Hello all. I’m glad to have found a place like this.  My story isn’t nearly as severe or brave as many of yours.  I just need to tell it.

A little over 18 months ago, after a long and slow decline, I had to tell my wife of 9 years (We had been together for 15, since I was 16.) that the distance between us had gotten to be too much, and that I couldn’t continue our relationship in that form.  That’s not where the story of why I’m here starts, though.

I was upset and lonely after that conversation.  It’s always been hard for me to maintain IRL friendships.  I tend to turn inward when I don’t feel well. I had kicked a nasty drinking problem about six months prior. I had also recently gone on medical leave from my job of 10 years, and was feeling especially isolated.  Over the next few weeks, I went poking around in a few chat rooms until I stumbled into one where I (by nature of the thing) had no business being, and I started talking to a girl who also had no business being there.  We were both quickly accepted by the community there, and we both started to rapidly develop feelings for each other. We clicked right away, and on so many levels, and I was starting to feel a bit better.  

She was from and living in a small Asian country, but was born here in the US and had lived in several other countries growing up.  She spoke 3 languages fluently. She came from a rather prominent family. A relentless pursuit of perfection type family. She was 10 years younger than I, but had been working on her own and internationally since she was in her mid-teens.  She owned her own successful business (35+ employees) and seemed to have a great head on her shoulders. We met during the first summer since her early teens that she hadn’t been traveling or working. We got to spend a lot of time together, at least online.  I quickly grew to love her, and then fell in love with her. I know she loved me, I don’t think she was in love with me. I don’t think she knows how.

Admittedly, this was a terrible time to take on a relationship. I’ve battled depression and anxiety my whole life, and with my relatively newfound medical conditions, I was in kind of a rough place; but she was so warm and engaging, so sweet and caring, that it made me feel like a whole person for the first time in a long time. I latched on tighter than I should have.  But I was all-in. I loved her more than anything. More than myself. I felt things with her that I had never felt before, and that’s not to say that my ex wife and I weren’t in love, we were, but this was different. There’s a whole complicated sub-story here, but I truly felt like she was my soul mate.   

Her love and affection was filling the void in me.  But things got complicated quickly. Her work season started a few months later, and that meant 14-18 hour days, crash into bed, repeat.  It was hard, but it was okay at first, but then her engagement seemed to wane. She didn’t make the effort to spend the time we could together, and she would get immediately defensive if I brought it up even in a very passive, casual context.  I tried my best to trudge along, but I was having a really hard time both in this part of my life and others, and I really missed that contact. She didn’t seem to. However, when the work season ended, she was back home and back to herself. It wasn’t quite the same, but it was good.  

Then we got wonderful news.  She was accepted to a performing arts college here in the states.  I was finally going to get to hold the woman of my dreams in my arms.  This past June, I cut flowers fresh from the yard, and carried them 300 miles and almost 12 hours to NYC, to be there when she touched down.  I was a wreck waiting for her to get through customs. When she finally got to me, and we wrapped each other up tight, it was like a bomb went off in my brain.  I finally understood what ‘home’ felt like...for the first time in my life. She, being a person of some importance, had a lunch meeting the next day, and then orientation immediately after that.  We got 16 hours together, but I was happier than I had ever been. I mean that. But that marked yet another profound change.

Almost immediately, I began to feel like I was losing her to school.  Contact became more sparse, even relative to how busy she was, and the effort slowed. That in itself hurt a lot, but what hurt more was the fact that she seemed completely unaware of, and then unphased by this.  But we had founded our relationship on the bedrock of communication, openness, and honesty. We talked about it a lot, not always happily, but the takeaway was always the same. She would reassure me over and over, of her own volition, that nothing had changed.  That she still felt the same, loved me just as much. That I wasn’t losing her. About 6 weeks later, we spent a wonderful day in a small city roughly halfway between us, and afterwards things got a small bit better again, but not for long.

Back at school, she was always ‘too busy’ to even read or answer a text, even on days she wasn’t in class.  She had a roommate now, and a complicated situation of her own back home, so phone calls were few and far between.  It hurt so badly, but I loved her so much, and we would talk about it as if we were working on it, and she said she wanted to work on it, so I pushed on.  On Labor Day Weekend, we took a trip to a state park in PA in my DIY camper build. There were some mishaps in the early stages, but we had an absolutely incredible weekend.  Truly the happiest time of my life. But on the last day, she was quiet and withdrawn. Not sad, just aloof. When I put her on the bus back to NYC, as I let go of her hand, somewhere deep down I knew I was never going to see her again.

Almost immediately after that trip, things started to decline, but her end of the conversation was always the same.  We were going to try new things. We were going to try harder together, and we were going to work it out. She had moved into a single room, and we started getting to talk on the phone a bit again.  The vibe was really strange. The whole situation was taking a tremendous toll on my mental state. I was putting literally all of the effort I could squeeze out of myself into trying to fix our relationship.  I’m not conveying properly just how dire the situation was, but it got really, really dark in my head. I felt like I couldn’t love her enough to fix it. I felt like I didn’t deserve to live.

Then, in mid-October, she went full radio silence for a full day.  I was distraught in my own right, but also very, very worried. My anxiety that day was unbearable.  I had a feeling, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I should have. When I heard from her next, it was in the form of a letter, emailed to me.  In this letter, she went on to detail how she had to end our relationship because she had to focus on herself, and her future, and how none of our ideas for the future (the ideas we had come up with, planned out, schemed on together) lined up, and how she couldn’t see a future with me in it.  She went on to say, essentially, that from about 6 months in, her feelings started to change, and she realized that she had been infatuated early on, and was using me to occupy her time. She knew that it was over for 10 weeks before she broke it off. The whole time assuring me that everything was fine.  Implying that I was acting crazy, overreacting. Hundreds of times. I asked her specifically dozens of times if exactly what was happening was happening, and she smiled that beautiful smile, and called me silly, and let it go on.  

Immediately my anxiety was dramatically reduced, but I was splitting my time between shock, and the most empty misery I had ever felt in my life. I felt like nothing, and I wanted to stop existing.

The shred of silver lining here is that this online community (who kind of saw this happening from a distance and tried to gently and sometimes not so gently tell me so) rallied around me, and have been amazingly supportive. I couldn’t have made the progress that I have without them.  Having said that, I’m still having a really hard time. My sense of self worth, my confidence, and my trust are completely destroyed. It’s already had an effect on others in my life, and I imagine it will for a long time. I do my best not to saddle anybody with more than they ask for (there’s a support channel on the server, nobody even has to read unless they want to.) but I’m really afraid of driving people away.  I’m already crushingly lonely.

What I struggle with most is just the deceit, and her complete and utter lack of consideration for how the whole situation was affecting me.  Honesty and openness. If she wanted my misery, and hers if she did indeed experience any, to stop, all she had to do was tell the truth. I wasn’t worth the truth.  I struggle a lot with the lack of justice. I also catch myself missing her and immediately hate and berate myself for it. Perhaps the biggest thing, though, is that feeling of home.  I knew it for such a fleeting moment, and now it feels as if I’ll never have it again.

Maybe because I’ve been in serious long-term relationships since the moment I started dating in my early teens, maybe because of the issues in my brain, maybe for lots of reasons, when I don’t have somebody to pour my love and affection onto, I feel like I’m drowning in it.  I feel so empty, so hurt, so worthless. And she did that, willingly and over the course of months, and she gets to just walk away, perhaps on to another victim. One of the lasting scars is that I constantly feel the need to make sure that everybody in my life knows that I’m trying my hardest.  I still feel so inadequate. I always feel like I’m letting everyone down.

I know I was too dependent on her, but I was always very careful not to overload her with my stuff.  Perhaps I failed; but if I did, it was anything but intentional. I’d have done anything to keep her from feeling any pain.  I’d have done anything to make it work. She just didn’t care.

I’m not articulating well just how this went down. I’m doing my best. It’s a hard story to tell, especially this (relatively) briefly.  I do see a therapist biweekly, and I tell him the truth. When we got into the bits and pieces, and he started using terms like abuse, and gaslighting, and PTRS, I somehow felt worse.  I feel foolish. I feel weak. I feel things I can’t put into words. I’m just trying to put myself back together, and I know progress isn’t linear, but it feels like one step forward and one huge step back.  I’m awful at being alone. I don’t know what to do about it.

Thank you for listening.  I didn’t know where else to go.