Long - not hung up, but confused
Entire story merged
I meet the girl of my dreams at about this time last year and we end up going out for six bliss filled months. We take it slow and cautious, waiting to have sex, waiting to pop the love word for several months, but when we do commit it's something sudden, simultaneous and totally amazing. For the last three of those six months she's with me she basically lives in my house and we even manage to go on a dream vacation to New York City together (despite a limited college budget), no sex the whole damn time, just her and I being with one another and being happy.
I've emphasized the slowness on becoming sexual in our relationship, but when we did go all the way there is no doubt in my mind that it was the best either one of us has ever experienced on that front. It was special and spectacular.
It comes to the end of these six months and she's going off to study in Hong Kong for a year while I stay here in the States all by my lonesome. Before she goes, she tells me she wants to work it out, to make things last between the two of us despite the distance. She tells me I'm her other half and that she'll love me forever - I feel the same way.
Two months later, as we're on the phone, she says that even though I can work it out to be around after I graduate to be near for her final year she doesn't want me there, so she can focus more on her schooling. She also says that after she graduates she wants to go abroad to Germany for a year to live the life out there and despite the fact that monetarily speaking it will be difficult for me to join her for more than weeks at a time (she's from a higher class than myself in terms of wealth). I say I need to think about things.
I do and decide that I can wait through anything for her. She has thought otherwise and dumps me over the phone. We start promising to meet each other at the end of it all and reignite things, but that wears and she starts to dodge contact. I try to talk to her once a week, send one or two emails a week, but she begins to find reasons not to respond. I get angry and call her on it and she says that she needs space.
Months pass, we try to be friends despite my negative feelings over being dumped, and she says she'll call me on my birthday. I mention that I work early that day but she forgets and calls early anyway and we end up rescheduling the talk for later. I mishear the day and end up getting unbelievably drunk the night she calls (a night sooner than I expected) and end up chewing her out over the phone, calling her dishonest and shallow. I remember none of this conversation for being so drunk, so it's her word I'm taking on this stuff. She reveals she's seeing another guy during this talk (the one thing I do remember) but I still write and apologize the next day.
She writes back saying she never wants to speak to me again. Despite this, we chat off and on over the internet through course of a few months, but I sense her reservations and write a letter saying that while I don't understand why she did what she did, I still want to be friends and will not ask her back (something she said was a breaking point during the time we were attempting to be friends before, something that bothered her greatly) despite my feelings. She ignores me and has done so for a month since, ignoring one additional email and another message wishing her a merry Christmas.
I still love her. I still feel that the two of us were as perfect as a couple can be. What am I supposed to make of her actions? I can't help but feel that if we were once again face to face things would be fabulous. But I can't convince myself to sit on my butt and hope for the best to come my way - it seems foolish not to get back into the mix and move on. Yet I worry for her desperately and wish her back. Day by day it gets easier to live without her, but all the same I know we'd still be good together. What should I do? Respond in kind and pretend she doesn't exist? Persist in what I think would be best for both of us?
Sorry for writing so long, but it's something I needed to flesh out completely. Thanks for anyone who read all this garbage and bothers to respond - I greatly appreciate it.
Is it worth it to be friends?
As some of you may remember, I came to this board looking for advice on dealing with an ex of mine. It wasn't that significant of a relationship, though both of us blew it up to that proportion (at least I did, and her friends tell me that she did, as did her words to me). We got along great and never had a moment's trouble while she was here.
When she moved away to study abroad, things changed dramatically. We talked once a week for a while, always with great conversations, but then she started to pull away and finally dumped me (after giving me many outs, as I've come to realize).
Months have passed since then and I no longer have romantic feelings for this girl. She treated me with such disrespect that I can't imagine dealing with her ever again in a relationship context without feeling great anxiety and I won't allow myself to get into that position.
Yet, for the time that we were together, she was a great friend to me and I know that people do not always act normally when under emotional stress. I've tried to reach out to her on several occations over a period of months (following NC) to say that while I've come to accept that the relationship is over, and that's positively for the best, I'd still like to keep the friendship. I've been ignored every time.
She once told me, through tears, that she regretted more than anything her inablity to keep friends for long periods - a recurring theme of her life. It's a moment that stuck in my head. I want to put the effort to be her friend because I know she'll need it one day. On the other hand, I'm pretty disgusted with her actions of late mostly because they strike me as entirely unwarranted. It's hard for me to maintain respect for her, but I feel a compulsion to have sympathy, not necessarily for my sake but for hers. She's going to come back here, one day, and I know that most of her old friends will have little to do with her as most of her friends were MY friends and will be that first and foremost, to her expense. I want to make this easy for her but she's making it very difficult for me to do so.
What should I do? I don't feel any turmoil over all this because her opinion of me has grown to mean very little, from my perspective. I have no problem with returning to the well again and again because I feel it's what could help her most. She does not seem to agree in the slightest and has in fact done her best to demonstrate otherwise (including alienating many of those other friends I've mentioned). I don't want to give up on her friendship because I don't want to conscribe her to a possible unhappy future, but she seems determined and I can't convince myself to continue on a seemingly hopeless task. Should I give up and say to hell with it? That strikes me as pretty wimpy. But what other option is there?
