She's dating a guy with the same name!
I'm 31, seem to have my life in good order (good job, friends, family support, etc.) but I've been an emotional wreck lately. SORRY, LONG POST FOLLOWS.
To start at the beginning, I met a girl almost 3 years ago after we were both coming out of fairly serious relationships. I was immediately attracted to this girl and felt almost instantly that she was the girl I'd been waiting my life for. Before you dismiss this, I've never in my life felt this way about anyone else before so soon after meeting them and as I will describe below, this feeling had plenty of time to cultivate over the years of friendship.
We started as friends as neither of us were really in a place to jump into a new relationship. We were both coming out of other serious relationships when we met, hers more so. She was absolutely devastated over her last breakup and I (stupidly) helped get her back on her feet. That evolved into becoming best friends after a few months and eventually the friendship took a turn to friends + something more. There were many stops and starts along the way but eventually we were exclusively dating about 5 months after meeting- sleeping over, traveling together, meeting respective families, talking nightly for hours, all the things I would ordinarily classify as "being in a relationship." But she never classified it that way though and never referred to me as her boyfriend (HUGE MISSED WARNING SIGN). Anyway, after a couple months of pseudo relationship, she said that she "wasn't ready to commit to a relationship" and went off on how hurt and scared she was from her previous relationship and that she didn't feel the same way about me as she did her ex. She backed away bigtime and I was devastated.
Another issue to keep in mind is that she has a strange problem where sex is very painful for her and that was part of the reason the relationship she was in before me failed. She had surgery, went to physical therapy, etc. but still had issues. Probably in large part because of this, her sex drive was very low and sexual encounters were few and far between. She was very fearful of the "requirement" of sexual availabiliy in an official bf/gf relationship.
Anyway, back to the timeline, gradually we built up the close friendship again and a few months down the road we were dating exclusively again for another few months before she backed away again claiming that a relationship was too constraining and I wasn't "The One." This time, we stayed out of contact afterward for a few months. The friendship was again built up very slowly over the course of the following year- me dating a few other people in the process but still carrying a torch for her deep down. I was finally sure I was 100% over romantically her when out of the blue she came back into my life after getting suddenly jealous of a new girl I was dating at the time and saying that she had taken me for granted this whole time. Seeing that I was ready to slip away from her life, she went into full-on seduction mode and reeled me back in one final time (with me dumping the other girl I was with to be with her) before ditching me again a few months later one last humiliating time with yet another exlaimation that I wasn't "the one" for her and had never been "the one" for her. She still wanted to maintain the friendship but wanted us both to move on. Not as much devastation time #3 but still a lot of bitterness on my part for falling for this girl's antics yet again.
Looking back, obviously the main problem is that I always was far more into her than she into me. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever dated and I certainly let that beauty blind me and let her treat me like a doormat. Nobody can love a doormat. =(
The other huge issue was that in our 3 year up and down "non-relationship" she never was in an official relationship with anyone else and I was as close to being in a relationship with her as anyone. Sure there were a few other guys that came into the picture briefly but I was the only one to have slept with her in this entire time frame. Being the closest thing to a boyfriend to her and as her best friend over this period, I figured fear of commitment was just a personal issue she had to deal with and was feeling OK with moving on because we'd given it a try a few times and it kept failing. I still had hope that we could continue to be friends as we had been with the benefit of time. We talked and e-mailed weekly-biweekly and still met occasionally after fallout #3 in late October.
This all came to a crashing halt when I found out recently that not only is she dating someone who shares my same (rather uncommon) name, she is in an official "relationship" with this person!! The same person who wouldn't make any sort of commitment to me in 3 years is now committed to someone else she'd known for a couple of months. I was devastated and decided immediately to cut off all contact-phone, Facebook, e-mail, etc. It's been 8 days but I still have pathetic feelings of longing for her and the friendship that is gone (my own choice for my own sanity). The worst thing is the ego blow though, essentially getting dumped 3 times by someone I was madly infatutated with and "replaced" by another in short time by someone who shares my own freaking name.
I'm really too old to be putting up with this drama. I'm perfectly fine with the idea of settling down but for some reason the thrill of chasing the beautiful girl that is just out of reach still haunts me. For some reason it's hard to be attracted to perfectly nice girls that don't make my heart skip. Am I doomed to a life of singledom? Do I need to readjust my standards? What the hell is wrong with me?
