srah Posted January 17, 2015 Share Posted January 17, 2015 I recently got out of an abusive relationship that brought up a lot of old baggage...namely that I wonder if I will ever have a healthy loving relationship again. My last serious relationship ended almost 5 years ago. We lived together for 4 years and I thought we would end up together. He said all the time that he loved me to death and that he had never really known love before our relationship. He treated me amazingly well for the first few years. Way above any other boyfriend in terms of consideration and treatment. And we were passionate about each other. Three years in I discovered that he had cheated on me for a month with someone he met online. He had an online dating profile and had gone on dates with women for 6 months (he claims things never got physical with them) while we were living together and having sex with each other nearly every day. I kicked him out of our house but we stayed in contact and then we stayed together and went to couple's counseling. I was wracked with pain and grief but I couldn't see moving on without him in my life. He said he had gone online to talk to women because he felt like he was too "dorky" for me. Our relationship improved after the counseling. We had another good six or so months. Then I received a job offer in New York (a city we had always agreed we wanted to move to) and he promised to look for work there as well and move out within six months. We had both agreed in the beginning of the relationship that neither of us wanted to stay in our home town. He visited every 2 weeks and our relationship was still quite good but he dragged his feet looking for work in NY. There was a single woman I knew in our hometown who worked with him who was pursuing him. I had a feeling she wanted him but he always denied it. Things in the relationship were still pretty solid and then--wham!--a day before Valentine's Day he told me he couldn't be with me anymore because he "wanted to be alone." I found out a few weeks later that he started dating the woman who was pursuing him and I was heartbroken for quite some time. A lot of forces were at work--one is that he was afraid to move to New York and chose the easy route. The other was that he was afraid to commit. Whatever the reason(s) I have since become afraid that I will never feel that "in love" feeling again with anyone again because I know that even if things progress perfectly for the first few years, that it could all go downhill. Perhaps he was a poor choice from the beginning and I didn't see the signs. Perhaps you "just know" when someone is right (I "just knew" at the end of our first date and never doubted it though...) How can I believe in love again? Btw I am 35 Link to post Share on other sites
whomsoever Posted January 20, 2015 Share Posted January 20, 2015 Hope is everything. when there is night,there is day as well. Everything is going to fall in place one day. You are going to wake up on sunday morning to have the best brunch cooked by your 'the one'. 1 Link to post Share on other sites
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