My ex and I were together for around 1.5 years in an LDR. He had tried to break up with me around 4 times before, but I would plead with him and he would come back, tell me he loved me, and talk about our future and marriage.

This September, he came to meet me, and that’s when I found out he had been using a dating app, swiping on women, sexting at least one woman, and sharing his WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram with girls. He said there was no physical connection, but I still consider it cheating.

He also told me that his family was his responsibility while I was a choice, and that he could change his choice but couldn’t leave his responsibility.

What confuses me is that before all this, he was still talking about our future and marriage and acting committed. Now I’m trying to understand what actually happened and how much of the relationship had already changed from his side.

I also pushed away a close friend becnause my ex had issues with him. I became distant, blocked him and eventually ghosted him because I was so focused on my relationship. After the breakup, I finally reached out to that friend, but he saw my messages and didn’t reply.

Now I feel like I lost a genuine friend because I gave so much of myself to a relationship that ended anyway. Most people don’t know about the cheating, so they probably think we simply broke up because we were incompatible and I was too dependent.

  • crayons_to_chaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    11 days ago

    Not to shill my own agenda, but in the last two years I’ve learned a lot about personality disorders, narcissism, aspd, and the upside down feeling that comes with being in a relationship with these kinds of folks. Now I’m not saying your person falls in this category, and of course caution labelling other people, because we can’t truly see their hearts.

    But we can see their actions, and we feel the impact when they lie to us and manipulate us. We feel the compound trauma when we express that hurt only to be met by more lies or some other dismissal. That’s real enough for me. What’s the thing they say, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.

    I fought hard thru the relationship to salvage it, as it sounds you have, and the effort SELDOM felt reciprocated. That is VERY real, and not just insecurity like they are likely to suggest (and we’re likely to consider)

    Amongst the horrible backward things that were said by them were these strangely self aware statements (they didn’t register any cognitive dissonance for her):

    “I can’t give you the kind of accountability you are asking for.”

    “Best I can do is a fresh start.”

    then finally

    “I think you just don’t like me.”

    And that one hurt a lot, because I believed I did like this person, but it turns out she was right. The person I loved was a mask they put on in the beginning. Eventually the mask comes off and you get to try to reconcile with the adult child beneath it, and they are terrified and hostile, and poor arbiters of their own reality.

    I have a lot to say on this, and I already fear I’m projecting, but the struggle and hopeless feeling remind me of my own experience with narcissism. It didn’t exist here, so I made a community a couple weeks ago, but the NarcissisticAbuse subreddit (along with the book “Its not you” by Dr. Ramani) was very helpful in letting me see how absurd my situation was.

    Sorry for the rant.