This discussion from Avaritia, Malucci, Foatie and Fossil on loneliness/unhappiness after a breakup and fixing yourself from within resonates with me as well.
I've never dealt with a breakup like this. Other than my first girlfriend in college, which hurt just because it was the first one, I didn't take relationships very seriously the rest of my 20s and early 30s. They were just women I hung out with. They were never going to be lifelong partners, as they wanted to have kids and I didn't. For this relationship, in my mid-30s, I went online with the purpose of finding a partner. And I thought I did. The day after we met, I called my mother and said I think I met the woman for me. She was the sixth woman I met off OKCupid back in 2013, and we had an easy connection from the get-go. She was a nerdy cute, smart, class valedictorian in high school, graduated with honors from college, put a lot of effort into being good at any task she was given professionally. She had lost her father nine months earlier, yet she was really positive and uplifting to be around. I had a lot of respect for her, and we were the same speed and had a similar calm demeanor. We got into a serious relationship very quickly. We met for brunch one weekend, next weekend met for dinner and had sex, then the next weekend and every weekend thereafter for three years (before moving in together) we spent the whole weekend together.
Looking back, I see there were always red flags that I overlooked because I wanted a partner. She was 25 years old when we met and hadn't yet established her own identity. I was her first real boyfriend. I introduced her to my interests -- movies, music, sports, activities -- and she seemed to adopt mine as her own while not introducing me to hers. She didn't seem to have her own interests. She didn't challenge me. We never fought, but I later realized it was because she didn't express her thoughts. Any issues she had with me or the relationship, she wouldn't communicate them. When we were alone, our conversations were pretty 50-50 but when we were in any company, she would be quiet and I would dominate the conversations as the more outgoing of us. I would try to drop her cues, but she seemed to prefer being quiet. She couldn't and never had had an orgasm in any way. Many of these were issues I was cognizant of the whole time, stuff I would discuss with my closest friends, mother and brother, but I was fully committed to her. Basically, I had chosen her as my partner no matter what, and hoped I could help her grow.
After she moved out in early September, I felt fine for the next four months. I knew she had messed this up. I'm not saying I did everything right, but I was ready for the long-term serious relationship and I put in the effort to try to make it work. I entered the year planning to propose on our five-year anniversary. Her attitude toward me and behavior had really changed 180 degrees in February, and there had never been a good explanation for it, so by September I felt relieved for this painful period to be over and excited about moving on. I felt like I was in a good place with a lot to offer, and I was interested to try the dating apps that had come to prominence while I was in the relationship.
That all changed about two months ago, surely not coincidentally starting when I saw my ex for the first time since soon after the breakup. She was at Staples Center for a Kings game and stopped by after since I'm in the place where we lived a few blocks away. We hadn't had any communication for three months before then. I went into a funk after that, the first two weeks feeling anxiety. Then we went out to dinner and a movie. I said I had thoughts about what happened between us. Neither of us ever knew or expressed how it had broken down so fast after we seemed to be on the same page for four years. I felt that, with time and distance, I had some ideas and wanted to talk them over with her. She said she wasn't ready yet. After that, I started feeling really alone for the first time in my life.
This really stripped me to my core and had me searching for answers of why I was feeling this way now compared to earlier periods in my life and thinking about what I needed to do to feel whole again. Is it just find a woman or is it more? I do think that I like myself and that I'm in a great place outside of the relationship area. I enjoy what I do for a living. It's not exactly what I dreamed to be doing with my life, and yet sometimes it is. I think being in that same realm and occasionally hitting those highs is pretty good. My income has taken a big jump up recently, to the point that I'm making more than I ever expected to in this profession. I'm easily poised to have more success with women now than I did in my 20s into early 30s, when I really focused on work and got a few casual relationships where I could. So why has my mindset been worse than it was then? Now I'm stylish, have a great place, am personable, intelligent, relatively successful. Does it just take time to feel right again after such a substantial breakup?
I do see some differences between now and then. Other than the one year before I got into my relationship with the ex, I lived with someone, whether my family, college roommates or brother. I've mostly worked from home much of my career, but even more so this year. So I get up, work from home, have nobody coming home, and can go days without in-person interaction. I feel cabin fever where I just have to get out even if just to walk around, and the weather in Los Angeles actually hasn't been that great this winter. For the first time in recorded history, there wasn't a 70-degree day in February and there has been 4x more rain than all of last year. The one way I would regularly get out of my apartment was to play tennis once or twice a week, but I wasn't even able to do that for a bit.
Also, I'm in a mid-life adult friendship rut. When I was in my 20s, I had two friends since childhood and my brother that I hung out with a lot. Now one of those friends is married with two kids. The other friend and brother are still single, but we all live farther apart and are busy and just don't hang out much anymore. Coming out of a relationship, I realize it's easy to just default to spending almost all your social time with your spouse. Then you take that away and now you don't have a structure for social interaction. So far I've been trying to fill that with meeting women from the apps, which I don't think is the right way. There is a bar/restaurant I go to once or twice a week where I've met some people, including the guy I went with to the Hinge meetup where I hooked up with the woman.
I feel like that hookup snapped me out of my funk. For the next week, I felt like myself again. I wasn't thinking about the past or worrying about the future. I was living in the present. Predictably, that wasn't enough to permanently fix my mindset. After seeing her again the following week and not being as into her, my mindset was back to being a little down this past weekend and Monday, but I've bounced back out of it. I do think it made a permanent difference in that I'm no longer focusing on the past and my ex and how it went wrong with us. But I am back to worrying about the future -- hurting this woman's feelings, finding another real connection with a woman, if I can ever get to the point of feeling like I truly have a partner again after how it fell apart the last time I thought so.
In this funk, I've been considering many things anyone who knows me would never think I would do: meditation, yoga, pilates, marijuana edibles (would never smoke anything), getting a dog, seeing a psychologist. I've even thought about how, though I can't see myself raising a kid, the support that I have from my mother and vice versa is the only reliable partnership a person can have and maybe I should have a kid just to have that relationship with someone after she is gone. I feel like I should be doing some of these things, but I guess I don't know where to start. I think meditation could be key, as I've seen how my thoughts can negatively affect my body so I would like to be able to better control that and instead have them make a positive impact. I never felt anxiety in my life that I noticed until three years ago, just before the ex and I were to move in together. I had always kind of expected that I wouldn't live that long. My great-grandfather died from a heart issue when he was 36. Of course, it was a different time then. But I wasn't even sure I wanted to live that long. I guess that's how a lot of people feel when they are young. Seeing things get serious with the ex, I started thinking about how I needed to be there for her, especially the way she lost her father, and how I had a large kidney stone stuck inside me that I had been putting off taking care of for years. I had an undiagnosed anxiety attack that raised my blood pressure. It took them a while to figure out that my blood pressure wasn't really high, but my thoughts would raise it. That scared me to think about. If I'm in a bad mindset, it can raise my blood pressure and give me chest tightness. It doesn't happen that often, and when it does I manage to keep it from getting out of hand, but it's something I want to work on. I'm typically a skeptical person who would have written off meditation in the past. Now I think it could be important for me, but I'm still skeptical enough to think that many of the meditation classes out there are money grabs. I feel like I need to find the right one. I'm so inflexible that yoga and pilates seem like they would be very difficult for me. It does feel like I should be doing something to better myself while single that will also give me more social interaction.
Last edited by Gaddy; 03-14-2019 at 07:02 PM.
