Okay, so hi guys! Trilli here, I've got a bit of a problem. And by problem I mean that for the most part I know what I would tell any one of my friends in this position, and have taken steps to follow my own advice it's just keeping my heart on the stupid leash and not relapsing into maladaptive, romantic thought patterns. And bless my friend's souls, they have been saints through all of this and are here to bear witness to my terrible decision-making. They've provided virtual cups of tea, many a hug and compliment, Fruit's Basket related quotes about umeboshi and just have in general been the support network one dreams of finding. They're indispensable, I love them with every breath. So, all that having been said - I'm going through what happens to be a pretty confusing and complicated romantic de-coupling. I've tried my very best to make the relationship work but my significant other just seemed to get more and more distant and less and less interested in meeting my needs until I felt like the only one in the relationship. Despite this, every time I brought up our issues he seemed to dismiss them as me being reactive or needy - things I have never been in relationships. It's really hard to give an overview of things but here's the score as it stands. Said SO and I met online [as I tend to meet most of my SOs, I have some pretty hardcore emotional unavailability issues and despite seeming pretty generally extroverted and socially competent people scare the living christ out of me. Honestly, if I hadn't moved in with my best friends in the last few semesters of college I would probably have never been able to become friends with them despite previously having been their teacher (I taught a genre fiction class at an intensely geeky university that somehow seemed to have a literary branch buried so far up its CW department's ass it spit woodchips all day long. Woodchips it called 'the plight of the working man' around its 50k/annum silver spoon.) and many many efforts on their part to engage me. ] We met through an extended group of college friends and a convenient IRC channel. I was single and had been happily so for quite some time. I don't really romantically engage all that often. I seem to have really passionate trysts and then just sort of wait for something to pique my interest again whilst being perfectly content by myself with my crochet and my writing. I knew immediately he was a problem child. He was brusque, intelligent, dismissive and generally hard to get along with though he seemed very well intended. And somewhere in me there's a cryptographer mixed with an Austenian romantic that knew we were in trouble. It was Mr. Darcy wrapped in a puzzle box. So, we got to VoIPing, as you do and the nights became longer and our conversations and inevitable disagreements grew more intense and I promised myself nothing would come of it. Then, he did the most remarkable thing. We would have philosophical disagreements, I'd put forth my arguments and we'd debate and I'd expect it to go no further...until he would come back the next day and he would say "you know, I thought about it all day and you're right" - and then he would *change*. I guess I had been so used to people who when they got in such heated debate would entrench themselves in their positions and on principle never concede - and certainly never integrate the new knowledge and never really go back. Everything from feminism to body positivity he just sort of absorbed - or at least it seemed. Anyway without giving an account of our entire relationship, nights became wee hours. Wee hours became sunrises. As it goes. We were perfection until the day we met. Everything went downhill. Apparently, I wasn't his bodily ideal. Then, a million other things that we built our relationship on became problems. He hated the city I lived in. I wasn't punctual enough. He got irritable in traffic for more than 5 minutes. All of these things readily aired. He began to blow hot and cold. I tried to remain constant but I was basically getting torn up. We'd all but said we'd loved each other and had plans and he was just...waning. Or waxing and then waning on longer and longer intervals. He'd ask me to keep the faith in us with little to no reinforcement. Tell me he needed space &etc, tell me his feelings for me were extraordinarily variable and he felt no need to really shield me from his mood swings. One day we'd be perfect and then the next day we'd "have nothing in common" and he'd just want to program all day. On top of that I was consuming some pretty unhealthy rhetoric about my body from him, namely that he just wasn't attracted to me and that if I were to lose some weight maybe he'd like me a bit better. I made some really emotionally charged non-optimal decisions. One of these was to go off the SSRI, prescribed for depression and anxiety, that was working for me but was causing undue amounts of weight gain. (I was at the heaviest I'd ever been and it had been causing me some distress but perhaps when one is having one's heart maimed on the daily it's not the *best* time to make such a change). I know, the physician's daughter in me weeps, too. We swapped to Prozac. Prozac has never been particularly effective for me, things went a bit dark and I got withdrawal-y (be careful with your Paxil, kids) and then as the Prozac failed to do anything useful I got just plain anxious 100% of the time. Finally we got me on Celexa last week and it seems that that's been kicking in. So, at this point I would tell any rational human being any number of the following. 1) Your needs aren't getting met, for whatever reason you need to book it far and book it fast. 2) Dude's just not that into you, pack it in and go find someone who recognizes the goddess in you. 3) Dude is very young, 21 to your 26, and has little to no life experience (not a blanket comment on the age difference - we just admittedly as individuals have very different levels of life and romantic experience). He's demonstrated commitment issues before and this likely has nothing to do with you - stop making excuses for him and treat yourself with some respect. No, it took me a month and a half and a functional anti-dep to summon the backbone to tell him to take the wilderness trek into not-my-space. Diatribe cut short - I broke up with him today and I'm finding it difficult to keep my self talk positive about it. I keep romanticizing and lingering on the "what ifs" and "somedays", hoping that he messages to reverse himself like he always does. Sincerest apologies for the long sad story I just...I could really use some accountability or external something.
Just for edification, he cites being more introverted than I am and just needing time to recharge - which I would totally understand and comply with. I mean, I'm semi-introverted myself and I have no problem just sort of hanging out across the room on a laptop reading or popping in and out. He just says he wants a girlfriend he can basically talk to every few days and spend maybe a couple day stretches with tops when he feels like it. However, we did a) spend the first 3 months essentially in each other's pockets with no indication of difficulty b) when he made this request so many hurtful things had been said that I kept looking for him to validate our feelings. I don't know, I feel like with security comes elasticity in a relationship. That security had kind of been sundered and so the prospect of just letting him do his own thing and drop in whenever he felt like it after that seemed really sort of one sided.
It sounds like that once he saw the physical-you, he just... stopped liking you. Like he'd gotten super invested in the image he'd built of you in his head, and when confronted with the reality, kind of held it against you. Because to me, how he behaved after he met you in person is how people behave to and around people they don't particularly like. We're strangers to one another, but I'm still glad you broke up with him. He was clearly a poor fit for you, and you deserve to have a romantic relationship with someone who not just loves you, but likes you, and acts like it.
Thanks for the reply! Especially on such a long post, oh man. I just can't really stop my brain from perseverating on 'what if I lost the weight, would he be able to love me then?' or 'what if I were his physical ideal from the get-go, would we still be happy?' and entertaining ideas of two months down the line us falling back in love. I know, it's saccharine and unrealistic. I also know that I'm not terribly overweight. I mean, not that that should matter but I'm about 30 lbs above my ideal. It's a fair bit of chub, and he met me at 50 lbs over, but still. And the feminist in me is just like "what the hell are these thoughts?"
It wasn't any problem :) Hahaha I feel this! Every breakup situation I've been part of, part of my mind was thinking of all these soap opera like scenarios where everything works out, and then the rest of my mind is like "what is WRONG with me????" But I figure it more or less comes down to grief. A relationship that ends is a loss, and a relationship that started out good but ends up on not-good terms can feel like even more of one. So you go through the stages of grief as you adjust to being single again, and the "If only I do/I'd done [thing], it would have worked out" sounds like the bargaining stage. You can know in your logical mind that it isn't true there was something you could have reasonably done, but it takes a while to sink in emotionally and process.
You're being very introspective and smart about this! And...no, a man who wants you to lose weight will find something else to pick at once you've lost the weight (and likely made yourself more miserable in the process).
