Did I fall for a bad boy? My story

[Austra89]

This is a long story but I am in a pretty complicated situation. Getting other people's opinions on this matters a lot to me so thank you very much if you chose to read this.

 

I was with this guy for a little more than a year. We were both 21 when we got together and I was in a pretty sad place in my life and being with him was one of the only things that made me happy at the time. We'd known eachother for two years before but at the time he had a gf and I had a bf so nothing happened and we were just friends. When we got together, he had recently broken up with his gf of 3 years because she had cheated on him, repeatedly even. To me he was this wonderful guy who deserved to be cheered up and the fact that I'd known him for quite some time and that he really stood out as one of the only "good guys" I knew was one of the reasons I fell in love with him. Also we were into partying a lot. We would get drunk and dance and have fun and our common love for partying really made us bond. We even had some of our first (and then only) drug experiences together but we really wanted to be responsible about it. Things were going wondefully and after half a year we moved in together. I really felt like we were deeply in love and he kept telling me that I was his dream girl and the best thing that had ever happened to him. I met his family, I met his friends and everybody liked me. Things were going great.

 

There were a few things however that bothered me. First there was the fact that hew still kept stuff from his ex gf around. It was just there, as if she had never moved out and it felt weird to me. But since he would sometimes not only let me use her stuff but encourage me to do it I thought he was over her. It seemed like those things genuinely didn't matter to him anymore. Sometimes I would feel bad when I thought about her. I would think about how, when she left those things there, it would have probably broken her heart if she had known that in a few years his next gf would be using all of this now meaningless stuff. But I admit that it also made me feel kinda good on a level. Like she didn't mean anything to him anymore and like my position in his life was secured. I happen to be very different from this girl and sometimes I would think that, since she cheated on him, he would never really get over her and would always keep this image of this young girl he once used to love and who broke his heart. But he was very definitive about his "hate" for her and he always said that she cheated on him for no good reason and that she was just a bad person. Blindly in love, I just decided to believe him and to try my best and make his life as good as I could.

The other things that bothered me was a big weirder. One day I accidentally discovered that his last google search was something like "young teens". It worried me and so I did something I am not proud of: I checked his browser history, thinking to myself that I would only check the first page and not obsess about what I'd find. It turned out that he was one of those guys who is alot, and I mean a lot into teen porn. I didn't want to check any further, that would have been too disturbing. But since the girls didn't seem to be actually underage (some looked very young but they did look like they could have been over 1 I let it be. I admit it did make me feel bad. About myself. About my relationship. But I tried to talk sense into myself and kept thinking that it didn't have to mean anything and that boys will be boys. I was so much in love with him that I kept telling myself that I was just being some crazy chick gf and that even if he liked looking at young girls, it didn't make him a bad person. On a few occasions he did make some tasteless comments about underage girls. But I just wanted to move on. After all, the boy I'd known and admired for all of this time wasn't a bad person, I thought.

 

Then, over time he started to change. I would feel less and less good about myself when I was with him and he started being a bit of a "bad boy". He'd sometimes says stupid things about girls when he was with his friends, things that would've kinda shocked me a couple of years ago because they really didn't go with the image that I had of him. But I'd think that he just wanted to be cool around his friends and let it be.

Over time, he began to withdraw. The longer and more seriously we were together, the more he would begin to question his feelings for me. It got to the point where he said he didn't think he was in love with me because I didn't eat healthily, which I thought was a weird reason. Mind you, I'm a really thin girl so he can't have meant that I was too fat. Anyway, we stayed together but things got really messy. He would tell me he was about to break up someday soon. I would be devasted. Then I'd break up and he'd tell me he wanted to stay together because he loved me. I don't know how to explain it but the relationship just got really really messy yet we stayed together because we had deep feelings for eachother and we had been close friends before.

 

Things got from bad to worse after he told me he thought he wanted to be single and I broke up. He tried to get back together, I eventually gave in only to have him tell me in the end that he was happier when he was alone and that we shouldn't be together.

So we broke up for good.

The weird part about it is that after all that we had shared, after how much love we'd had for eachother and how much love everybody saw in us (they called us "the dream team") I felt like the kind of vague, reason-less breakup we had had wasn't worthy of the big relationship we'd once shared. I did think it was better that we weren't together because I could clearly see now that staying with him was draining me of my self-esteem. But I wanted to understand. I wanted to know why things had ended, what exactly it was that had blown apart two people who had seemed so perfect for eachother. You know that feeling after everything goes wrong and you're like "Whoa! When did all of this happen"? Well it was exactly like that. He would insist on how important it was to him that we stay close friends. That we still go out together and have fun like just before we got together. I told him that that was most likely never going to happen and that if what he was trying to do was being single for some time to have his fun and then come back to me when he was finally a grown man that wasn't going to happen. And then he said that I was completely misunderstanding him and that he couldn't be with me because he felt guilty when I was around and he didn't know why. He said that to him it wasn't about fun and that he wasn't that kind of guy. He then said that he was never in love with me and that if he wants to be single it is to see if he can fall in love at first sight with a girl. He'd say that he wanted to be with someone he'd loved from the first time he'd seen them. Fair enough, I thought. It might be a crappy reason but at least it's a reason.

 

It is devastating to hear someone you've loved so much, you've shared so much with tell you they never loved you. It felt like all of the good things we had shared were undone. And frankly, I don't believe him and neither do his friends. I know for a fact that we had loved eachother dearly, stupidly but I decided that if he had gotten to the point where he would tell me he had never loved me than he really must not care about me anymore and that it was better to cut him out of my life.

It does feel horrible to have someone you once knew so well turn into someone you barely recognize at all. But getting back with him would only make me feel worse. So I gave up and began to move on.

 

He once sent me a drunk text telling me that he'd never loved me and that he hadn't been able to break up with me because I was the perfect girlfriend and that I still mattered to him and he wanted to be friends. I didn't answer because I felt like it was definitely unnecessary to rub in that he had apparently never loved me, even though it seemed hard to believe. That text actually made me feel like he was trying to convince himself of what he was saying more than he was trying to convince me. Unsure about whether his intentions were truly good or if he was just trying to hurt me, I let it be.

 

Three weeks after that he turned up with another girl one evening. I had previously asked him if he had feelings for another girl or if he had ever cheated on me and he said no, which I believed. Now all of the sudden there's a new girl already. And he's parading her under my eyes. It felt kind of surreal that he, of all people, would do something like that. Did I really matter this little to him? But I decided I was going to be okay and just tried to forget. Even though all I could think about was that, apparently, he had never loved me and that he was falling in love with some other girl already. What had I done wrong?

 

The week after that he brought her again. This time the girl was completely, utterly drunk out of her mind. She would talk up all of his friends and I could see that it made them uncomfortable.The two of them looked very much in love, he would keep stroking her hair and buying her those cheap plastic flowers (something he'd always thought of as "stupid" when he was with me) and she would hug him and kiss him and look like the happiest girl in the world. Later that evening some of his friends told me that she was 17 and that he was asking everyone, proudly, if "one could tell". They also said that you could tell he had given her drugs.

Another evening he came again, with the same girl and she started chatting me up. I could tell that she was definitely on extasy (else she would have never talked to me, I think). She looked very young, I felt like she was a little girl and she would tell me that she thought I was very pretty and that she didn't feel at ease when I was around because she was afraid her being with him would hurt me. Extasy makes you very talkative like that. I told her that it was fine and she had nothing to worry about. She then told me she had recently broken up with her boyfriend and that she was still very much in love with him and that if she saw him with another girl it would hurt her. I told her that that was because she still loved him and she agreed. She then went on to tell me that she didn't love my ex boyfriend and that she was just looking to get her ex out of her head. But she barely even knew her own name, by then. She was as unbelievably, stupidly happy as you are when you take extasy for the first few times and I know that she hasn't had any experiences with drugs previously. She would even sometimes wander off around the club, leave him standing there and talk to random strangers. When she was talking to me he would look very worried and would try to get her away from me.

 

Now, I have to say: I bear no grudge at all towards this girl. If anything at all, I pity her. Because I used to be that girl stoned out of her brains and I know that she can not be held responsible for what she's doing because a) She's 17 and b) He was giving her drugs. I felt genuine tenderness for the poor thing, I just wanted to hug her. But that night I definitely stopped loving him. I can't possibly love a grown man who gives underage girls drugs.

 

Anyway, I'm trying to make sense of all this. I'm really confused right now. I try to think that he might think he's falling in love with her and that maybe, just maybe he was telling the truth when he said he wanted to fall in love with a girl on first sight. (Which is stupid because both of us were with someone else when we met. But anyways.)

But somehow I can't shake off this disgusting feeling. I feel dirty sometimes. And stupid. I sometimes think that, truly, he is a disgusting person and that I was just a stupid girl who fell for him. Which, to be frank, feels truly horrifying and makes me ashamed. I can't think of my relationship with him as a meaningful experience since he just shook it off by saying he never had feelings for me and getting into drugs. But there's this doubt. This feeling like maybe he was actually this perverted bad person and that I refused to see it. I would like to know what exactly I am getting over here. Did it just not work out, as these things happen? Or did he lie to me because he's into underage girls or his ex or whatever and I was just stupid?

I don't know. I am lost. When I look back so many things that I did seem so unlike myself, and I know how my feelings can make me blind in situations like these. But I definitely want to understand what the heck just happened here, how I could go from being the happiest girl on earth to this and if it just didn't work out or if I really fell for a bad boy.

I hope that understanding what happened can make me move on better, faster. But I don't even trust my own judgement. I want people who are unbiased to give it to me straight because the thoughts that I have are conflicting and can't be all true at once.

 

Please, help me make sense out of this. It really means a lot to me and I'm in too much of an emotional state to see things clear.

[Austra89]

Also, I want to add that I am really distressed right now. It felt terrible to be around him and this girl that night and even though I need to be able to go out and move on, I catch myself actually panicking whenever I think that he might be there. At times, it really does feel truly agonizing and having people help me make sense of it all is one of the only things that makes it a little better.

 

I know this is a long story but I'm in a really dark place right now.

[Ramzk001]

Men prefer younger partner. Hes not that old. He can like or love or date anyone. Could be teen! You cant control anyone's decisions. Dont make it big issue.

 

Move on to someone better!! You'll find many better guys. I don't understand you but i am sure If he was a nice guy, you wouldve dumped him. You are devasted because he dumped you. You wouldve done same if you had his strings in your hand.

 

He suddenly stopped loving you, again...hes young and immature. People change, There are many phases in life, they grow up and learn different things and you will learn too. Move on

[Harrisson]

I think that if he was in love with this girl then he wouldn't be giving her drugs to get in her pants. I'm sorry but it sounds like that's what he's trying to do.

It also sounds like he's kinda flimsy in his opinions. Telling you he never loved you is pretty harsh, especially if he would tell you otherwise. Maybe he was trying to get it over with.

[Austra89]

Thank you for your replies. They really mean a lot.

 

I feel plain overwhelmed by all of the things that have been happening, everything went so fast. I'm trying to make sense of it because all I can think of, all day long, is this breakup and I feel like there are still so many questions unanswered... It's like I can't function as a human being anymore. I thought time would make it better but it's been two months and I keep feeling worse and worse.

 

It's not only like I don't know him anymore but also like I don't know myself. Sometimes I wonder if he is doing things on purpose to hurt me. And then I think that he's just doing things and not caring about me. And that only hurts worse.