Thank you for your thoughtful and caring post. It means more to me than you will know.

The part that is really hard for me to reconcile, no pun intended, is that this lady has so much goodness inside of her, and we did really well a lot of the times, except when she kind of started to go off the rails. I couldn’t even say if it wasn’t her medication that might’ve been causing her to be antagonistic, and I’m sure that might be part of it, but she does have a very combative controlling part of her.

I could go on and on, but it would be as long as the first posting I wrote.

I mean, I definitely have been thinking about what you have said… She’s not likely to change, I’ve seen some true colors that are not hugely flattering… But you know, we all have our issues, and we all have things that we are good at and not so good at… She has so much to offer.

It is really strange to acknowledge that someone like her can be so decent on one hand, and then get very upset and semi hostile at service workers, because something hasn’t gone the way it was expected. I often would give her a little bit of slack, because she works like a dog, and her job has a huge amount of pressure and expectation attached to it, along with some likely trauma, because she works in healthcare, and who knows whether that contributes to her demeanor.

We seemed to have so much in common with our personalities… She started off as a really smiley kind of lady, and that’s kind of who I want to be in the world as well…. We both marveled at how much we felt like outsiders, and often stayed away from social conventions… It almost seems like we were two peas in a pod. We loved spending time together, which is what makes it so hard that it turned the way that it did.

It mostly turned because of these stupid things that she would get in her head that she would turn into contentions… I have multiple examples, but I’ll spare the details… To me, these contention seems no more than power struggles and nitpicking, which I think is one characteristic that is often pointed out that avoidant people often suffer with… I have heard from multiple authorities that avoidant attachment style people will often pick at their partners, because it’s a way of giving them a little bit of a push to see if they will actually leave the relationship, since they expect their partner will leave eventually anyway.

I just don’t know what to do with it. Big part of my heart is with this lady. It was only five months, but every day we were consistently, talking, chatting, having fun on the phone… I’ve almost never encountered that.

When we first got together, for the first few months, she was all about making me feel validated and appreciated… Once her nitpicking started, that started to level out, which I knew it would, because that kind of thing seems to usually taper off once routines take hold. I knew she was avoidant, so I tried to give her lots of space. I really didn’t sense any major issues with her right up until the end, other than our big talk, and how she seemed so unfazed by it, even though I knew I had sent out a fairly strong boundary…

I knew I had to set that boundary in place, meaning the boundary that the hostility couldn’t continue, or it would likely lead to an end of the relationship… But I’m not crazy about how I did it. I don’t think I really pointed the finger at her strongly in an accusatory manner, but she knew what I was talking about, and she knew it was about her. it wasn’t terrible execution on my part, but it wasn’t great, either. Probably would’ve been much better if I said, “I love you, but I want to work with you to find a way for us to not bark at each other like this, and keep on the positive side of things“. I think that would have been much more proactive, and I might still have a lady friend if perhaps I had Said it in that way.

Despite the obvious of what you say, I still have this feeling that I’ll be waiting around for the next few months to see if she checks in and says anything…

I would think that the most thoughtful people would check in with someone that they had such an intense time with over the summer and at least maybe apologize for things going down the way they did…

The break up was very odd. She gave me no mention of being troubled… I talked with her the night before, and I hadn’t seen her in three weeks because she was away at a conference, and she invited me up for lunch. I asked her if I can bring ingredients for a meal…

I get up there, she seems kind of happy to see me, but a little bit distractible, I guess. It was like a new start I thought. I made a nice meal for her, we sat at the table and chitchatted, she gave me a couple of gifts that she bought while she was away… I noticed she wasn’t wearing the ring that she had worn that I bought for her, which she had worn every single time I had seen her since I gave it to her… That seemed a bit odd, but it had been three weeks since I’ve seen her, so no big deal.

We clear the table together and wash dishes… Then I ask her if there’s anything around her house that she needs for me to do… And she had me install a ceiling smoke detector, which only took me a couple of minutes, and she helped in small ways. All good.

Then she takes her dogs out to the back porch for a few minutes, and I see her fumbling around out there, she looks a bit distracted… Since I didn’t have my shoes on, I just went and sat back down at the table and she came back in just a few minutes later, came right, over to the table, sat down, and said, “oh, by the way, I feel like I have lost enthusiasm for this, so I am going to end it”. Really? I’ve been here for over an hour, cooked you a meal, helped around the house, and now you’re telling me you’re going to end it? Of course, I didn’t say this out loud.

Knowing that in my brain, I almost expect stuff like this to happen, it didn’t really come as a big surprise, but it was a massive shock, if that makes any sense. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This is a girl that just a few months earlier, was looking at houses that her and I could buy together, and considering trips that we might be able to go on. She would have been up to meet my family far away if it wasn’t for her work schedule. Then she uses us not being able to go on expensive vacation says one of the criteria to break up? That doesn’t make any sense

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything quite as strange in my dating life, but I don’t exactly have a rich, very dating light, so who knows whether strangeness comes part and parcel with break ups.

This may take a long time to get over. I had so much hope for this lady. We had covered a lot of distance in a very short amount of time. It may have been one of the best summers I have ever had. Now, it will serve as the saddest summer that I’ve ever had. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much hope with somebody as I have had with her… And it wasn’t just fantasy. Part of it was, but I was trying to accept her as the real human being that she is, as we all are… I would’ve never thought the bottom would fall out of it, like that, and with her almost treating me without a lot of consideration with how she broke up with me… No real discussion about it. No negotiation. There could have been so much more. We might’ve been able to do. We were just getting started, really.

That’s what makes me feel that something strange went down… Either with her mental health, because I could tell she was snappy that day, or maybe people in her family may have said something to her that made her feel swayed to end it. I guess I may never know.

I remember a month and a half earlier, she came to me, really happy that she said that her neighbor really liked me. Almost as if that was unexpected, and that it was an endorsement that was meaningful to her, as if she thought that maybe some people would find difficulty with who I am. That seemed a little Bizzarre, but I was happy that she told me that her neighbor thought I was a nice guy. I think she was still looking for the positives, despite her reservations about how I live my life. It really didn’t feel great, now that I think of it.

I do need to realize that there are cultural stereotypes and expectations. She had told me near the beginning that her family is very different, and her mother had said to her to be careful because guys with long hair all do drugs. She said she had to convince her mother that this was not the case. That’s pretty strange.

Ironically, the last night I saw her, before the break up day, her mother had called from an hour away and needed a ride to the ER, because she was sick… I volunteered to drive my lady friend down there at 10 o’clock at night, and spent the entire night in the ER waiting room while she was with her mother, waiting to be admitted. We didn’t get home until 6 AM that morning, and I kind of hoped that that whole ordeal would be a bit of a bonding experience between her and I. I guess not.

Her mother was quite nice to me that one and only time I met her. I treated her kindly… Kind of joked with her, escorted her in and out of the car and into the wheelchair, and I was hoping that would be meaningful to my lady friend. Apparently not enough.

I worked hard to make this lady happy. I did all kinds of jobs around her house, and she has a beach house on the ocean, and, although I was apprehensive to go there at first, after a while, we had a blast up there, and I did all kinds of work for her up there at that house, with a sole purpose of making her happy and taking some of the stress off of her already hugely heavy load.

This break up almost feels a little ungrateful on her part. So if I get it straight, you love bomb the crap out of somebody who is nice to you, they spend the summer working hard to make you happy, and take you places, and to do things for you, And then, without even a second glance you break up with them? Something just doesn’t jive with that story. It’s got to be at mental health issue. I don’t know what else to think. It can’t just be lack of character. I interacted with her way too much over the five months to believe that it’s just a matter of a lack of character. She’s got way too many other good things going on for me to come to that conclusion.

I don’t know what else to think. Someone suggested bipolar, but the symptoms don’t really line up. Maybe just significant depression? But then again, she gets to work every day no problems, although I don’t know if that is relevant to significant depression. She did say that she has had a fairly strong history with depression, and said that every year she struggles with it.

Can you tell that I’m ruminating about this? I just can’t shake the bizarreness of it all.