C
Caroline723
Guest
So this is a bit of a long story but would really value some insight:
About four years ago I met a man and we dated for about 18 months. Our relationship was great in terms of personalities. We seemed to click on a rather profound level without requiring much effort to get there. I wanted to marry him. But he blew hot and cold with me, would profess love and then take it back. Would be warm and loving one day and cold and unempathetic the next. The relationship ended in a mess of frustration and pain. For the first year after, I tried to maintain no contact but we spoke a few times. Then, one year after we broke up he told me he was engaged to someone else. I was heartbroken.
In the fifteen months since then I had no contact with him or any mutual friends. I moved away and assumed he had married and life was well. I have done everything under the sun to move on: prayer, frequent sacraments, therapy, cutting myself off from sources of contact or info. But I have continued to feel such a hole in my heart though over time I grew accustomed to it and life went on. I have tried to be open to dating other men but honestly it has felt forced.
A month ago I received a long, apologetic email from him out of the blue. He sounded like a different person: humble, honest and full of self-reflection. There were things I had wanted to apologize to him for too but never contacted him because it wasn’t appropriate. So I emailed back an apology. He wrote back immediately and said that most of his greatest regrets in life were in regard to me and that he feels things might have been very different if he had tried harder. He implied that he had ended his engagement and would tell me about it later but that he attributed to me his not going down a path to ruin. And he asked to see me.
That started three weeks of emails texts and phone calls. We literally picked up right where we left off but this time he seemed emotionally right there, open and solidly interested. I got a sense from his emails that he had ended the engagement last summer; he said he had spent much of the past year writing and deleting emails to me. I had a trip back to his area planned for this past weekend and we made plans to meet up Friday to talk. Instead he had planned out this day of all the things I had asked him for but he would never do: a museum, Mass and a really nice dinner. We ended up talking till 5am. He told me he loved me. I saw him again Sunday and it was more of the same and by the end he was promising that we were going to be married soon. On Monday when I arrived at his house, something was wrong. He was cold and distant, the old personality. He told me that he felt ‘conflicted’ because he had just ended his engagement FOUR weeks ago. As in days before emailing me. I was floored. He had told me about the engagement but omitted that fact earlier. Anyhow he started back pedaling on everything he had been saying for the past few weeks to me, and said that he never expected to hear back from me on that first email and that afterward our discourse had taken on ‘a life of its own’. I felt sick, used, angry and devastated.
We are both in our 30s and serious Catholics. And it makes me sick that I could use words like ‘narcissistic’ and ‘sociopathic’ to describe him. I love him so deeply. What is wrong with me? Why didn’t God answer my prayers those two years to lift this attachment to him? I see that he is someone who I would always live in fear of being abandoned by and yet my heart still longs to be with him. I wrote to him a few days ago and laid it plainly that his behavior was dishonorable but I left the door open for reconciliation, by telling him that he is never to contact me again unless he is truly marriage-minded. I know I am insane to allow that. He has proved himself to be a liar. My heart refuses to give up hope that this part of him will be healed.
About four years ago I met a man and we dated for about 18 months. Our relationship was great in terms of personalities. We seemed to click on a rather profound level without requiring much effort to get there. I wanted to marry him. But he blew hot and cold with me, would profess love and then take it back. Would be warm and loving one day and cold and unempathetic the next. The relationship ended in a mess of frustration and pain. For the first year after, I tried to maintain no contact but we spoke a few times. Then, one year after we broke up he told me he was engaged to someone else. I was heartbroken.
In the fifteen months since then I had no contact with him or any mutual friends. I moved away and assumed he had married and life was well. I have done everything under the sun to move on: prayer, frequent sacraments, therapy, cutting myself off from sources of contact or info. But I have continued to feel such a hole in my heart though over time I grew accustomed to it and life went on. I have tried to be open to dating other men but honestly it has felt forced.
A month ago I received a long, apologetic email from him out of the blue. He sounded like a different person: humble, honest and full of self-reflection. There were things I had wanted to apologize to him for too but never contacted him because it wasn’t appropriate. So I emailed back an apology. He wrote back immediately and said that most of his greatest regrets in life were in regard to me and that he feels things might have been very different if he had tried harder. He implied that he had ended his engagement and would tell me about it later but that he attributed to me his not going down a path to ruin. And he asked to see me.
That started three weeks of emails texts and phone calls. We literally picked up right where we left off but this time he seemed emotionally right there, open and solidly interested. I got a sense from his emails that he had ended the engagement last summer; he said he had spent much of the past year writing and deleting emails to me. I had a trip back to his area planned for this past weekend and we made plans to meet up Friday to talk. Instead he had planned out this day of all the things I had asked him for but he would never do: a museum, Mass and a really nice dinner. We ended up talking till 5am. He told me he loved me. I saw him again Sunday and it was more of the same and by the end he was promising that we were going to be married soon. On Monday when I arrived at his house, something was wrong. He was cold and distant, the old personality. He told me that he felt ‘conflicted’ because he had just ended his engagement FOUR weeks ago. As in days before emailing me. I was floored. He had told me about the engagement but omitted that fact earlier. Anyhow he started back pedaling on everything he had been saying for the past few weeks to me, and said that he never expected to hear back from me on that first email and that afterward our discourse had taken on ‘a life of its own’. I felt sick, used, angry and devastated.
We are both in our 30s and serious Catholics. And it makes me sick that I could use words like ‘narcissistic’ and ‘sociopathic’ to describe him. I love him so deeply. What is wrong with me? Why didn’t God answer my prayers those two years to lift this attachment to him? I see that he is someone who I would always live in fear of being abandoned by and yet my heart still longs to be with him. I wrote to him a few days ago and laid it plainly that his behavior was dishonorable but I left the door open for reconciliation, by telling him that he is never to contact me again unless he is truly marriage-minded. I know I am insane to allow that. He has proved himself to be a liar. My heart refuses to give up hope that this part of him will be healed.