Dear Kristine:

You shared that you married young for 20 years,  and divorced at 40. Your ex husband “had anger issues and was difficult to live with”. After your divorce you dated quite a bit for 7 years. Most of the men you dated didn’t want a serious relationship. You fell hard for a few, “but nothing ended up serious”.

Following seven years of dating, you met your now boyfriend of 3 years, a kind, genuine, affectionate, caring, very loyal man. The two of you have a great relationship, don’t argue, see eye to eye on a lot of important things, have fun, still smitten with each other 3 years in. You referred to him as the love of your life,  the two of you are planning to move in together next year and talk about forever and maybe getting married in the future.

The problem you have is that he shared with you about his relationship history, and what he shared troubles you, particularly two relationships: one with a college sweetheart whom he dated for 8 years and then broke up with her. Then regretted it, tried to get her back, but she moved on. He told you that he was an idiot for breaking up with her. He still keeps in touch with her. The two of you spent some time with her and her husband, following which he told you: “Isn’t she just one of the most genuine people you’ve ever met?”

The other relationship that troubles you is the one he had with his ex wife who left him after 8 years for another man. He was devastated, tried to fix the marriage, did everything he could to keep her from leaving, and he cried hard the day they got divorced.

You wrote: “It makes me feel like I’m his second (or third??) choice. It makes me feel like he wishes his entire life worked out differently… I feel like I’m not special. I feel like if we were to break up, he would just find the next girl. I feel like ‘just another girl’ in a long line of girls. I feel like he is settling for me because he couldn’t get what he wanted”.

* “It makes me feel like I’m his second (or third??) choice”- the distortion in this sentence is that you are ignoring the past-present-future time continuum. It is not that the two other women and you are his girlfriends at the present. One he was done with as a girlfriend in his twenties, the other in his 40s and you are in his 50s.

I can almost hear you (?) saying, but he still loves them, or what if he still loves them, and that’s why he talked so affectionately about the first one recently.. well, that’s his nostalgia- a very, very common phenomenon: people looking back at their past and seeing it as way more wonderful than it was. The reason for it is that we miss our youth (not the people in it, really). We miss how it felt to be young, when everything was more colorful, more vivid,  more intense.

“It makes me feel like he wishes his entire life worked out differently”- I don’t think so, not according to what you described about how he treats you. I think you are confusing his nostalgia with a current regret for not being with one of the other women.

“I feel like if we were to break up, he would just find the next girl”- that’s not his pattern. He would probably cry a lot, and try hard to get you back (don’t test my hypothesis, please).

In summary, for now: he misses being young, that’s all, as in nostalgia. You are not his second or third choice. You are his first choice, no doubt.

Please let me know of your thoughts regarding my reply.

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by .

You are welcome, Kristine. 🙂

Dear Kristine:

My new input today: you wrote regarding running into your boyfriend’s former college sweetheart of eight years: “We ran into her and her husband  one night and ended up hanging out with them in a bar after. I hated every second of it. He could tell I was uncomfortable so he was extra affectionate but instead of trying to make me feel better on the ride home, he just kept telling me what a great person she was. ‘Isnt she just one of the most genuine people you’ve ever met?’ Blah. blah. I think he thought I felt threatened by her romantically.. It makes me feel not good enough, like I won’t live up to her… It makes me feel like I’m his second (or third??) choice”-

– it is possible that this is what he wants you to feel: that you are not good enough for him, that you are not his first choice, and this is why he shared with you so much about his past relationships, about his many exes that he keeps in touch with and still sees once in a while, about how he cried after his marriage ended, and that he regrets the long relationship with his former college sweetheart ending, that he was an idiot for ending it, etc.

And this is why, while knowing you were very uncomfortable during the meeting at the bar, he “kept telling” you what a great person she was. It was not a single comment that he made about her, but he “kept telling” you,  going as far as asking you that question, about how genuine she is, rubbing it in.

If he knew how comfortable you were, and if he believed that you were jealous of her, or threatened by her, why did he choose to promote that discomfort, jealousy and threat?

It is possible that after your 20 year marriage of “many bad times”, your difficult divorce, and 7 years of dating men who “didn’t want serious relationships”, falling “hard for a small handful but nothing ended up serious”, being at that point in your late 40s, or early 50s, when you met your boyfriend of 3 years- you were very invested in seeing him in the best possible way: “He  is more than I could have hoped for. He’s kind, genuine, affectionate, caring. Good sense of humor, I could go on and on… I never question his love for me or his commitment to me”-

– maybe his low self esteem is such that he needs you to feel less-than about yourself, so that he can feel more-than about himself.

anita