Dear Jaz2:

“I’m just really confused at this point as to the reason for his actions”- the reason, reads to me, is his anger. He is angry at you. Maybe because you ended the two months relationship with him and “he thought (you) hurt him intentionally”.

anita

Dear Jaz2,

You don’t mention any of his characteristics or personality other than how he reacted to you dumping him. But lets go in order of what happened.

First, you got together with your friend for whatever reason, but felt that you couldn’t commit so decided to end it.

Now, congratulations to you on being decisive about ending the relationship. Many people are too scare of hurting others or being seen as rude to end a relationship when they should have. But no matter when you entered into a relationship, know that you have the option to end it anytime, even a few hours after. You do not have to do anything you don’t feel comfortable doing and one of that thing is being in a relationship. People might call you indecisive for ‘ending things too early’, but they are not the ones who has to work at the relationship so their points are moot at anytime they venture to tell you what to do in your relationship. And it’s actually respectful of you to end things early as there’s isn’t as much investment in the relationship if you had let it go on. Also, by letting it go on, you are giving the other party false hope that the relationship is working and to keep at it. So it’s better to end things when you feel that you can’t invest much of your emotions into a relationship than to stay in one just because you feel guilty. Good for you.

Now, you don’t mention if you felt guilty before or after your friend went on to be a jerk. But what you shouldn’t have done was apologized for your actions. Even if you weren’t apologizing for ending things, any apologies at that point made it worse because you let yourself claim the title of ‘criminal/perpetrator’ in making him feel bad about the ending of a relationship. Any breakups will suck and people will feel dissapointed and sad, but he does not have the authority to place all the blame on you. That he would, might be because he thought it over, and possibly from side commentary from his friends, and came to the conclusion that you were a jerk for breaking up with him just after a few weeks of dating. And men are generally taught to feel entitled to certain things, so he might possibly have felt entitled anger over you ending the relationship without his consent so is being a jerk about it. Then when he contacted you, you responded in the affirmative of his hypothesis that you breaking up with him was because you were a jerk yourself because you apologized. Your apologies cemented his thought about why you broke up with him.

It’s understandable that you didn’t want to hurt him, but any break up will hurt. So the best way to go about it is to break up with no room for reconsideration, and then make space between you two. When you lose something, you need the space and time to grieve and mourn so that you can let go and move forward. But your friend didn’t abide to that and contacted you. You felt guilty, apologized, only to get angry messages back. That kind of reactions is very common because your ex believed that you are at fault for something and you kept supporting that by contacting him and apologizing in some way. You two created a drama of a person owing a life-debt from one decisive action.

Also, you don’t apologize for breaking up. Apologizing will only signal to the other person that there might be something wrong with them that you had to apologize because you couldn’t stand that one thing so decided to break up. Even if you say that it’s about you, it will still sound like an excuse. So you apologized and now he might possibly felt like there is something wrong with him and so that makes him angry. Then you kept contacting him, which only added fuel to the fire because it makes you even guiltier in his mind. It’s a never ending loop because now he is trying to find some way to fuel that anger, or at least find a way to justified that anger, which explain the Netflix thing. And then complaining to your friend? Same thing. He is trying to degrade your image with other people because you did what he wanted so now he doesn’t have many ammunition left other than your friends. Also, he is suffering so you should suffer with him.

Now that this happened, ask yourself if you’ve actually looked at your ex for the person he is or that you might have worn rose tinted glasses because you were friends. There are always signs to watch out for so after all this, carefully comb through your past interactions with your ex and look for the pieces that tells you whether he is capable of such childish entitlement and let it be a warning for the next person who sign up to be your potential partner.

So now you can see that your ex is capable of doing this just from you breaking up with him. And you unknowingly put on a play of ‘war’ with him; you apologizing constantly and him being aggressive via message. As you can see, that got you nowhere. The best course of action when your ex contacted you was to ignore it. Save it should anything else happen, but you should have ignore it. I don’t know why you felt guilty for breaking up with him since it means that there was little investment at that point into the relationship, but you felt guilty and answered him. That gave him the first opening to continued sulking about the breakup and it seem to be escalating somewhat.

Do not be blinded by the ‘but he was such a good person’. Well, he’s doing what he can to harassed you right now so leave the past to the past and focus on the present to deal with your situation. So he might be harassing you because he doesn’t want to let go just yet and by making you feel angry, you’ll respond to him. Even if it’s only a little bit of communications, it still some communication which is better then none. Or his ego is so hurt that he can only do this and he feels entitle to it because it’s only fair since he is hurt. And on and on. But that doesn’t matter. What matters now is what you’re going to do from now on.

My advice: stop contacting him. No matter how he might be contacting you, through message or your friend, you must find ways to ignore it. Because from your interactions after the break up, you have taught him that by making you angry or guilty, you’ll respond to him. You kept contacting him because of guilt and now it’s out of anger. So whatever he does, you need to learn to ignore it. As you continued to ignore him, he’ll eventually come to the conclusion that you are over this relationship and that it’s time to move on. But do not try to predict when he will stop harassing you. You cannot read his mind so there’s little hope of understanding his logic. So make a no contact rule with him. Enlist the help of friends and family if you have to. Change to a different messenger for the time being so that any messages from him will go unread or have a friend regulate that. Tell friends that you don’t want to hear about him. Avoid him if you can since it seems that you both study at the same institution. Make this thing absolute. But do not believe him if he suddenly turns around and ask to be friend again. If he can act this way towards a supposed friend turned girlfriend turned ex, then do you really trust he won’t do anything once he convinces you that he’s over the relationship?

Any question, comment away.

Good luck.