Hi everyone,
I'll try to sum up my story in a fairly concise way here. I don't wanna bore you all to death before you finish, but I don't have too many other people to turn to for advice so any help/advice/encouragement you could provide would be much appreciated.
A little history to start... I met this girl through a friend about 3 years ago when she was here in town visiting. We hit it off immediately, and when she went home we stayed in touch through facebook, texting, e-mailing, etc. Even with the lack of ever being able to be together it was still the time of my life. I'd never experienced clicking with someone like that and she became (and I consider even still to be) my one real true best friend. For about the first year or so we were just that... best friends. It was always sort of the elephant in the room that we liked each other but the distance keeping us apart and stuff made us each a little uneasy to really talk about having a real relationship. When we finally did everything was fantastic. We both obviously would have preferred to be physically together but just knowing we were in it together kept us very happy.
We were very strong and happy for about another year. It's a shame that this has all happened because we were in love and were fired up that we'd be able to stay strong and "beat the odds" of long distance relationships. Sadly however I think we both slowly started to succumb to the toll it was taking on us. We'd only been able to see each other twice since becoming "official." Not being able to do things together and each being busy with our own lives gave us less and less to talk about and enjoy together. Also I think having an uncertain "end-date" to being apart due to work and school reasons made things much more grim. Little things would begin to frustrate me like when she'd reply to a text or something in a way that I felt was less caring or loving than what I'd send to her, and some things I'd do would start to aggravate her more as well.
I started to question my feelings a lot, and I hated myself for it. I was in an ongoing battle with myself trying to figure out whether or not my feelings were still the same... Were these problems just because of the distance? Would we be a perfectly happy couple in a more normal situation? Was I just having a hard time crossing over from the "honey-moon" phase to the more regular, long-term love phase? How much of it was her changing as well as myself? Or was I just being paranoid and over-thinking everything?
What happened next was I met somebody new. I was completely lost and had no idea what to do. This new girl was very nice, fun, and to be honest I found treated me and happily talked with me more the way that I felt like I was missing from my girlfriend at that time. Even just typing that right now hurts a lot. I made the extremely difficult decision to end things with my girlfriend. I wasn't proud of it and hated myself for hurting her, but it would have been wrong for me to stay with her while I was developing feelings for this new girl. And I felt that my girlfriend too deserved to be able to live her life more where she is and go on real dates and stuff. I also hoped that maybe being apart would show me what I gave up and would make it possible to get back together with her and revive those old feelings that we used to share.
It took maybe a couple hard months but she's gotten over me very well. I admire her for it and am very impressed. She's a really strong gal. She's even thanked me for doing it because she's really enjoying being able to spend more time with her friends and stuff there. So if there's any silver lining to this I suppose it's that. Because she deserves to be happy. What I had with that other girl didn't last too long. She's nice and a good person and everything but I guess the attraction was more of a short-term-type thing than I was expecting. I'm afraid it may have been a case of "Grass is Greener Syndrome" or of me going with the Ms. Right Now as opposed to the real Ms. Right as people say.
The past couple months or so now I've started having feelings of wanting to give it another shot with my ex. In the past couple weeks they've been especially strong. It's like all I'm thinking about and it's killing me that a bad decision I made might end up costing me a lifetime of happiness. When I see happy couples or think about things they do like go grocery shopping... watch movies... get married... have kids... pay bills... even spend days sitting by the others hospital bed when they're old and grey... there's only one person I want to do those things with.
She's aware of these new developments, and while she says there's not a zero percent chance of us giving it another shot, it sounds very slim. And it certainly won't be anytime soon. In fact I don't even necessarily want it to be anytime soon because I'm happy that she's happy, and frankly I think I deserve this time being miserable by myself. She says she wants to be friends with me, but sadly it isn't the same. I find myself having to initiate every conversation and there's other little things like her knowing I had a big job interview and not asking how it went. That stuff hurts. I don't necessarily blame her after what I did to her, but I know that the girl I used to know is in there somewhere and it kills me that I not only lost my girlfriend, but also my best friend.
If anyone's made it this far thank you for your time reading all this. Any advice or inspiration you could provide would be greatly appreciated. I'm not really interested in ways to get over her. What I'm hoping for more is advice on getting her back one day. I know it won't take a couple days, or a couple months or maybe even longer, but I have so much faith in what we had and could have. It'd be such a shame if after everything we used to share and dream about, we never even get a chance at trying a real relationship one day, and I think that's worth fighting for.
I'll try to sum up my story in a fairly concise way here. I don't wanna bore you all to death before you finish, but I don't have too many other people to turn to for advice so any help/advice/encouragement you could provide would be much appreciated.
A little history to start... I met this girl through a friend about 3 years ago when she was here in town visiting. We hit it off immediately, and when she went home we stayed in touch through facebook, texting, e-mailing, etc. Even with the lack of ever being able to be together it was still the time of my life. I'd never experienced clicking with someone like that and she became (and I consider even still to be) my one real true best friend. For about the first year or so we were just that... best friends. It was always sort of the elephant in the room that we liked each other but the distance keeping us apart and stuff made us each a little uneasy to really talk about having a real relationship. When we finally did everything was fantastic. We both obviously would have preferred to be physically together but just knowing we were in it together kept us very happy.
We were very strong and happy for about another year. It's a shame that this has all happened because we were in love and were fired up that we'd be able to stay strong and "beat the odds" of long distance relationships. Sadly however I think we both slowly started to succumb to the toll it was taking on us. We'd only been able to see each other twice since becoming "official." Not being able to do things together and each being busy with our own lives gave us less and less to talk about and enjoy together. Also I think having an uncertain "end-date" to being apart due to work and school reasons made things much more grim. Little things would begin to frustrate me like when she'd reply to a text or something in a way that I felt was less caring or loving than what I'd send to her, and some things I'd do would start to aggravate her more as well.
I started to question my feelings a lot, and I hated myself for it. I was in an ongoing battle with myself trying to figure out whether or not my feelings were still the same... Were these problems just because of the distance? Would we be a perfectly happy couple in a more normal situation? Was I just having a hard time crossing over from the "honey-moon" phase to the more regular, long-term love phase? How much of it was her changing as well as myself? Or was I just being paranoid and over-thinking everything?
What happened next was I met somebody new. I was completely lost and had no idea what to do. This new girl was very nice, fun, and to be honest I found treated me and happily talked with me more the way that I felt like I was missing from my girlfriend at that time. Even just typing that right now hurts a lot. I made the extremely difficult decision to end things with my girlfriend. I wasn't proud of it and hated myself for hurting her, but it would have been wrong for me to stay with her while I was developing feelings for this new girl. And I felt that my girlfriend too deserved to be able to live her life more where she is and go on real dates and stuff. I also hoped that maybe being apart would show me what I gave up and would make it possible to get back together with her and revive those old feelings that we used to share.
It took maybe a couple hard months but she's gotten over me very well. I admire her for it and am very impressed. She's a really strong gal. She's even thanked me for doing it because she's really enjoying being able to spend more time with her friends and stuff there. So if there's any silver lining to this I suppose it's that. Because she deserves to be happy. What I had with that other girl didn't last too long. She's nice and a good person and everything but I guess the attraction was more of a short-term-type thing than I was expecting. I'm afraid it may have been a case of "Grass is Greener Syndrome" or of me going with the Ms. Right Now as opposed to the real Ms. Right as people say.
The past couple months or so now I've started having feelings of wanting to give it another shot with my ex. In the past couple weeks they've been especially strong. It's like all I'm thinking about and it's killing me that a bad decision I made might end up costing me a lifetime of happiness. When I see happy couples or think about things they do like go grocery shopping... watch movies... get married... have kids... pay bills... even spend days sitting by the others hospital bed when they're old and grey... there's only one person I want to do those things with.
She's aware of these new developments, and while she says there's not a zero percent chance of us giving it another shot, it sounds very slim. And it certainly won't be anytime soon. In fact I don't even necessarily want it to be anytime soon because I'm happy that she's happy, and frankly I think I deserve this time being miserable by myself. She says she wants to be friends with me, but sadly it isn't the same. I find myself having to initiate every conversation and there's other little things like her knowing I had a big job interview and not asking how it went. That stuff hurts. I don't necessarily blame her after what I did to her, but I know that the girl I used to know is in there somewhere and it kills me that I not only lost my girlfriend, but also my best friend.
If anyone's made it this far thank you for your time reading all this. Any advice or inspiration you could provide would be greatly appreciated. I'm not really interested in ways to get over her. What I'm hoping for more is advice on getting her back one day. I know it won't take a couple days, or a couple months or maybe even longer, but I have so much faith in what we had and could have. It'd be such a shame if after everything we used to share and dream about, we never even get a chance at trying a real relationship one day, and I think that's worth fighting for.
Comment