I'm so sorry. I do believe you're in agony. It's an awful loss. He was your first and, so far, only love, and he is the father of your children. This will be probably be the worst thing you've ever gone through. It may be the worst thing you will ever go through.

This does not have to destroy you. You can decide that it will, and then it will. Two things make us who we are. One is what we've experienced. The other is how we've decided to view our experience. Two persons going through equally heart-wrenching experiences can come out with different impact on who they are, depending on that second factor. Someone close to me - young - lost her marriage, decided she couldn't cope . . . and possibly never will recover. She is consumed with thoughts of how life has hurt her and and how her dreams were shattered. She'll probably spend the rest of her life in and out of therapy, endlessly explaining that she didn't get what she needed and looking for affirmation that life dealt her some hard blows.

You have every right to grieve. There is no time table for how you move through that. But you can resolve that this awful wounding is not going to destroy your soul. People recover from even the most horrid things. It is not true that the worse it hurts now means the less likely you are to ever get over him leaving. I think being very young makes the pain worse. But it also leaves you the gift of more time ahead of you. Right now that just seems to stretch out as that much longer to live in misery. It's okay for it to seem like that now.

If you truly believe that he does not love you, then you need to be out of this relationship. I have nothing judgemental to say about you continuing to be with him. It gets lonely. But I think you can do better. The problem is not so much that he is taking your love, but he is wasting your time. Because of how you feel about him, you don't mind to continue giving him your love. It won't deplete the capacity for love that is on you. But keep reminding yourself that you have only so many days in your life . . . only so much time remaining, until you won't be young any more. He's had enough of your time. Learn to resent him taking more of it. That delays you building a life that does not revolve around him.