing finally pumped again, as within an instant it shed the pain of past burdens and stresses. I was whole again and everything made sense. After this, she felt it important to our new bond that we try to unfetter the problems that had disqualified a healthy relationship in the past. So she informed me she had slept with three different guys since I’d been gone, only one with whom she’d had a relationship. I accepted this even though it irked me to no end – how I was left in a spatial and temporal void pining for her alone, only to hear she had attempted to get over me by divvying up her body between scoundrels. Even so, I accepted and forgave because I wanted her to do the same of me and wanted to move on to something new. That night she invited me over and I stayed. We kissed, we shared, we exploded unto each other 6-months-worth of re-acquaintance. Then, just as suddenly as she had come back into my life she had disappeared and voluntarily sabotaged everything.

The next day she told me to get out of her life forever – again, with no reason. I asked to talk to her and tried to convey to her that she acted so sporadically like this because of her past and that I wasn’t here to judge or hate or misconstrue but simply to be a friend and help her through. Against her wishes, I went around to her house to console her and found the police had been called and I charged with rape. I just laughed at how ridiculous it was until I heard it from her own mouth and that’s when I knew I had to force myself to move on from this girl. It was the first time in my life someone had gone from the most adored thing in my heart to some malignant, spiteful stranger I no longer knew. She never continued with the allegations but to stand in a room full of accusatory people believing such a heinous lie made me sick and being unable to represent myself accordingly was even sicker. This was barely a month ago and still I have no reason why someone I loved (and presumably loved me) could have treated me with such agonising asperity and acrimony. Now, I have even less closure than I did going back into this. I have lost the respect and dignity of most of my social circles because, whilst she never advanced her accusation legally, that never stopped her propagating this filth to friends, family, work colleagues, and fellow Christians. I’ve lost my job and church but at least my true friends have been underscored.

What I wanted to say to you before detail and verbosity overcame me:

You’re an HSP and that makes it immeasurably harder to move on – I can see this patently in your inhibition to go back to college and inability to remove yourself from that time you shared as one. I too am constantly haunted by trivialities and flinch at even the slightest recollection of my girl and the good times. I walk around the house and I’ll see the one bent spoon amongst the 9 others and know how it got bent, know the story behind it, know how it is irrevocably connected to her. I smell grapefruit soap and go to pieces because it was ‘her’ soap and, later, ‘our’ soap. I see the chip in the wall, the broken shelf in the fridge, the immovable stain on my bed, the shirt of hers that had gotten lost in my closet, the times I wake up in the morning to find one of her hairs roguishly entwined in my beard. These are the pieces of her that remind me of days gone, moments lost, compiling a cruel confrontation of reality that continues to shred me.

You don’t need to utterly get over her if this is how you’re dealing with it but you definitely need to understand that at some point you’re missing the relationship more than her. You’re missing the intimacy, companionship, and co-dependency of another person. Knowing someone will be there when you get home after a long day at work, the thrill of hearing your phone’s message alert after a fight and knowing that it’s her, the many little and varied nuances that make up your personal affiliation with another human. It hurts but I guess, given my situation, that I had no choice but to get over mine. I’m definitely not over it. I have good days and bad. Having no idea what made her flick the switch and become a completely different person makes me want to stop progressing but that’s still me allowing her to control me and have influence on my life even if only indirectly. Yours, without details, appears to be a little less complicated but still just as saddening. Being HSP I think also makes us invest a lot more and therefore want a lot more back. I’m not saying you loved her more than she did you, I’m just saying that different people interpret their love and level of involvement in different ways and expecting everyone to be the same or even similar to oneself is just not realistic. People are pathologically different, sometimes broken, and that at least in my case I needed to acknowledge, however hard it was, that I truly, madly, deeply could not love her as I wanted. She wanted something completely different to what I wanted, it’s as obvious as the fact that the relationship is no longer active. But as HSPs we get utterly despondent about that because we can’t comprehend that the memory we have constructed of them amidst our state of obsession is much more attractive a version of that person than ever existed. Think about that for a moment.

You’re asking why you can’t stop thinking about her and then you plain state that you never wanted her to leave and are still reeling from an apparent lack of closure. Unfortunately what we want or expect from people are not conducive to getting over someone. We keep adding ‘if only’ to everything. If only she gave me a reason, then I could move on. If only she wanted to stay friends. If only she kept in contact with me. If only I did this. If only she did that etc. These are illusory easy-fixes that act as obstructions to us moving on. We keep holding out for these miracle circumstances that never come, or at least this is how I processed the post-breakup. Even so, you can take advice, get some support, but HSPs find it hard to let go and always wind up back on networks such as this, talking about the past, hoping that past will transcend the future, and expecting a tip, a miracle, a hidden clue that might finally usher in clarity.

You say it scares you to move on and believe me that terrifies me also, yet you previously talk of the fact that you have not been in contact with her for years and that you don’t even go on social media to stalk out some details about her. These two are huge signs you have some self-control in avoiding getting stuck on her. I can’t say the same. I kept squeezing myself into communicatory situations with her and even now find myself suddenly needing to check her facebook or instagram, to see what pictures she’s recently liked or what guys she’s just added. And I hate myself for it but I can’t seem to stop. So props to you for that. I also get the need to care for someone that has hurt you so badly. I look back on my relationship and I think, again, ‘if only’ she would let me be there for her as a friend then she could see how much of a good thing I am. But that in itself is paradoxical because we should never feel the need to convince, persuade, or coerce someone into caring for us. That is not love, but something desperate and conditional.

Finding new women is one thing but being attracted to them after having pedestalled one above all things is another entirely. I look back on mine and I can honestly find few physical faults, she was gorgeous and very generous and her personality was fun and intellectually unchallenging, yet I found this nothing but endearing. Now I look at other girls and I can’t appreciate them in their own light. I’m constantly directing them into my life but then only allowing myself to perceive them through the lens of my ex. It’s unfair but natural and something that really needs to be dealt with but naturally only. Don’t force yourself to forget about your ex in that respect and, by the same token, don’t disallow yourself to become attracted to something new just because it is not familiar.

Anyway, this has gone on for far too long and I apologise. I just felt I needed to preface my sentiments with a bit of perspective-enabling backstory. I’m exactly like you and am relieved (in the most benign way possible) that after three years you still have this problem with finality. As always, I’m very interested in hearing more about this, especially if it helps my own journey. Thanks so much for sharing.

T.

I will not delve into my extensive story but I will share briefly of my day to day living.

I feel like I’m in the beginning stages of what you’re currently experiencing.The distraught and pain that my breakup has induced on me as a human feels almost unbearable at times. Mentally and emotionally, I feel like I share the same outlook and stance as you. The same painstakingly affirmation that I too will never truly get over my first love. I’m only in the beginning stages, being 6 months since our separation. Within those 6 months, the thoughts, the memories, the constant tug-of-war with the mind has hardly lessened to a degree that makes me feel normal. Is this what normal will be like? I’ve by no means thrown in the towel with my life, I have plenty of friends, plenty of hobbies and interest. I live healthy, actively, and positively. Has this helped? No. I have dreams, aspirations, and goals all to which I know I will excel at. My life will only be full again with a significant other, at least to my knowledge and beliefs. Trying to find happiness in the emptiness of being alone is very difficult.

She left me in the worst of ways, for another guy. And like you, someone who just overall seems so inferior. She’s apparently “in love” with him now after us being together for 4 years. I would conclude that I was a mistake, and was rewritten and forgotten of. I admire your strength as to not pursue her on social media sites, as I fall victim to this time and time again. The images and words that I have read from her have burned so deeply into my brain that I feel like it will carry with me to the grave. Weird how the mind works. It wants to know what’s going on in the life of someone you love, but at the same time knows the pain in which it will bring. It’s a pendulum like scenario. One side is curiosity and love, and the other is pain and hurt. It’s a continuous cycle. Personally I hit the wall with it, and hopefully my mind will refuse to search her up from this day forth.

Like yours, she too changed, not for the better. She become immature, distant, and heartless.

Like anything in life, I’ve been trying to utilize it as a lesson. As a teacher. If you take nothing from it then it was a waste of time, an in essence a mistake. You’re not alone in this fight T. Ive fought every day for 6 months now with no sunlight in the horizon.

Strength. Perseverance. Determination. Love.

You’ll win this fight. Just remember, you’re in control of you.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 2 months ago by Kevin.

Seeing someone you love with another person is the hardest thing I can say I’ve personally ever had to experience. Because everything else it appears balances on the fulcrum of love. I could lose my job, friends, even principles and I believe it could all be accepted if only I had her. When I was overseas on exchange, there were a slew of other problems that squeezed out and none of which affected me at all close to losing my relationship. If I could put a close second, it would be my childhood friend dying to an ephemeral-onset tumour back in Australia and me being completely unable to see him before he died. But even that shook me less than seeing but one picture – one specific collection of pixels – that showed her happy, smiling, with a new guy, and completely moved on from me. People can die but if only I had her then nothing could hurt me or challenge me. I don’t think that’s blind obsession, I think that’s wanting to feel again how that one person could make you feel. In my case, I believe I miss(ed) the relationship more than her but now that I really thought about what you said, I do honestly miss her as her. But that version doesn’t exist anymore and will never again exist, at least toward me.

It’s easy for me to find placation and commiseration from strangers when I tell them of how ‘it’ ended and how wronged I was. However, as I’m talking about the bad stuff I’m thinking all the while back to the things that made me love her. You so affectionately described you ex’s soft-spoken voice that I started to miss this anonymous girl. I’m exactly the same: I remember her accent, her unbridled generosity, and her genuine sympathy for others’ pain, however trivial. I look at these traits that defined her, that I loved her for, and then compare them against how she treated me with such cold, relentless indifference at ‘the end’ and I just don’t understand what happened. It was such sheer contradiction. I mean, I’ve always been relatively quick to anger, unreasonable, and often impatient. I understand these are faults or at least negative denotations I need to regulate. But from start to the finish I’ve always plain manifested these traits because they are characteristically ‘me’ and allowing people to see my true colours gives them the ability to either help improve me or adapt to me. As a result, there are basically no surprises for the other person. Even in my darkest mood I can’t even imagine suddenly acting so antithetically. Yet you, Kevin, and I have each talked of severe deviations in character from the people we love(d), to the point that they became strangers.

Heartlessness, spite, immaturity, irrationality, unaccountability, resentment seem to be oft-accessed players in this and are employed in ways that make us feel as though the love was never requited in the first place. I think this is because deep down they at least have the capacity to know they are being unfair and need to overcompensate to hide this. I also think people accuse others of what they themselves are capable of. An example of this is when jealousy correlates competently with guilt: my ex would always be jealous of me talking to other girls, even when I unveiled them as my cousin or married work colleague or platonic friend and that was because she was not only capable of cheating but eventually did cheat and probably had numerous times in the past. In the same way, there is no need for someone who no longer wants to be in a relationship to overreact like these girls do when there is nothing to overreact about. If you fall out of love then you fall out of love and that’s that. But when you perhaps fall out of love and then, feeling guilty, unreasonably decide to chastise the other person who still loves you, whilst consciously hating them and resenting them for this is complete emotional terrorism. The trend appears to be such that these girls use psychological hurt and ‘scapegoatism’ as first-resorts (rather than last resorts) in effort to produce instant and efficient distance from former loves. I understand if I’m harassing a girl, sending gifts, pleading for forgiveness, and ultimately transcending conventional modes of ‘getting back together’ to the point that I become a stalker then, yeah, treating me like shit would then make sense. But we love them… and they hate us… and then we end up hating ourselves.

With my ex, I only really found out about our problems at the end of our relationship, as in, after she had already decided she didn’t want to be in it as a result of these problems. I explained to her that argumentation, to a point, will always be one of the healthiest things in any relationship because it stimulates understanding, which in turn begets compromise. She obviously did not agree since she functions under some perverted form of self-projected affirmation that obstructs her from having any accountability. Basically: everything she said or did was correct and my disagreeing with her meant I was the hateful, angry, manipulative bad guy. It’s easy to quantify immaturity and say, ‘well, from this age to this age people are immature or mature’ but again it’s socially and environmentally dependent. My ex was 20 so I quickly wanted to label immaturity as my reason for closure but I have met people much more self-aware, down to earth, and emotionally accomplished than her at that age or younger, so I digress.

Kevin went through the victimisation of being cheated upon, and I say ‘cheated’ because even though she left him for another guy and may not have physically consummated this sentiment whilst in a relationship with him, I feel that emotional infidelity is just as, if not more, catastrophic. It is easy to draw down and repudiate an official title (‘she is my girlfriend’; ‘we are in a relationship’ etc.) on a whim but the soul remains connected, always. You guys might have been spatially separated, but emotionally, spiritually, cosmically? No. No way. That is why when someone departs from a relationship it is rarely consensual but yet people only ever look at the physical, spatial, geographical perspective of ‘relationship’ to determine whether it is on or off, never the actual side where the good stuff (hard stuff) resides.

As Kevin talked of, we know we are worth more than how we were treated but this neither fixes anything nor helps us feel better with any immediacy. To this day, this hour, this moment, with all that’s happened, I would still utter a resounding ‘yes’ if that original version of my ex exploded back into my life, wanting me back with the same intensity. I said earlier that I believe people like us (often HSPs) can obsess over detail to the point that we miss the relationship more than the person. I think this is true, but it doesn’t have any bearing on the fact that some people move on quickly and that this is proportionate to the degree to which they invested. I always invest, or try to invest, 100% so it is immeasurably harder and more excruciating to move on when the time comes, whereas my ex is one of those people who always needs attention, always needs validation, and always needs to be in a relationship or be loved by someone. She went through three relationships in four months and from the mutual friends I talked to (and on the sad occasions I would search out her social media) she talked about how much better the successive iteration was. It was almost as if her love or idea thereof was copy-pasted between relationships with little rhyme or reason. I will never understand this kind of person and it’s not entirely a sign of immaturity, some just depend upon relational status as a prime descriptor of identity.

The unfounded promises always cut deeply. I’m reading your section about the baby and it’s shocking but coldly familiar. I understand love is supposed to be an organic, unpredictable thing but it is also the most socially acceptable form of insanity known to this world. People can say things here and there without realising that one day they might be held accountable – that one day they might decide to call it over, unfairly expecting absolution from all the promises they have left to burden their now-shattered exes. Hearing your story now about sudden changes in people leads me to believe that 100% devotion to a relationship is entirely up for interpretation. Your 100% appears to involve reciprocity, compromise, trust, and likeminded expectation otherwise this wouldn’t continue an active source of pain in your life so many years on. Her 100%, on the other hand, sounds like it involved a whole lot less commitment overall, but this isn’t her fault per se. The fault basically is tied to the assumption you (we) made that both sides of the relationship were balanced in their contribution and understanding. There is no problem with different levels of commitment because, as I said before, people are fundamentally different and that’s where communication comes necessarily into play. In your relationship, there was a definite conscious move by your ex to disconnect but try to consider that subconsciously you might have acted in ways that may have caused this. Without knowing any intimate details about the actual breakdown, I’m just speculating – although this, however selfish, is in light of my own situation. When all was said and done, my ex definitely surpassed me in vindictiveness, malice, and an unjustifiable failure to communicate. Her destructive path has been well documented but I would be lying if I said there weren’t (small) problems inherent at my end that might very well have seeped out and catalysed the (large) problems at hers.

Additionally, with the baby thing, I think your ex was always 100%. It’s just that some people can disengage emotionally so much easier than others; how they go about disengaging is what defines them, regardless of the motivation. When the relationship ended – be it in her mind, heart, or spirit – she didn’t think much of her promise(s) whereas that was the very thing you clung too and that hurts, that someone could somehow misinterpret you so callously. Honestly, I think communication is the most necessary thing in a relationship and, as such, assumption is the most harmful. In my relationship, I assumed that everything was typically fine only to hear during its breakdown of all my problems, failings, insecurities, and neuroses that she flagged as reason. All she needed at the end was convenience, not wanting to work on any said problems but rather wanting to move on to people who were ‘perfect, not flawed’ she said. I told her relationships weren’t perfect products you go into a store and buy, coming with an instruction manual, and a number to call for maintenance. They require decisive critique and constructive analysis to achieve an arrangement that is understood and accepted in simpatico.

I’m relieved that you still believe you love this girl, something I think is fairly common for a first love. What strikes me most, however, is that this girl was not the first but the third. For me, this recent relationship was the first proper one too but there weren’t really any serious ones prior. I had a handful of dalliances and extended unofficiated romances but nothing where I actually felt I wanted someone as bad as I wanted her. I’m scared now that it will happen again, that I’ll be hurt again and that, perhaps like you, I won’t allow myself to invest as deeply before or at least until I’m completely healed. I’m such a critical person in every way and that has precluded a lot of relationships from starting because I’ll tend to weigh them against an idealised list of attributes. Funnily enough, my ex came in and ticked scant few of that list yet I couldn’t have even imagined such a combination of beauty, humour, and kind-heartedness unless I’d seen her for myself. I’m not saying ‘don’t make lists’, I’m saying don’t hold those lists with such compulsion that you forget that they can be rewritten in a single heartbeat.

My friends’ advice in this has been many and varied. They have told me it would all get better, that time was curative. But I don’t want to get better unless better is with her. I don’t want time to heal, unless time is going to bring her back. I don’t want to get over her as she has done of me with such ostensible success, unless getting over her will somehow re-enact her love. I have good and bad periods of time just like everyone else. In fact, it’s more like good weeks with an occasional bad day now and then. I’ve noticed that when I get depressed about something I always end up going back and dredging up my past with her, by way of reminiscing moments, stalking memories, searching out items in my house or pictures on my computer. It’s unhealthy because I always link every single bad thing that happens to me back to her and the fact our relationship didn’t work out. In this respect, Kevin’s pendulum analogy is seriously spot-on – a cycle of constant polarity between curiosity and pain with the swinging in between representing the grey void of mediocrity and idle time. But soon enough, its swing will either lose momentum or we’ll be fortunate enough to have it swing to a new true love.

You talk of gaining nothing by dwelling on the past and that is true to an extent but dwell as long as you need in order for you to achieve the self-awareness required to love yourself, want something better, and ultimately move on. The feeling of being a mere footnote, a few dot-pointed pages in her greater and growing tome of existence, is devastating. I remember when I left overseas I was so involved and engrained in her life that I was sure I could not be so easily erased. I knew her parents, had good relationships with her close friends, and we’d begun to build wider social circles of acquaintances that were wholly unique to ‘us’. Then suddenly I was gone. When I first saw the picture of the boyfriend she had after me (in barely a month), I just about melted. I couldn’t eat or sleep and this was during final examinations for law in a foreign country. The picture itself hurt because it was your obligatory ‘in love’ snapshot holding hands and kissing and smiling. But what hurt the most were the comments from those parents, those close friends, those mutual acquaintances who did nothing but accept this new guy. It daggers the soul and baffles the mind.