Shelbyville,

I forgot to add what you might know about the grief process. DABDA: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. You can google more for each of them, but personally, after the initial shock has worn off (“Oh no, s/he couldn’t have! It is a mistake! S/he will come round to her/his senses! Can’t be true”, etc.) and before acceptance (“It is what it is” and you are content, maybe even happy), one goes from one to another. In my case, I started feeling a little anger only now, over three years (!!!) after the breakup. I am not particularly proud of it, but I wouldn’t mind him falling in love with me all over again (also my pride speaking because he has never ever gone back to any old flame of his) and me toying with him for some time to say “Sorry, babe, can’t do it” afterwards. I mostly felt depression (probably had a propensity to it before and the split just exacerbated it) after the split. Bargaining also took place when I thought I could win him back. Well, you can’t “win” anyone back, no more than you can “conquer” anyone or make them love you. I like the sayings “It takes two to tango” and “the relationship is a two-way street” and “You can lead a horse to the water but you can’t make him drink.”

So I would say don’t be surprised to start thinking “what if” (bargaining) again or crying or anything. You may even play a little psychologist with yourself catching and determining what it is you are feeling right now and what stage of the grief process it is.

Try to derive little pleasures from your everyday life (buy a pastry, go out to see the night sky, etc.) And tell yourself that you will try to live the life the way it is unfolding and you will revisit and examine where you are heart-wise one year later. It may very well happen that you will notice that you are feeling much better and not thinking about him as much as you used to well before that one-year mark.

It also helped me to remember on the conscious level that I had been devastated just like that after my very first breakup and very first love. Well, I survived to fall in love again, then fell in love with this guy. Also, I had a couple of infatuations after him. I knew I was not fully ready, but I also knew that with time, the attachment to my ex would fade and if the new guy stayed in my life, I would fall in love with him. Unfortunately, he had his own problems and it didn’t work out, BUT it did take my focus off my ex AND I hadn’t YET fallen in love with the new guy, so was kind of stuck in-between. That happened three years ago, and it has been like that since. For my ex I feel nothing, even wouldn’t mind him suffering (as written above) (so not exactly nothing he-he) and for the new guy I sort of entertain a very vague hope that doesn’t however prevent me from living my life as a single and enjoying it.

I am also aware that I have much more freedom now to do what I want and how I want (my ex was what you would call high-maintenance). I also remember all those little things that I turned a blind eye to thinking that he was tired, stressed at work, etc and that things would get better with time. Well, they hardly ever get better with time and, for instance, stress and being tired doesn’t prevent my father to do some things for me that my ex could have done but didn’t. I do look at his new wife’s social media account once every three months or so and realise that I don’t want to live the life she is living now, because my ex hasn’t changed. I suspect him to be a covert narcissist, so, in all frankness, I don’t want to live my life waiting for my partner to FINALLY take time off work for us to go travelling (he did it at the very beginning of the romance, but there it stopped both for me and for her – and I have travelled alone to many more places than I could have travelled with him if we had still been together during these three years), to live my life wondering if I am truly the one (he was not exactly a womanizer, but one couldn’t help wondering quite often whether he was behaving as a true gentleman or actually liked another lady – I can see the same in his body language in real life (we still meet occasionally)) and so on.

Oh, and one more thing that did have a huge impact on me. I happened to come across a short article in a free magazine lying around at work (weird how one stumbles upon meaningful things sometimes!). The short four-paragraph article was about being single during holiday time and the sentence that attracted my attention was, “It is not being alone that hurts, it is being unloved that hurts.” I started digging into it. The long and the short of it was that you can make an effort and try to see love that other people give to you. I remember my mother giving me a chain with a pendant for my birthday and all that I could think was, “Why is it not my boyfriend giving me a chain with that tiny heart? He did give me one when we started dating, he even spoke about a bracelet several times after that, but it has been three years now and nothing…” I resented my mother’s gift because of my boyfriend! See what co-dependency can do to oneself?!! So I started sharing more about myself with other people and making an effort to notice when someone approached me for something – a talk, a piece of advice or information, opening up more, etc. Where in the past I would reserve EVERYTHING for my boyfriend (of course, he is my second half, everything for him and everything with him, if we are not together, the occasion is not worth it), now I tried to “spread” my existence among everyone whom I liked. Doing that also helped me to be less in my thoughts and more in the moment.

Also, I picked up some things that we had been doing or intended to do together. Like travelling to certain places (I would always know where we would go next and then after that – not a strict list, but more like “have an idea for the foreseeable future (3-4 years)) or mastering shooting. It was a little hard at the beginning to restart on one’s own what we had been doing together, but I wouldn’t be starting things that I didn’t like, so the excitement of the activity erased the feeling of missing that he was not there (besides, he didn’t behave the way he said he would after the breakup and my ideal of him was shattered even more on the conscious level; it was only a matter of time for my heart to follow my brain). And once you get better doing something, you get that extra confidence and become more proud of yourself. (In addition, you might meet somebody along the way and cross a few items off your list – only pluses.) So by the time you are done with the original “list” for the two of you, it has been a couple of years (or more – I am very faithful and if I get attached, I get attached), but time and new impressions and experiences do their hidden work in the background, so you emerge feeling relief because your list is done and you are a new person with no luggage (and many more new skills and knowledge).

So be gentle with yourself and take your time.

Good luck,

X

You are very welcome.

You might also want to look at the threads of dreaming715. She was dumped by her fiancé, then got emotionally involved with a man who kind of led her on, but didn’t respond to her feelings – situations I could very well relate to. I am not sure she is really-really happy in her current relationship, but she writes that she loves her current boyfriend very much.

It was a consolation for me to see that the feelings, ideas and thoughts that I had were nothing out of the ordinary and that what I felt might have been felt by another person and vice versa.

https://tinybuddha.com/members/dreaming715/topics/page/4/

Also, you might get an idea of her timeline, though of course each case is different. Even with me, when in the heat of the moment, I think that I am just as attached as I was with X, Y or Z, maybe even more, but as time passes, I can see that no, I was that attached and it took me X time to get over and there I thought that I was attached even more, but it took less time…

My main take on life in general and relationships in particular now is that there are no rules or patterns. Everything should be taken as it comes and viewed and experienced on a case-by-case basis.

All the very best,

X

I am mad today too. I’m really mad that I’m suffering so much and he’s not. He can’t be, because his heart didn’t break- mine did. He never committed his heart fully therefore he never risked breaking it. I want him to know how much I’m hurt and lost. Every single piece of advice would go against meeting him to discuss it because what on earth would I expect to get out of it? More pain? I don’t know, but I feel I’m slowing breaking into a shadow of my former self and I don’t want him to be okay. I want him to at least be torn up a little by guilt, that he doesn’t get to easily sail off into the distance.

I still have respect for him, so it wouldn’t be a conversation of abuse etc, but I would like to explain how I feel and what the decision has meant for me. I don’t know, will i suffer badly if I decide to do it?

Sorry, I saw these on your other thread and couldn’t help commenting on this.

First, my ex’s heart didn’t break either – his love had been waning for a while (and that is one thing that I still bear a grudge against him for: not that he fell out of love, after all, we can hardly control our feelings, but that he was not aware of his feelings (as he always claimed he was), that he didn’t do anything to maintain his love interest (I seemed to be the only one reading psychology books on love, infatuation, etc. and how to stay in love for a lifetime – he thought it is just a matter of luck and destiny, something along the lines of “if I fall out of love, well, too bad, this only means that you are not the one for me.”) AND how he behaved when he was already head over heels in love with that new woman, but still kept me in the dark about it. He later said that he didn’t want me to behave unreasonably and it was somewhat a fair point. But only somewhat. I compare how he behaved with his ex when he was just head over heels in love with me as he was then with that new woman, and I think that that is where I had made a mistake. I thought he was being careful with her feelings and such (you know like they say, “See how he treats her – that is how he will treat you”), but he was only using her! He needed certain things from her for a while, that is why he was so careful and attentive – a paragon of how one should split with somebody. From me, he didn’t need anything, so he could toss me aside with no regrets (“I met another woman, I am in love with her. You can’t even expect me to say sorry, because we are not in control of our feelings – didn’t you say so yourself?”). A sure narc.

One more recommendation. Natalie Lue’s website Baggage Reclaim on relationships, self-esteem, emotionally unavailable men, narcissists, etc. If you google “Baggage Reclaim Narcissists,” you’ll get right a few links in Google. All are worth checking. I tried the website itself (https://www.baggagereclaim.co.uk/ ), it seems to have changed navigation, so I can’t find a list of all the blog topics, like I used to be able to.

I am bringing this up because of what you wrote above. Whenever I wanted to talk to my ex, I would have that dialogue in my head – and oh, I knew only too well what he would say. Also HOW he would say it. That voiced dialogue in my head immediately convinced me that talking to him wouldn’t lead me anywhere. Worse, I knew what he would say, so why talk to him? If I complained that he wouldn’t do this or that, he would point to an event when he did it – and rightly so! But as Natalie Lue writes, having taken out garbage once or twice in an entire year means that one can’t say that the other party has NEVER done it, but it doesn’t mean that the other party does his or her portion of chores (just an example). And that is how narcissists twist and turn reality, so in the end you feel that something is amiss, that your feelings are valid, but your reason, your mind tells you that you are wrong and that he is right and that you are such a bad person accusing him!

I am not saying that your ex is a narc – hey, I can’t even say that mine was (I am no qualified psychologist), but a few of Natalie’s blog entries did knock some sense into me. Natalie may sound harsh, but sometimes, that is what one needs.

Does he need your explanations of how you feel? I bet he doesn’t. At least, I am 100% positive that mine didn’t. I wrote a timeline of our romance. It became very clear how strong his feelings were for the first two-and-a-half years (that also confused me initially – don’t they say that infatuation doesn’t last that long? So that must be TRUE LOVE!!!)  and then it became up and down, meaning that a few things didn’t feel right, but then there were so many things that showed that he really cared (combined with his adequate explanations and that twisting of facts that made me doubt myself and take the blame on my depression, anxiety, having been dumped by my #1 and whatnot) that the bottom line was “unsure.” And it remained like that until he went MIA before I finally got hold of him and he confessed about that new flame that had been burning for about three months already. Ugh!

So I vented in my diary and tried to do all those things that Zberovskiy writes about. He doesn’t say that they will bring you immediate relief. He says that time surely helps, but if you do them, you can shorten that time to several months.

And then the other guy came along (that kind of led me on), took my focus off my ex and so it goes.

Also, when I met my ex again, he seemed to be a different man – the one I knew him to be with his ex before me. I decided it was safer and easier for me to imagine my ex dead and to try to take this new man as an identical twin of my ex in appearance.

Just a thought.

Take good care of yourself and mean it! 🙂

Mark this day on your 2019 calendar  – even if you are not in love with somebody who is worthy of it, I have no doubt whatsoever that your longing to be with your ex will have dulled one year from now. You will probably view this story as a love story with a not-so-happy ending, but it won’t touch you any more. Something like what you have lived through, appreciated the good, cut your losses, learnt the lesson and moved on. You may forgive, but won’t forget.

Oh, and happy birthday!

X

H A P P Y     B I R T H D A Y,    SHELBY/ STELLA !!!

anita

Dear  Shelby:

You were about thirty when the relationship with your ex boyfriend began, there was a life you had before you met  him, three decades of life not having  known of his existence at all, isn’t it correct>

What was that life  like?

anita