Hi all! This is my first ever post here, despite being a frequent reader. I found this site a few days after my breakup back in August, and it was a tremendous help to read Kevin’s blog and emails and all of your posts. I still pop in from time to time as I’m going through my healing and I figured it was time to finally post something myself. Perhaps to get some advice but more importantly just for the therapy of sharing my story. God knows my family and friends are sick of hearing about it so maybe someone here will be happy to listen!
My ex and I dated for 7 or 8 months, from December 2014 until this August. We were madly in love and things moved faster with him than they have with any other guy I have dated… he met my family at 3 months, I met his at 5, we said I love you at 4, and at 6 or 7 months he came with me to my hometown to see where I grew up and met all of my friends and family. We were talking about moving in together just before we broke up and had just started to talk vaguely of things like marriage and babies, although we treaded on those topics lightly. Despite how fast it was moving, it all felt right. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been happier.
Then all of a sudden, one day in July, mere days after we talked about moving in together, he sat me down at a bar, asked me how I was feeling about our relationship, and then unloaded a laundry list of reasons why he wasn’t happy and felt like we should break up. I panicked and begged him to give us a chance. It seemed so unfair to suddenly break up with me without having brought up any of these concerns before. He eventually reluctantly agreed to give it another shot, although I was leaving for a 2 week trip the next morning, so really giving us another try would have to wait until I got back.
We texted every day during my trip. I wrote him a letter on paper that addressed many of his concerns and I mailed it to him while I was still gone. He told me many times he still loved me and was looking forward to me coming home. However, the night he picked me up at the airport, we went home to talk about us and it was pretty clear within a few minutes that he was already done. We both had a good drunken cry in each others arms, and he stayed the night in my bed, although we kept our clothes on. The next morning he rolled over to me and said “baby, I fucked up”. I told him that I had fucked up too, to which he responded, “no, you didn’t”. I knew that moment that he had cheated, although it took a few minutes to coax the details out of him. He said that it was only once, with a random girl at a bar, and it had happened before he had ever tried to break up with me, right after he had come back from visiting my hometown (I was still out of town for a few more days). Although it’s become pretty clear that there were so many things he lied about, so I’m not sure how much of what he told me was the truth.
That morning is the last time I saw him. I tried to do a NC period, but wasn’t ever successful at a full 30 days. I went a week, then 10 days, then 18 days. Early on I sent an email with a few last words I felt I had to tell him, because I knew then either I wasn’t ever going to talk to him again, or if I did the next time I talked to him I wanted it to be light and small talky, I didn’t want to have to bring up all of the past baggage, so I tried to get that out of the way early on. He responded saying how sorry he was for hurting me so much, it killed him to hurt me, etc. That was back in late August or early September. More recently we have been texting, just short conversations every week or two. Just once I told him I was drunk and missing him, to which he responded that not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about me. Other than that though, our convos have been light-- eg he congratulated me on taking a big exam a couple weeks ago, or I wished him happy back to the future day last week (one of his favorite movies).
All this time I’ve waffled on whether I even wanted him back if it was possible. At first of course I did, then for a time it seemed like all of our issues were too much to get over. I started a new job shortly after our breakup, and turns out that his ex before me actually works in my office (we live in a large US city, so this is a pretty weird coincidence!). I finally told her about him a few weeks ago, and just in our short conversation in the office hallway she made me feel so much better about him-- she seems to think he is pretty messed up, and she congratulated me on making it out of that situation alive. She said that he is just a stepping stone to better things. I believed her and for a while there I was feeling pretty great. I’ve been enjoying time with friends, bought a new house, loving my new job, even have been dating a little. I’ve been doing everything right to get over him…
And then yesterday for whatever reason I wanted to find some info that I was pretty sure was in our texting conversation from like April, so I scrolled back through all of our texts, something I had successfully avoided doing since our breakup… terrible idea! It brought everything crashing back, and seeing that evidence of how happy and in love we were… and now I feel like I’m back to square one. I am having sex with someone (just like a friends with benefits situation) and I went over to his house yesterday when I was feeling so sad, hoping it would make me feel better, and I ended up crying during sex! Yikes! I feel like if he were to want to give it another shot I would take him back in a heartbeat. I still have some of his stuff and am going to be moving soon, so I was planning on mailing him his stuff next week. Now I am thinking about putting a letter/card in there that hints at how I am feeling to see how he responds…
Anyway, I don’t know if I have any specific questions, but if anyone has any thoughts or advice feel free to share! Thanks for reading this ridiculously long post!
but it’s ok I understand. Sometimes I read others’ posts asking for advice on their situations and I’m like “I have no freakin clue what you OR I should do, that’s why I’m here!”