So, about 21 years ago I met a girl and fell for her extremely hard. This was my first taste of love and having had a pretty traumatic life growing up, I was obsessed with this girl… overlooking my own ideals/values/moralities, whatever I needed to do to be with her. Anyways, my oldest brother was friends with her father and we were pretty close in age (I was 18 and she was 15 and a 1/2 when we first met). I was strongly attracted to her and she didn’t know that I even existed. I approached her father and asked if he would be alright with it, if I approached her romantically. I got shot down instantly. A couple of years later, after I joined the Army and was back on leave, I encountered her father in the neighborhood. The next morning, I got a call from this girl. Long story short, we met up and hit it off amazingly.
We then dated for the next eight years and I put up with her cheating on me multiple times (early in the relationship) because I was in love (i.e. not rational). Eventually, things went south and she broke up with me, giving a bunch of bullshit reasons to me. We didn’t end on good terms and hadn’t spoken since.
I started to notice health problems recently and it made me reflect on my life. I changed my paradigm and part of this was to be open and honest, so I started reaching out to people that I may have hurt or felt that I didn’t treat well enough, to apologize. This girl was one of those people. I reached out through facebook messenger and she read it, but never responded. So I tried again, I just wanted to know if she actually got my message. Still no response and still no closure for me, so I looked her up in the whitepages and sent her some old photos she had given me (which I had recently found while going through my army stuff, as I reflected back on my life). I figured that she wasn’t getting the messages on facebook or at least not actually reading them.
I tell her that I’m writing an autobiography (which I am) and that I’m going to be brutally honest in it… 30 minutes later, my phone rings while I’m in the shower, a restricted number… i assume it’s her, but can’t know for sure. The next day, I get a text from her saying that she is willing to talk. We chat for like 30 minutes, we both apologize and I extend my hand in friendship to her… she tells me that I give her anxiety and that she is afraid of me (I wasn’t abusive to this girl ever and if I had wanted to do her harm, I’m a former infantryman, which means that my job for 3 years was to train to be the most effective killer I could be). So to alleviate her fears, I told her that I would share some things from the people that know me best, my students/players. She agreed and told me it’ll take her a while to process it all. I felt the undertones though, she didn’t want anything to do with me.
I sent her a bunch of things where these students/players expressed gratitude for helping them in High School, many are very moving and paint me in a very positive light. I also tell her that I picked up on the undertones and I asked for one final thing from her… the real reason she broke up with me. Now, when we broke up, she put it all on my shoulders. Using all manner of reasons that were blatantly false or completely irrational. It always ate away at me and I wanted to get closure.
She calls me the next day, bitching at me for sending a bunch of messages (90% were of what she asked for). So I calm her down and she tells me that I was correct about the reasons she gave me being bullshit, then she tells me that she broke up with me because I’m a “pusher”… I push people to be better and she hated that about me (i still think this is bullshit, but it’s better than I made her feel bad for horseback riding because my brother talked about how horses would rather be out in the wild than in a stable). When we were about to get off the phone this time, she brought up my autobiography and wanted to know how I was going to portray her now.
All that said, I know that her mother was pressuring her to leave me. Her and her mother are very success-orientated people and I’m the opposite, I couldn’t care less about financial success, as long as I can get by and do what makes me content/happy. So my analysis of this situation is that she is afraid to associate with me in any manner, because her mother and friends would be disapproving of it. I can see a lot of guilt too, like she doesn’t want to face herself for how she treated me. I also think that the only reason she called me was to avoid being painted negatively in my writings… I told her that I was going to be brutally honest, but that I would change her name and not give away identifying details (like her ivy-league school’s name or the company that she works for).
I gleaned from our two conversations that she is a workaholic (she’s a data analyst and software developer for a pharmaceutical company, I cannot see this as fulfilling at all) and that she only surrounds herself with people who are “OK” with her being the way she is, either you accept her and her actions or you can fuck off basically, no compromise. To me, this seems like a pretty miserable existence by itself, but she has also played World of Warcraft for over 12 years now)… I held my tongue and avoided being judgmental or preachy though, as I knew it would only lead to an argument. It actually makes me sad that she is living such a life… I believe she has shaped her reality to better fit her perspective, i.e. she’s living in a prison of self-denial and delusion.
What do you guys think is going on psychologically here, do you agree or disagree with my analysis?