Dumped and Hurt

[irashii]

This will be a long one, but I'm trying to get some perspective. I welcome it from all sides, since at this point I'm incredibly raw and am trying to sort out my feelings on the mess.

 

I'm recently 28 and she was 20. I recognize the age gap is a lot, and I did feel a bit of anxiety about it in the early stages of the relationship, but because she pursued me and was comfortable with the idea (her parents had a 14 year age gap), I kept going. We met in the same program, as I went back to school later in life. We were together for three months.

 

The initial setup that we both had was that, due to the nature of my transient life for the next while (I'll be graduating university as of August and, though I'll be staying around town for a few months afterwards with work, I cannot guarantee I'll be there long term), I wasn’t really going to be looking for things with other people, but if she wanted to I would understand. And, honestly, I would have in the early stages. If she told me she’d found someone she wanted to explore things with early on I would have just either stepped back entirely or gone FWB no problem. I have FWB — it works because there are no feelings. The reason I wasn’t keeping up with my FWB at the time was because I feel like new things deserve to be worked on in their own right without outside interference — basically, I was exclusive with her because I wanted to be, not because I had to be. But, unbeknownst to me, she had decided that, as I was not actively looking, it would be unfair of her not to undertake a level of exclusivity as well. She didn’t tell me about that — she just did it. If she had told me she made that decision in the early days, I would have disabused her of the notion that she had to be exclusive just because I was acting as such. She mentioned at the time that she wasn't interested in a serious relationship, so I figured this would be a very light thing and had mentally prepared for such in the early days.

 

I had also mentioned that, as she was still relatively new to the LGBT dating game, we would take things at her pace. Unprompted on my end, over the next couple of months she introduced me to her friends, her sister and sister’s fiance, told her mom about me, told me that it was weird to introduce me to people as just a friend (and subsequently would introduce me to people as her girlfriend), told me that I should just keep some things at her place because “we were there”, and all kinds of other things like that which, to the average person, would indicate that things were getting pretty serious. Her sister is getting married in Disneyland at the end of the year and, when she heard I’d never been, she said that maybe a trip should be in my future (aka with her). She had a plan to tell her dad about her sexuality, which she’d never done before. Every time she brought up coming out to her family, I told her that I would support her in doing so, but that she shouldn’t feel the need to do it for me. She always responded by saying it was something she felt like she should be able to tell her family about. Fair enough; I’d let it go after that. A couple of weeks ago, she mentioned that very early on in our dating (like, maybe two weeks in or so) she’d used the fact that she was seeing me as an excuse to not sleep with someone who was trying to hit on her (and admittedly it wasn’t someone she wanted to sleep with, but that’s still not something you a) tell me and b) do in our department because everyone will know within 24 hours). She’d shown on a couple of occasions that she was pretty jealous of the idea of me with another woman.

 

She also met my father because she came to my birthday lunch with him in May, and literally the week before the blow up she was supposed to be meeting my brother and sister-in-law for dinner before my sister-in-law broke her ankle and spent the day in hospital. She’d been asking about meeting my niece. She had briefly met my mother and my sister at my department grad ceremony, and had an open invitation to come for dinner. It got serious, and it was not serious at my behest (obviously I am culpable in that I was advancing as well, but all of the family meeting on my end happened well after being introduced to her sister and her telling her mother about us, and generally coincided with major life events in which it would be weird for my girlfriend not to be there). Literally two days before we exploded she mentioned that she’d be totally fine with me meeting her brother. The only person she showed any hesitance about was her dad.

 

At the end of June she was going to be going back to her hometown for two months to work, and staying with her father. Her hometown is about three hours away, which would be difficult, but I have a car and would have been able to make the trip on weekends if she'd wanted. As I mentioned, her father didn’t know about her being bi or about her dating me, but about a month ago when I asked if she wanted to break things off before she went home she said no. She said it would only be two months, and that we’d be seeing each other about as much as if we were in the same city because I’d be so busy with my final class and work. She even went so far as to invite me to a major event in her hometown (I’ve never been) — she told me that, though she hadn’t been since her grandfather died, she would do that for me.

 

Unprompted. Utterly unprompted.

 

Anyway, the gist of the breakup occurred because I sensed that something was amiss and I asked about it. We’d been hanging out or going for dinner several times a week prior to her getting busy with some shows that she was working on, and after she got busy that obviously cut down to mostly seeing her on the weekends. That’s fine — I get that. But she’d send me pictures of her out for meals with her friends, and ultimately told me that she didn’t have time to see me before I went to visit my brother in another city for a week because she had homework and was going to the mall with her best friend. Normally I wouldn’t give a crap about her going out with her friends, because everybody needs space to themselves with their friends, but she literally saw said best friend every day at rehearsal, so that struck me as a mediocre excuse.

 

So, I asked if I had done something or if I had been too demanding of her time. She said no, and that I hadn’t done anything wrong, but she felt pressure because she felt I was in a place where I was ready for a long term relationship and she wasn’t.

 

I’d never talked long term. I did not bring up long term. The words long term did not come out of my mouth. I had admitted that her meeting my father was a big deal (because he takes these things seriously), but this did not result in me asking her for a long term commitment or anything of the sort.

 

So, things snowballed from there. Eventually it got to a place where she revealed that exclusivity and commitment freaked her out, and asked me what I wanted. I admitted that, while I was not sold on the idea of long term myself (because it's been three months, and who the hell can really know at that point), I did want exclusivity with her because I could admit to myself that I was in deep enough to know the idea of her sleeping with someone else would hurt. She then started freaking out, saying she’s scared of getting in too deep with people because it just inevitably hurts more when things end (she had a particularly bad breakup with her last LTR), and she didn’t ever want to feel hurt like she did when she got out of her last relationship again, and things like that. She said, and I quote, “It's not that this isn't amazing - it is. I adore spending time with you and I really care for you, but now I’m in my head.” So, I asked her if she was in her head about things ending or about if things would be bad if they did. She said that she was just generally overthinking things, like “what if I wake up and I don’t like this person anymore? Then I’m a jerk. Or what if I get attached and then poof they’re gone? Or what if I’m happy but I’m not ready for a relationship?” Things like that.

 

Ultimately she said she didn’t know what she wanted, asked to take the time that I was visiting my brother to think (which is a cop out but fine), and broke up with me when I came back home because “we have different expectations of the relationship and I’m not interested in pursuing it any further”.

 

Now, I’m frustrated as hell. Because even though I asked her when she dumped me if she did this because she was scared and she said no, my gut is telling me she caught more feelings than she intended to and she’s sprinting as far as she can from this. Ultimately I may just be projecting that because I’m the idiot who caught feelings for a toddler, but I feel like, given her actions prior to the last week or so when she started pulling away, she was the one making things serious. Even the week prior to our blow up, when I went to pick her up from a cast party she was at, she was asking when she’d get to see me and saying she missed me, and was thinking about me, and didn’t want me to go (and considering how long it took her to leave my car when I pulled up to her place, I do believe it).

 

Mostly, I think it’s tied up in three things. One, she didn’t anticipate catching feels and is now generally running because it’s scary — which, fair enough. She got out of a terrible relationship last year and, though she had a rebound phase, was probably not anticipating finding something that actually felt real. I can get that, but don’t string me along in the process and don't make it serious if you don't want serious. Two, she’s going home for two months, and the idea of long distance (even when it’s not really all that long) is hard — it’s a lot easier to drop something and bang other people than to be tied up with someone else. Again, fair, but call it off when I asked about it in that case, or just be honest if it’s because you want to screw other people.

 

And number three, which I think is also a major one, is that she’s still incredibly tied up with her father’s opinion of her, and her dad’s a straight up homophobe. She mentioned once that she didn’t know how she would handle her dad telling her it was just a phase. Like, her dad’s opinion is absolutely massive to her — prior to her dumping me she spent an hour talking about how she was looking at going to Europe for two weeks at the end of summer as long as she could talk her dad into it. Not because he’d be paying or anything — just because she didn’t want to make him worry. I mostly think the reality of being in a relationship with someone and either having to flat out lie by omission to her father about it or telling her dad and him taking it badly became too much and, again, she ran away. Which, again, I can get — coming out is terrifying, and doing it when you’re still somewhat financially dependant on a person is a huge risk. But I’m also not the one who was pushing for her to come out in any way, though I may be getting punished for it now.

 

Ultimately, I just feel used. Most of my friends who I’ve talked to with this have all come to the conclusion that she straight up has no idea what she wants, though they may just be being kind on my behalf. It’s entirely possible she figured out exactly what she wants and I’m just not it, and she doesn’t have the balls to say that. I just feel like an idiot because I caught feelings. It’s better to find out now that she’s flaky, of course, but it still feels like an absolute gut punch. Ultimately, I've initiated no contact, removed her and her social circle from my social media, and am working on healing. I wasn't expecting this to hurt as bad as it does considering the short term nature of the deal. I wish I'd never agreed to date her in the first place given the dumpster fire this turned in to -- I would have been just fine getting out of University unattached, and would have done so had she not asked me out in the first place.

 

I don't know. I just don't get this. I'm sorry for the rant.

[Maldives]

Take her at her word dude. I think she's told you exactly what it is the truth. The only time Ive found dumpers lie about a breal up is wen they've met someone or talking to someone.

 

Good chance it's age mixed wth her 1st experience of being hurt

[The Urbanyst]

I never take women under 25 seriously. They have too much life ahead of them to commit to anyone permanently in most cases. They are also still developing and figuring out who they are.

 

At your age you should know this.