cgo311055 Posted January 18, 2019 Posted January 18, 2019 I'm asking because of my personal experience on this. People seem to give up so easily. What was your experience on this? 3 years ago I became friends with an amazing girl. Truthfully, I never saw her as anything more than that. Yet we we're always extremely touchy with each other and spent countless hours laughing at the stupidest things. Never in my life had I felt so compatible with someone. As time passed so did my time with her. Only a few month left until her graduation day and that's when her behavior changed. She began to spend every single day by me. Whenever it was cold she would mercilessly strangle herself within my arms not giving a single damn about all the friends surrounding us. We started staying after school madly flirting with each other on the football field. For a moment we stared into each other's eyes and that's when I knew, I was in love. 2 month left of her senior year and we decided we wanted to give us a try. The feeling was indescribable, even her best friend said that we we're so compatible it was scary. She revealed to me that she had a crush on me for 3 years and that even when she was with her previous ex she had thought about me. But we had an obvious and ongoing problem. She had to go off to college and was afraid things would go wrong. We cried about it and she told that if she really did love me she would have to let me go. Yet we didn't break up, instead we cried, made out in the corner of the school, went on our first date and met her parents all within the same week. 1 month left until graduation. A friend of mine told me she had discussed to him about us. She said I was great and everything she ever wanted but she didn't think it was going to work out in college. I was devastated, I thought we had everything cleared up. Soon I realized that I was in a relationship with someone who had doubt about us. I became incredibly insecure and repeatedly asked myself why. So I had to ask and I did, were you cheating on me? She told me she would never and proceeded to comfort me. But as the weeks went by she became distant. The beginning of our downfall was the worst. We broke up, a month before she departs to college. She was hurt because I didn't trust her, but even now I never told her why I began to feel insecure. She threw me a cushion of words to soften the break up. Things like, I need to work on myself, maybe once we figure this out again we can get back together and I still want you there as a friend. Worst thing was, the college was 40 minutes away. So my question, why does a individual begin feeling overwhelmingly amounts of doubt? Are they afraid of being tied down? Is it because we are teenagers with unavoidable amounts of immaturity? What's your story?
d0nnivain Posted January 18, 2019 Posted January 18, 2019 It's not that they give up. It's that they recognize that they are on to the next chapter of their lives & they want to be free to explore. LDRs are also hard. Some people know they don't want to deal with the heartbreak I'm sorry you got hurt but look at it as a way to write the next chapter of your life. 1
ExpatInItaly Posted January 18, 2019 Posted January 18, 2019 It's not that they give up. It's that they recognize that they are on to the next chapter of their lives & they want to be free to explore. LDRs are also hard. Some people know they don't want to deal with the heartbreak I'm sorry you got hurt but look at it as a way to write the next chapter of your life. Yes, exactly. What we want as teens changes a lot as we grow and move forward in life. That is reflected in the frequency of break-ups as people move on from their high-school sweethearts. Most folks that young are not truly ready to commit in the way a relationship would require to survive the transition into adulthood. 2
Lotsgoingon Posted January 18, 2019 Posted January 18, 2019 Several reasons. One, yes people are looking forward to the opportunity to explore, experiment and find out about themselves in college. Going to college with a partner back home is sorta like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet on a full stomach. Second, and more subtle, people date each other ... in huge part because the other is around. Our market for partners isn't global. It's who's around now that I can spend good time with! ... Same with friends? We choose friends in part because they are around. But going off to college is all about (for many people) trying out a new life, seeking a new identity, exploring and investigating new interests, new conversations. In the old days, lots of LGBT folks came out in college. Lots of rural folks realize they love the city ... and so on ... So your gf thinks you're good. ... She's just not stuck on the idea that you are her one and only and that she should never even look at another guy ... and that life with you is the best possible life ... and all that! There are probably sides of her that she hasn't told you about ... that she wants to explore ... and being single allows that exploration to occur. Doesn't mean she finds you inadequate. But as they say, she wants to know "what else is out there" (for herself) and as far as dating. This is not a criticism, but she likely has talked to you about or hinted at sides of herself, maybe ideas or values not popular where you grew up, that she wants to check out ... And these may be things you don't approve of. Celebrate what you've had. It's still valid. BTW: this kind of breakup can happen when people are older and one travels to a new location for a job. Often the person moving ... doesn't want to come to the new location with a partner. They want to see what's happening in the new locale. 1
major_merrick Posted January 20, 2019 Posted January 20, 2019 My husband and I were engaged at the end of high school, but broke up when we went to college. Part of it was due to distance - 6 hours drive. Part of it was due to me being unsettled about my primary attraction to other women. At that point, he wanted a religious monogamous marriage and I just couldn't live with the idea of never having a girlfriend. By the time I realized that I had issues with being without him, he had found someone else. When he married that person, it made me angry and jealous, and I thought I was going to miss out on our friendship. Yes, college offers a buffet of opportunities. Sometimes, what you find when you're young and in love turns out to be good too. I'm just glad that we both grew up enough to deal with each other, and that we stayed friends through all the years of changes.
snowboy91 Posted January 20, 2019 Posted January 20, 2019 Sorry to hear about your experiences - unfortunately it's all too common. Leaving for college/university puts an enormous amount of strain on a relationship. Aside from the obvious distance part, when you go to college you go through all these experiences and changes, so you end up a very different person. Those changes can cause the two people to become less compatible over time. Once you add the large number of available, more like minded potential partners, it's going to be very difficult to resist the urge to explore other people. I doubt that that urge is on her mind right now, but she does have some idea of how the two of you will grow apart once she leaves. I also think her fear of hurting you and your fear of her leaving is what led to you two not trusting each other, which caused both of you to pull away and ended up destroying the relationship. As much as it sucks, it's almost better that it happened sooner rather than later.
Cakess Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 If I could go back I would've cut all ties with my HS sweetheart before college, the LDR literally tore us apart in a way that we'll never fully recover though we still love and care about each other deeply. It just has to be one of those things, if it's meant for you, it'll always be there, and you have to trust that. But trying to hold onto something because you're scared just ends up ruining everything.
mortensorchid Posted January 21, 2019 Posted January 21, 2019 People are moving onto the next chapter in their lives, and part of that is cutting ties with the old chapter (as in people you went to high school with). I don't talk to anyone I went to high school with outside of Facebook, and when we do it's once a year. But then again that's what Facebook is for. I was with my HS Sweetheart for 4 years, I was in 10th grade and he was in 12th when we started dating. He went away to college and we stayed together, then 3 years later I went away to college and after my first year I changed. And we broke up that summer. In some ways maybe it was wrong of me to do so, but I recognized that we had both changed and it was time for us to go our separate ways. The majority of the time we were "together" we were actually apart. And as I would find out as an adult, LDRs are not good things for either party. I think that's why a majority of people break up before going away to college. True, some see a new pool of people before them and think "I'm going to whore around", and they do, but you find out rather quickly this is not for you and it's part of your growing pains. Now, as a full blown adult, there are more things at risk for people. It's what it is.
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