Dear Jules:

In your thread in April this year and in your thread more than six months later, Nov 3, 2020, you shared the following:

Ever since you were a child, you had two dreams: (a) to get your own dog, a dream you had your whole life, and (b) to live abroad someday, a dream you always had.

You wrote about Australia in your 20s, while you were a student: “I did my exchange studies there and felt more home than in my home country”.

You dreamed of spending a working holiday there after you graduate university. It took you nine years to complete two university degrees, graduating from the second in the summer of 2019. You then met your partner, at about 30 years old, “she really loved and adored me for so many months”. You told her about your Australia dream, wanting her to join you there, but she didn’t share your dream of living abroad. You decided to make your Australia dream come true nonetheless at the end of 2020.

When Covid-19 happened, you decided, “ok, Australia is not going to happen, I will make my other dream come true and finally get my own dog”, but you doubted this decision, overthinking it, being torn between the two dreams, figuring that a commitment to a dog will tie you down and make the Australia dream impossible for you (when the Covid-19 situation allows the travel). You were also thinking that “the constant urge to go to Australia .. would also potentially ruin my relationship”.

A month later, in mid-May, you and your partner separated. You wrote about your ex partner: “When I met her, I felt like home”. You shared that the two of you had “the same humour, same values, amazing physical connection, similar interests.. I thought I would marry her one day”. The two of you never lived together, but you spent a lot of time in her apartment, an apartment “that felt like home more than my own”, you wrote. You also spent alone time in your place, doing your art.

You suspected that her biggest dream was to  have kids although she never asked if you “would like to consider starting a family with her one day”. You told her that you were not sure whether you wanted kids in your future. In January this year, the two of you were traveling for a month and “everything had been great”. When you returned from your travels, she took time off from work and later was left un-employed “without much of savings and way too much free time”, and suffering from panic attacks. The two of you “argued a lot”. “In the end, she was the one to make the decision” to break up. It was a protracted break up where the two of you “acted like a couple in love” for two months post-breakup (May-July). In July she wanted a break but you suggested a breakup.

A month after the recent, no contact breakup, in August, she called you drunk, “begging to come over, missing me desperately”. You resisted her begging and didn’t see her, figuring you better figure out first if you want kids in your future before you see her. At the time, you “had been going to a therapist to figure out my goals in life”. You figured that you need to be clear about your goals and plans for the future first, and then contact her.

When you had contact with her next, on or around her birthday in September, she told you that she “had met someone and fell in love a couple of days after the drunken phone call in August”, that she had similar goals with her new partner (“a new girl (who) just moved back from abroad only due (to) covid”).

You shared that from the beginning of the breakup your depression got deeper, and that what you found out in September deepened your depression, that you are currently “in such a dark place”. You wrote about your recent ex-partner and partners before her: “It seems that everyone I love eventually leaves me and soon finds a more suitable match… I feel that I have been replaced while she has such a special place in my heart”.

Since the breakup, you “tried everything:.. been on dates, been to a yoga retreat, started a new hobby, met friends, made new friends, gotten a puppy, which has been my biggest dream through my whole life, gone to therapy.. But I’m stuck. Nothing helps, I just miss her in my life… It feels like our relationship couldn’t have been so special to her than it was to me… I’m stuck with the idea of us being the right people for each other… Do you have any practical advice for me that could help?”

My input followed by advice:

1. The issue of home and feeling at home- you wrote that you always dreamed of living abroad. Regarding Australia, you wrote: “I did my exchange studies there and felt more home than in my home country”. About your ex-partner, you wrote: “When I met her, I felt like home“, and about spending lots of time in her apartment, you wrote: “that felt like home more than my own”-

– it seems to me that your early home life, as a child and onward, did not feel like home, and that is why you always, that is, from a very young age, dreamed of living elsewhere. Perhaps you dreamed about living elsewhere from as early as you were able to dream.

I imagine your life at home, as a child, was spent feeling alone and anxious too much of the time, and I am guessing that your anxiousness fed your over-thinking, and when conflicted and overthinking- you get stuck in action-paralysis at times.

2. When your ex-partner called you “begging to come over, missing (you) desperately”, and you refused to see her because you wanted to be clear about your life goals before you have contact with her- this is an example of the action-paralysis I referred to above. You were stuck in thinking when action was called for. It was time to pause your thinking about your life goals and attend to the current crisis.

It is possible that your most ex-partner was so hurt and angry that you turned her away that time, that she made up the story about seriously involved with another woman, so to hurt you back.

It is possible that what I refer to as your action paralysis has handicapped your previous relationships as well.

Advice: if you agree with what I wrote above, if it feels true to you, address your childhood in therapy, address the emotional experience of living in a home that didn’t feel like home. Also, you are welcome to share more with me, and if you want, we can continue to communicate here.

anita