Eight months ago, (I’ll call him Steve) and I began seeing each other. We weren’t together the whole time, but mostly we were together.
I knew that I loved him after being together a month. I guess I should have suspected something when we weren’t open about our relationship to anyone we knew. I ran a support group when we first started going out and used my then-current health problems as an excuse to not go so I could spend my weekends with him.
After about a month and a half, the day after his birthday, he tells me that he’s not ready for a relationship and would like to be friends with benefits. I really wasn’t ok with this, but I said fine mostly because it was the best sex I’ve ever had.
Almost one month to the day, he tells me that he would like to start dating someone else. I was crushed. I felt that we had gotten back to that place we were a couple of months ago. Had I made it all up in my head? We had spent almost everyday together and were on the phone talking/texting all the time. The conversations we would have sometimes were even better than the sex.
So he began dating someone else and I tried my best to be a good friend to him. I never had the “why” conversation as to why our relationship ended. I never asked him why he told me he had too many issues to work out to be in a relationship with me and yet he could attempt a relationship with someone else. I never talked about my pain with anyone except my therapist. Worst of all, I never said anything when he was holding that someone else’s hand at my birthday party.
The end of that first month he was dating someone else, we had sex. I felt awful that I had been the “other woman” for the second time. During that month we weren’t friends with benefits, we still saw each other a lot and were on the phone constantly. The only aspect of our relationship that changed for that short time was that we weren’t having sex.
Steve didn’t officially breakup with his someone else until the middle of the next month just after I had my gallbladder surgery. From then on until the holidays were over (November and December), we had gone back to dating without telling anyone. Toward the end of December, he looked at me as I was making dinner and said, “It feels like we’re dating, doesn’t it?” I said yes, but I was taken aback because I thought we had already established that.
In the beginning of January, he came right out and asked me to be his girlfriend. I wanted to shout from the rooftop that we were together! Finally, we began telling our friends that we were dating. One day he looked me in the eye and asked me to move in with him. Not too long after that he asked me to move back East with him.
We were at the point where we were almost living together in his small apartment and then it happened. On the first of February, he dumped me in the car while we were going to buy plastic to cover this apartment windows. He started by saying that he thought we were moving too fast which then turned into him having issues to work on. Even though I knew all about him having issues, I wanted it to work out anyway. Soon the issues were so great that he couldn’t be with anyone. As he was crying, telling me that he didn’t mean to hurt me, I was parking the car at the store. I couldn’t believe that he was doing this to me again. I also couldn’t believe that I had been dumped giving my boyfriend a ride to the store so that he wouldn’t freeze to death.
The next day I just cried. I couldn’t be mad at him for hurting me because I was too mad at myself for letting it happen yet again.
The few days that followed, I was finally mad at him and not at myself any longer. Those happened to be days when I had to see him. I hated how angry I felt and how I couldn’t stand the sight of him.
On the third day of being angry, I couldn’t stand it anymore and finally made him tell me why he had broken up with me. I felt as though my heart had been shot out of my chest with a 12-gauge shotgun when he told me why. The man that I loved with every fiber of my being, the man who told me he loved me and asked my to move with him, told me that he loved me but that he wasn’t attracted to me. I suspected that there was more, but I was too stunned to ask what the more was.
Since that day, we’ve had sex a couple of times, but I suspect that he’s already seeing someone else. I ask myself why I put up with this, and I know what it is. I love him. I know that for now I’m fooling myself into believing that it will work out as an attempt to cope. I’ve seen him just about everyday since we had that conversation and I find that I get so flustered that I feel I have to tell him that he’s an asshole at least once when I see him. I hear myself tell him that he’s an asshole, but I can’t stop myself.
What will happen next, I don’t know. I feel deep within that I won’t take this forever, but finding the courage to emotionally separate myself from him has been really hard.
-Tracy Winters