Hello,

I feel this is going to be a long one so I apologize if I ramble. I have made a huge mistake and as a result I am lost in my life. It has gotten to the point that I am in so much emotional pain that I do not think there has been a single day in 3 months where I have not cried.

I am a 19 year old student and have just finished my first year at University. Up until 2 months ago, I had been in a happy relationship with a guy I met in college for just over 2 years. However, whilst I was at University, I fell in love with someone else, a good friend of mine who was my best friend at University. It started as an ignorable crush but towards the end of term, those feelings had intensified and I was no longer satisfied with the relationship with my boyfriend.

When I left University and came home, this other guy started becoming flirtier in his text messages. Eventually, it ended up turning into full blown sexting which made me feel really guilty because I was betraying my boyfriend. As a person who has been betrayed in the past by someone who was my closest friend for 10 years, I never wanted to be like that type of person so I began to despise myself for it. I told him it was a bad idea and I felt really guilty for doing it so it stopped for a while and then resumed.
One night, he was telling me about a girl he really liked and it made me really jealous and hurt to hear it so I ended up confessing my feelings to him. Even though he had sent me texts from before all this saying how much he liked me as a person and how he was obviously attracted to me, he said that he didn’t feel a spark between us so we couldn’t be more than friends…But he still wanted to have sex with me.

This devastated me, and trying to hide all my emotions from my boyfriend made it even worse. My boyfriend was and still is a very caring person and has treated me so well, he did not deserve what I did to him.
The other guy felt guilty about my feelings for him so we stopped sexting, but occasionally it would happen again. I decided that it was not fair on my boyfriend to keep this a secret from him, so I decided to end it and told him about my feelings for the other guy. Even though I do not deserve it, my now ex has still remained friends with me and tries to cheer me up when I’m feeling particularly down. He is an amazing person. I wish I still loved him.

Since the breakup, this other guy has been extremely callous with me. He has provided me with no support or help. I feel he is just trying to use me to have sex when I go back in 2 weeks. When I told him I was angry and why I was angry, he would not listen. He believes that if we make our relationship emotional, it won’t be worth it. I know he has been hurt in the past and may not want an emotional attachment because he is afraid of getting hurt again. He does not want a serious relationship with anyone; he just wants to have sex with them. He wants us to be friends with benefits but he does not seem to understand how much that could hurt me. We share a group of friends and he wants us to keep it a secret from them. But when you love someone, you want to show affection for them in public. At this point, I’m not sure if he even cares about me as a friend. We had such a great friendship before all this happened and I would rather go back to being that compared to what we are now. Unbelievably, despite how badly he has made me feel. I still love him, and I feel so weak and pathetic for doing so. Being honest, I feel like I love him and hate him at the same time, like I want to kiss him and kick him.

I understand that many people would blame me for this, it is after all my own fault that this has happened, I have lost the love of the one person who I completely trust and who I want to talk to but can’t. I have received nothing but pain and it has left me feeling worthless, used and alone. I cannot simply just walk away from this guy as I may lose all my friends that we have in common. I want to tell him I can’t do this but fear that my love for him will make me give in and do something stupid. Having sex with him could break me. I just want this feeling to stop, this constant sadness that I cannot make go away. I don’t know how to handle it.