phatmanisi
Sep 22, 2010, 02:55 PM
This is my first question here on this site, or anywhere on the internet for that matter. I don't really know what exactly I'm hoping to accomplish, and to be perfectly honest, I don't really have a question that needs answering. I think that right now I just need to be able to spill everything that I've been feeling and maybe someone will have some sort of advice that I haven't considered yet. Or maybe not and people will be kind, as I've seen in answers to other questions, and just offer support. I suppose the internet isn't exactly the best place to go for this type of thing, and it isn't like I'm at the end of my rope or don't have anyone else to talk to... I don't know. I just feel so lost and alone, even with all of my friends and family helping me through this, and so... I guess I'm just looking for another avenue of expression and support. Hopefully this is it. Sorry for the exposition of an introduction.
So, I am 19 and in my second year of school at the world's best public university (you figure it out). I'm an out of state student from Minnesota. During first semester of last year (my first year), I met this woman. We will call her L. Same year as me, also a freshmen. We chatted a little bit in our discussion section and through the usual process of attraction, ended up hanging out at my fraternity a couple of times. We had our first date in mid October and have been dating ever since. I'm not exactly sure where to go in the story from here... So I guess I'll just jump into the breakup story. Early in our relationship we were fairly casual. We both made it clear that we were both in our first year of college and we wanted to be free and open to explore and experiment. That went nowhere and we became incredibly close, very quickly. She was just so different from anyone I'd ever met in my life. Now I've been through several long term relationships. I dated a girl from mid 8th grade to the end of 9th, another girl from mid 10th until the end of 11th and then another girl on and off most of my senior year. Each of these girls I thought was the one, and each one was terribly hard to break up with. That said, this girl is different. I had (and still have not) met anyone quite as intelligent and interesting as her. She just had this quality that I can't articulate. She was confident and secure in herself, and yet still open and giving, with the air of vulnerability. She could recall little things that I thought no one could possibly remember. She related to me in ways no one ever has before. We were compatible in the highest degree, able to spend any amount of time together without becoming bored or running out of things to talk about. She touched me (I mean this both emotionally and physically) in a way that I had never experienced, with such genuine interest and tenderness that it was hard not to fall in love with her on the spot. I think overall, the best possible way I can describe it, is that she made me feel something that I'd never felt. I think she articulated it best in a valentines day card to me when she wrote "when I met you, you made me feel something that made me understand why it never worked with anyone else." Does that make sense? Anyway. I tried, I really tried, as hard as I could to keep my distance. To not let myself fall. That's always been one of my biggest flaws (some say qualities), falling so disastrously in love that I give all of myself to my partner, while keeping very little (if any at all) of myself for myself. There was another girl I had a past relationship with (from high school) that still had feelings for me and was moving to my city. I tried to use her as a deterrent, tried to become attached to her. This was about 2-4 weeks in. I could already tell I was falling, but I wanted so bad not to. This other woman moved and I broke things off with L. The night I told her was filled with tears and hugs and kisses. But she responded in the only way that a woman like her could possibly respond in. "I understand. This is your life and you need to make the right decisions for you. I want to be with you and I will miss you and I will hope that things are not finished with us. But I understand and I wish you the best." God, she was so level headed and down to earth.
So the thing with the other girl lasted about 48 hours until I broke down and told her that there was another woman and I was so sorry but I was rampantly in love and I just couldn't be with her. And so I called L. And we got together. And have been happy since then. We still called our anniversary our first date (in mid October) and basically forgot about this time. After this, we lost all inhibition. We let go and fell, long and hard, we fell into the depths of our emotion and love. Everything I've written about her quintupled. We did things that I'd never done with a partner. We went to services together at Hillel (we were both Jewish, another first for me), we took walks throughout the wilderness, we spent hours and hours just laying in my bed talking. I remember once when we were just laying in bed in her dorm room, and there were a couple of minutes of silence (always comfortable with her) and I looked at her and she was just so beautiful and the way she smiled up at me was just so genuine and I could just see her eyes telling me how much she loved me. And I started crying. She had that kind of effect on me. So between this point and the end of first semester (about 2 months) we were like this. And yet we never said "I love you." We wanted to save it. Winter/Holiday break rolled around and I went back to Minnesota. We stayed incredibly connected. Skyped every day, texts and phone calls. And finally we decided that one of us should come visit. Her family has more money than mine so she ended up flying to Minnesota for a week. It was unbelievable and the first night she got there we said "I love you" to each other for the first time. We spent the week together, there might have been 6 hours the entire week, including sleeping that we weren't together. And it was perfect. During this trip we got very explicit about the long term and what that meant for us. We started jokingly at first, talking about what type f wedding we wanted, how smart our kids were going to be, etc... An important thing to note is that she was the first one to bring these things up. She was the first one to refer to me as her "soulmate."
Jump ahead. Its present day. We've been dating for 11 months, about 3 weeks until 1 year rolls around. Things have changed. Somehow. Impossible to articulate all of the little factors that went into this feeling of change, but they were there. They were present all summer and it was really hard for me to deal with. At its most basic level, the change was that I felt that there were little things (for example our level of contact, her use, or lack there of, of the term soulmate, feeling uncomfortable with a long love letter than I had written her over the summer that she thought was just 'too much.') that upset me. Now I've always been a very passionate, very emotional man. So with this in mind, whenver I experienced something like this, I would do my best to convince myself that everything was totally fine and that I was just overreacting and that she was just a little more secure and confident in our relationship, so she didn't feel the need to do these things as I did. Anyway, these things chipped and chipped away at me. And she could tell. She was always so good at reading me. And any time that something like that happened, or she could tell I was upset, she would console me and ask me what was wrong and ask how she could fix it. At first I would try to explain what was bothering me, but I would always end up feeling like I was needy or clingy. And its so hard to argue something like "we used to talk THIS much and now we talk THIS much and I don't understand why and I don't like it." Especially when you're in a relationship that is otherwise so great. This whole time we were always, mostly, happy and content and loving with each other.
We get back to college and I hope that these feelings will stop. After all I just spend a 10 week summer where I saw her for 6 days the entire time. That's got to be rough. Things were better when we were together, but soon I noticed that little things were still different from the way I remembered them being in the past. I tried to reason that I was too sensitive or that the honeymoon phase was over, that sort of thing. Finally one evening (ironically the night after her birthday) I was in one of my little funks and not wanting to tell her why because I didn't want to feel needy and immature. She started asking me about things that had happened over the past few days and if that was why I was upset. I realized she was rattling off any possible reason for why I was upset because she knew I was, and figured it was her doing somehow, she just didn't know why. I asked her if this was what she was doing and she said yes and we bth agreed that it wasn't healthy and we agreed to talk about it the next day.
the next day we talked and the short of it was me saying "I have been unhappy a lot recently and I'm not sure why. I have an idea though. We used to be very forward and blunt about how we thought of each other and what our plans together were in the long term. I still feel that way. I still think of you as my soulmate. And while I am not EXPECTING to marry you, and while I am not PLANNING on marrying you, it is still something that I could see happening and still something I can honestly say I would like to happen. I still feel this way. And I think something has changed for you. And if it has, you need to tell me." And it had. She said things had changed. She wasn;t sure when or how it had happened, odds were it was a gradual thing, but she had realized at some point that she had gone from completely sure that I was "the one" for her, to not feeling that way. Not that she didn't love me, or that I didn't make her happy or that she wanted to be with me. She did all of those things. And so I suppose I initiated it first. I told her I wasn't sure if I could be with her knowing that I felt so strongly and that she didn't reciprocate. And while these feelings of commitment and passion weren;t the root or basis of our relationship by any means, our love, experiences, trust, respect for each other grew from our lives and experiences, it would still be incredibly hard to be with someone knowing you were on different pages as far as feelings.
We were in limbo for a day and then we talked again. I recanted. I told her that I couldn't change the way I felt and that was that. But that I completely understood that it might have been unfair and irrational to expect or ask her to have that type of long term commitment or feeling. Who was I, a 19 year old, to assume and expect my partner to know that I was the one for them. It wasn;t right. She said that she agreed but that the way I felt was the way I felt. She didn't want me to have to change that. And with that in mind, she didn't think she could be with me anymore, with the pressure and pain of being with someone she loved very much and knowing that she couldn't give me everything that I wanted or was feeling.
2 days of utter pain. And then we talked again. I came to her and said that, again, I felt the way I felt. But I didn't care. I wanted to be with her. I wanted t be with her in any capacity that worked. I said "sometimes people are on different pages. i mean, you fell for me in the beginning long before I did. You were the first one to call me soulmate. We can do this. I can do this" I tried to reason that she loved me, she wanted to be with me, why wasn't that good enough for me? And so I realized that it was. It had to be. I didn't care if she thought we would spend the rest of our lives together or not, I just wanted her NOW. And she said no. She said that, again, she had felt the same as I had. She kne exactly how I felt because she HAD felt that way. And now she knew that she didn't anymore. And while yes, I made her very happy and she was still very much in love, she didn't think she could be with me. She said she couldn't deal with the difference in feeling and expectation. She couldn't deal with eeling like she was making me unhappy. She said she couldn't imagine feeling the way she felt and being OK if I didn't. And she didn't want to be the woman that told me that the way I felt was not OK. I tried to say more but she stopped me and said "pleas... I dont want to be with you anymore."
And that was it. I ended with saying "if you ever change your mind..." and trailing off. She looked at me sadly, empathetically, and shook her head.
And I haven't talked to her since.
I'm lost. I feel alone. I miss her so much. I am constantly on the verge of tears. Its been about a week now since the last talk. I can't imagine how I'll ever find anyone as incredible as her. Anyone with the type of emotional and mental connection we had. Anyone as smart and as inquisitive and interesting as her. Anyone as ****ing beautiful as she was. All this underneath 5 feet tall (I'm only 5'4" so this was an incredible thing to experience. I'd dated one girl ever that was shorter than me and that was by an inch).
I want to talk to my best friend in the world. I want to tell them about my pain and my suffering and my stress and how much I think about her. The only problem is she was my best friend.
I'm sure the rest of what I have to say will just sound like I'm moping. Or perhaps just cliché. So I won't go on. I've been through long relationships. I've been through hard breakups. I think I even thought at one point that I would marry one of my high school girlfriends. But nothing has ever felt like this. I just feel like I was MEANT to be with her. I'm not that religious, but there is a word in hebrew that she taught me that I hadn't heard before. Bsheret (ba-sher-it). It means the one whom God has chosen for you to be with. Literally it means love of my heart. Love of my soul. Soulmate. I feel like if I lose her, I will lose the person that I was made to be with. Anyway...
Sorry for the novel. I appreciate any response. Maybe I won't get any because who would want to read all this? Anyway.
Thanks in advance.
So, I am 19 and in my second year of school at the world's best public university (you figure it out). I'm an out of state student from Minnesota. During first semester of last year (my first year), I met this woman. We will call her L. Same year as me, also a freshmen. We chatted a little bit in our discussion section and through the usual process of attraction, ended up hanging out at my fraternity a couple of times. We had our first date in mid October and have been dating ever since. I'm not exactly sure where to go in the story from here... So I guess I'll just jump into the breakup story. Early in our relationship we were fairly casual. We both made it clear that we were both in our first year of college and we wanted to be free and open to explore and experiment. That went nowhere and we became incredibly close, very quickly. She was just so different from anyone I'd ever met in my life. Now I've been through several long term relationships. I dated a girl from mid 8th grade to the end of 9th, another girl from mid 10th until the end of 11th and then another girl on and off most of my senior year. Each of these girls I thought was the one, and each one was terribly hard to break up with. That said, this girl is different. I had (and still have not) met anyone quite as intelligent and interesting as her. She just had this quality that I can't articulate. She was confident and secure in herself, and yet still open and giving, with the air of vulnerability. She could recall little things that I thought no one could possibly remember. She related to me in ways no one ever has before. We were compatible in the highest degree, able to spend any amount of time together without becoming bored or running out of things to talk about. She touched me (I mean this both emotionally and physically) in a way that I had never experienced, with such genuine interest and tenderness that it was hard not to fall in love with her on the spot. I think overall, the best possible way I can describe it, is that she made me feel something that I'd never felt. I think she articulated it best in a valentines day card to me when she wrote "when I met you, you made me feel something that made me understand why it never worked with anyone else." Does that make sense? Anyway. I tried, I really tried, as hard as I could to keep my distance. To not let myself fall. That's always been one of my biggest flaws (some say qualities), falling so disastrously in love that I give all of myself to my partner, while keeping very little (if any at all) of myself for myself. There was another girl I had a past relationship with (from high school) that still had feelings for me and was moving to my city. I tried to use her as a deterrent, tried to become attached to her. This was about 2-4 weeks in. I could already tell I was falling, but I wanted so bad not to. This other woman moved and I broke things off with L. The night I told her was filled with tears and hugs and kisses. But she responded in the only way that a woman like her could possibly respond in. "I understand. This is your life and you need to make the right decisions for you. I want to be with you and I will miss you and I will hope that things are not finished with us. But I understand and I wish you the best." God, she was so level headed and down to earth.
So the thing with the other girl lasted about 48 hours until I broke down and told her that there was another woman and I was so sorry but I was rampantly in love and I just couldn't be with her. And so I called L. And we got together. And have been happy since then. We still called our anniversary our first date (in mid October) and basically forgot about this time. After this, we lost all inhibition. We let go and fell, long and hard, we fell into the depths of our emotion and love. Everything I've written about her quintupled. We did things that I'd never done with a partner. We went to services together at Hillel (we were both Jewish, another first for me), we took walks throughout the wilderness, we spent hours and hours just laying in my bed talking. I remember once when we were just laying in bed in her dorm room, and there were a couple of minutes of silence (always comfortable with her) and I looked at her and she was just so beautiful and the way she smiled up at me was just so genuine and I could just see her eyes telling me how much she loved me. And I started crying. She had that kind of effect on me. So between this point and the end of first semester (about 2 months) we were like this. And yet we never said "I love you." We wanted to save it. Winter/Holiday break rolled around and I went back to Minnesota. We stayed incredibly connected. Skyped every day, texts and phone calls. And finally we decided that one of us should come visit. Her family has more money than mine so she ended up flying to Minnesota for a week. It was unbelievable and the first night she got there we said "I love you" to each other for the first time. We spent the week together, there might have been 6 hours the entire week, including sleeping that we weren't together. And it was perfect. During this trip we got very explicit about the long term and what that meant for us. We started jokingly at first, talking about what type f wedding we wanted, how smart our kids were going to be, etc... An important thing to note is that she was the first one to bring these things up. She was the first one to refer to me as her "soulmate."
Jump ahead. Its present day. We've been dating for 11 months, about 3 weeks until 1 year rolls around. Things have changed. Somehow. Impossible to articulate all of the little factors that went into this feeling of change, but they were there. They were present all summer and it was really hard for me to deal with. At its most basic level, the change was that I felt that there were little things (for example our level of contact, her use, or lack there of, of the term soulmate, feeling uncomfortable with a long love letter than I had written her over the summer that she thought was just 'too much.') that upset me. Now I've always been a very passionate, very emotional man. So with this in mind, whenver I experienced something like this, I would do my best to convince myself that everything was totally fine and that I was just overreacting and that she was just a little more secure and confident in our relationship, so she didn't feel the need to do these things as I did. Anyway, these things chipped and chipped away at me. And she could tell. She was always so good at reading me. And any time that something like that happened, or she could tell I was upset, she would console me and ask me what was wrong and ask how she could fix it. At first I would try to explain what was bothering me, but I would always end up feeling like I was needy or clingy. And its so hard to argue something like "we used to talk THIS much and now we talk THIS much and I don't understand why and I don't like it." Especially when you're in a relationship that is otherwise so great. This whole time we were always, mostly, happy and content and loving with each other.
We get back to college and I hope that these feelings will stop. After all I just spend a 10 week summer where I saw her for 6 days the entire time. That's got to be rough. Things were better when we were together, but soon I noticed that little things were still different from the way I remembered them being in the past. I tried to reason that I was too sensitive or that the honeymoon phase was over, that sort of thing. Finally one evening (ironically the night after her birthday) I was in one of my little funks and not wanting to tell her why because I didn't want to feel needy and immature. She started asking me about things that had happened over the past few days and if that was why I was upset. I realized she was rattling off any possible reason for why I was upset because she knew I was, and figured it was her doing somehow, she just didn't know why. I asked her if this was what she was doing and she said yes and we bth agreed that it wasn't healthy and we agreed to talk about it the next day.
the next day we talked and the short of it was me saying "I have been unhappy a lot recently and I'm not sure why. I have an idea though. We used to be very forward and blunt about how we thought of each other and what our plans together were in the long term. I still feel that way. I still think of you as my soulmate. And while I am not EXPECTING to marry you, and while I am not PLANNING on marrying you, it is still something that I could see happening and still something I can honestly say I would like to happen. I still feel this way. And I think something has changed for you. And if it has, you need to tell me." And it had. She said things had changed. She wasn;t sure when or how it had happened, odds were it was a gradual thing, but she had realized at some point that she had gone from completely sure that I was "the one" for her, to not feeling that way. Not that she didn't love me, or that I didn't make her happy or that she wanted to be with me. She did all of those things. And so I suppose I initiated it first. I told her I wasn't sure if I could be with her knowing that I felt so strongly and that she didn't reciprocate. And while these feelings of commitment and passion weren;t the root or basis of our relationship by any means, our love, experiences, trust, respect for each other grew from our lives and experiences, it would still be incredibly hard to be with someone knowing you were on different pages as far as feelings.
We were in limbo for a day and then we talked again. I recanted. I told her that I couldn't change the way I felt and that was that. But that I completely understood that it might have been unfair and irrational to expect or ask her to have that type of long term commitment or feeling. Who was I, a 19 year old, to assume and expect my partner to know that I was the one for them. It wasn;t right. She said that she agreed but that the way I felt was the way I felt. She didn't want me to have to change that. And with that in mind, she didn't think she could be with me anymore, with the pressure and pain of being with someone she loved very much and knowing that she couldn't give me everything that I wanted or was feeling.
2 days of utter pain. And then we talked again. I came to her and said that, again, I felt the way I felt. But I didn't care. I wanted to be with her. I wanted t be with her in any capacity that worked. I said "sometimes people are on different pages. i mean, you fell for me in the beginning long before I did. You were the first one to call me soulmate. We can do this. I can do this" I tried to reason that she loved me, she wanted to be with me, why wasn't that good enough for me? And so I realized that it was. It had to be. I didn't care if she thought we would spend the rest of our lives together or not, I just wanted her NOW. And she said no. She said that, again, she had felt the same as I had. She kne exactly how I felt because she HAD felt that way. And now she knew that she didn't anymore. And while yes, I made her very happy and she was still very much in love, she didn't think she could be with me. She said she couldn't deal with the difference in feeling and expectation. She couldn't deal with eeling like she was making me unhappy. She said she couldn't imagine feeling the way she felt and being OK if I didn't. And she didn't want to be the woman that told me that the way I felt was not OK. I tried to say more but she stopped me and said "pleas... I dont want to be with you anymore."
And that was it. I ended with saying "if you ever change your mind..." and trailing off. She looked at me sadly, empathetically, and shook her head.
And I haven't talked to her since.
I'm lost. I feel alone. I miss her so much. I am constantly on the verge of tears. Its been about a week now since the last talk. I can't imagine how I'll ever find anyone as incredible as her. Anyone with the type of emotional and mental connection we had. Anyone as smart and as inquisitive and interesting as her. Anyone as ****ing beautiful as she was. All this underneath 5 feet tall (I'm only 5'4" so this was an incredible thing to experience. I'd dated one girl ever that was shorter than me and that was by an inch).
I want to talk to my best friend in the world. I want to tell them about my pain and my suffering and my stress and how much I think about her. The only problem is she was my best friend.
I'm sure the rest of what I have to say will just sound like I'm moping. Or perhaps just cliché. So I won't go on. I've been through long relationships. I've been through hard breakups. I think I even thought at one point that I would marry one of my high school girlfriends. But nothing has ever felt like this. I just feel like I was MEANT to be with her. I'm not that religious, but there is a word in hebrew that she taught me that I hadn't heard before. Bsheret (ba-sher-it). It means the one whom God has chosen for you to be with. Literally it means love of my heart. Love of my soul. Soulmate. I feel like if I lose her, I will lose the person that I was made to be with. Anyway...
Sorry for the novel. I appreciate any response. Maybe I won't get any because who would want to read all this? Anyway.
Thanks in advance.