I don’t really know who in my life to go to about this issue, so I’m hoping that y’all will help me gain some perspective. Sorry about the length. About a month and a half ago, I broke up with my girlfriend. We both cared a lot about each other, but I realized certain issues just were not going to go away. I will get to those in a moment, but I will fully admit the way that I broke up with her was totally selfish. When I finally got the nerve to do it, we were both very, very far from home and on opposite sides of the world. She’d just started staying with extended family to nanny for the summer, and I had just gotten to Europe for internships. Also, she was in the middle of a nannying job at the time, which she could not leave. I have regretted that particular bit a lot, but I did not know if I would have the nerve later to do it. There has been other, later jackassery on my part, like focusing too much on things that she did wrong in the relationship which was affecting her more than I realized. In any case, I have tried to be there for her to deal with this break up and so that she will have someone to talk to. I know she’s been very lonely there, and though she has other friends whom she can call and talk to, I know that there are some things that she wants to talk to me in particular about. I also know that I make her feel secure and talking to me makes her feel better. I recently apologized for treating her badly over the course of this whole thing, because I do want to stay friends with her. As for the reasons that I broke up with her, there were a few. First, the final thing that led me to break it off was that we went to the wedding of one of her ex-bfs (which, doing the math at the wedding, he was pursuing his now wife while they were dating, but whatever). They’re not much older than we are, and the whole ordeal made her very affectionate with me and she started to talk about marriage very seriously, which we’d done in the past but I’d made it clear that I won’t be ready for years. All I could think of was “I don’t want to marry this girl and have things be like this forever.” This came to a head when my high school best friend got engaged and my other best friend told me she was thinking it would happen soon. In terms of lesser issues, though, we’d both gained a lot of weight and could not seem to stick to any diet or exercise when we were around each other. This affected both of our confidence and health levels significantly and really started to wear on us. She is an extremely messy person and at least once I would come to my place (where she practically lived rent free) to find it totally trashed, with the kitchen having plates everywhere and food “accidentally” left out of the refrigerator. Finally, for to most part, I felt like she would not take my time and effort into consideration, whether it was asking for rides, favors, whatever, I felt like if she asked me to do something, I would almost always do it, but if I asked her to do something then she would often not do it or if she did then she would act like she was doing me some grand favor. To me, though, all of these are side issues and I think that I could have tolerated or even worked with her on most of them. The main issues which made me feel trapped, though, involved communication, respect, family and, unfortunately, sex. The communication bit is one of my failings. I hate confrontation, and when there were issues, I would often downplay them until things kind of exploded. After having worked on this though, I realized that this was only part of the problem. The other half of it is that she would not take my concerns seriously unless I did actually freak out about it. Even if she acknowledged the problem, which was only sometimes, she would try to be accommodating but that would only last until she got stressed out about something and things were back the way they were. The family thing is something that has worn on me because there is not much I can do about it. My family dynamics are super weird and it freaks a lot of people out that as a result I am not as close to my family as most others are. Not only that, but one set of my parents really did not like her and made it very clear to me from the beginning. When they scheduled a trip to come see me and came into my place, it was messy, like always. Of course, much of the mess was her stuff, which really clenched their dislike even more. The sex part is pretty complicated. When we first started seeing each other, we would fool around all the time. Hell, we missed class sometimes because we couldn’t keep ourselves off each other. Within a few months, though, that almost completely stopped and it’s been rare ever since. Somewhere in that time she got on birth control, which she blamed for her decreased sex drive, but this had been a trend for some time. We probably had sex twice every about six weeks, on average. This is not close to satisfying for me, and I don’t really believe it was for her either but I felt that there was nothing I could do. She would always say how small my dick was compared to the other guys she has been with and that despite my making improvements, that I was bad at sex. I’m sure that most of her saying that comes from her just liking to be totally honest with me, but it still hurts. Still, it was becoming clear to be that we’re just not very sexually compatible and that we’re just too young to be in a mostly sexless relationship forever, even though she seemed to think that the trade-off for other things was worth it. REAL ISSUE HERE! So, most of why I am writing is because things between me and her are just in kind of a… weird place. We still care about each other and have even expressed that to each other, but we both seem to realize that it just probably won’t work out. One of the reasons is that now not only does my family dislike her, just more strongly, but now her family thinks I’m an asshole for breaking it off with her while overseas (okay, fair). Also, probably too many things have been said at this point. Here’s the thing though. She had a Tinder date recently, which, okay fine, whatever. She can go out with whomever she wants. That didn’t bother me. In fact, I wasn’t bothered until she called me the next day and told me that she went on the date and that they had sex. Then she went into detail about the date and then about the sex, which they had multiple times. I was surprisingly hurt when she told me all that. I know it’s irrational to be upset about this; she’s single after all. But something about her having sex really bothers me, especially like she described. In my mind, it makes me think that all of the sex issues were my fault after all. It makes me feel pretty worthless. I know that she is going on a trip soon and has mentioned that she wants to find at least another guy to hook up with on it. I have my own escapades in the works, so it’s not as if I’m becoming a monk, but it does make me feel like that if I couldn’t even impress the girl whom I loved for that long, then how can I hope to do that for anyone else? This is especially confusing to me because she has told me before that I was the first guy to make her really orgasm, at least occasionally. I don’t know if that’s true or not anymore, but it seems like a weird thing to lie about. There’s also the fact that she calls to talk to me every day. Mostly, the conversations are pretty nice but they are pretty littered with reminders that we’re not dating anymore, mostly coming from her. She’s also done some things which seem pretty purposefully teasing, like being naked on video chat but only showing her face and things like that. At this point, I just don’t know what to do. I feel like somewhere, I still care about this girl and I really enjoy talking to her, still. We still have good personality chemistry. I don’t know that I want to lose that. But I don’t know that I want to stay in a ghost of a relationship like we’ve got going on right now. Any advice from an outside perspective?
TL/DR: My ex-gf and I who had a very messy relationship and many relationship issues are trying to be friends, but the conversations are regular, tend to be weird and sometimes passive-aggressive. Also, because of sex issues, I don’t know that I can emotionally handle hearing about her with other guys, though I know that it will/should happen.
Submitted July 04, 2016 at 07:09PM by whoknowsnotmeha http://ift.tt/29bqBmm relationships
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