Broken Hearted Chewer Support Thread - Page 2  

High Fidelity was actually a very helpful, distracting watch for me during the worst days of my aforementioned debacle.

Glad to be of help, man. Sounds like you did the right thing.

You had to go and say that on the night I was meant to be seeing the Get Up Kids... didn't you, Lloyd? Didn't you?

Now, I'm starting to dip again. Martin, please crank the ignorable music would ya?

Good. And believe me buddy, all the time that you've spent thinking about her, she's spent not thinking about you. It's harsh, it's true, and the sooner you start believing it, the better off you will be and the quicker this chick will lose residency in your head. Keep your head up!

I talked to her and she basically told me the past year was all for naught. I deactivated my Facebook profile. I feel like I just died.

Cliché time: the only way is up. If she can say something that cold after a year, I find it hard to believe she's worth torturing yourself over.

I'm honestly sorry to hear about it, man. Just don't let those feelings get the better of you.

Am I really the first one to recommend dirty filthy rebound sex?

Of course there is.

I'm workin' on it.

Damn right there is.

The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.

As quite a few people on the boards know, I've been where you are recently. You get really, really attached to someone, you start building this person up in your mind, and suddenly you find that she's leaving your life is a great tragedy.

You're probably going to shrug this off now--I probably would have at the point you're at now--but there are two lies kinds of lies we tell ourselves about the people we care about: lies that are to their benefit and lies that less than charitable to them. "There's nobody better" is the former kind of lie. You have to deprogram that shit. It's unhealthy and it fucks you up for way longer than it should. Also, as one depression sufferer to another, it's also the kind of lie that clinging to will eventually lead to an especially long valley. Ask yourself if you think wailing over her is worth that. It took me three years to realize that it wasn't. You don't want that.

Love is a beautiful thing. It's what communities are built on. Romantic attachment is volatile. In small doses, it can be great, but overdoses are terrible. To quote the Bard: "These violent delights have violent ends;/ And their triumph die, like the fire and powder,/ Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey/ Is loathsome in its own deliciousness,/ And in the taste confounds the appetite/Therefore, love moderately"

This is probably the best thing I could have heard right now. Thanks Cuch.

Damn some of you poor bastards need to hook up with Monique, the French foreign exchange student that moved in with Rickys family next door - just watch out in case Rickys mum blows up.

Seriously tho - my heart goes out to you guys.

My pleasure. Weirdly, my personal problems are a combo of yours, Gabe's, and Martin's, and I had a rough go with a girl with commitment issues myself that went on from June 2007-June 2010. So, I see where you're coming from, especially the whole "there's nobody better" thing.

As some of the members have guessed from my jokes about families and domesticity, I didn't come from a very happy home. My late brother and I were born both terminally and chronically ill--I am one of the few functional late stage pineoblastoma patients in the world who is alive and fully functional--grew up in poverty and my parents and both sets of grandparents were unhappily married. On top of that, our older brother and father were physically and verbally abusive to both us and our mother, who was also chronically ill. (Added bonuses: the older brother grew up to be an abusive father and husband and I helped feed and clean the other brother while he died over a course of three weeks. Oh, and my mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer the same year he died.) So, up until age 23, I didn't want anything to do with long-term relationships. During my teens, most of my family thought I was gay because of how often I brushed off women, in fact.

Then, I went to college in England and they assigned this girl to the same building and floor that I was on. She was also a Berkeley student doing a term at Cambridge, she was hot, she was friendly, and she painted, played guitar, sang, and wrote verse and prose. She also had a 150 IQ. In short, she was my ideal woman. This scared me, because I found I just couldn't brush her off. Literally, the word "no" just would not come out of my mouth when I was around her. Then I got a call from the States. My mother's latest surgery went really poorly, she was near death, and we didn't have the cash to bring me home early. I had a sort of meltdown and just sort of assumed the girl would disappear.

She didn't. She brought me food, cleaned my place, made sure I stayed current with my courseload, and told me she cared about me and my mother a great deal. This was when I knew I loved her. I loved her above all things, really.

What took about a year to set in was that, as great as she was, she was also batshit crazy. Over the course of her stays at my place, I had discovered that she had trouble sustaining relationships of any kind and had recently parted ways with her entire circle of friends. Three weeks into being back home, she pushed me away only to "bump into me" on campus eight days later. That's the cycle we went through the entire last year of college. The summer after graduation, we parted ways for what I thought was good.

Three months later, we started talking again via email and the phone. Her current relationship was just as fucked as ours had been and she--for some reason--felt the need to talk through these problems with me and not him. This started a yearlong exchange that included inviting her to the OFA Inaugural Ball as my date.

By December of 2009, I was at home taking care of my dying mother after nearly 6 years of illness and five dozen and my sister-in-law threw my surviving brother out for beating her and threatening the kids. He ended up attacking me and breaking my hand. My parents both refused to throw him out and sanitized the scene and lied to the police. So, I decided to move to Riverside and work on a campaign there, which happened to be 45 minutes away from that girl.

Four months into living there, I'm working campaign hours, I'm withdrawn, and cut off from my family. I'm lonely. So I get back in touch with her. My college friends in the area find out about this the day prior and arrange an intervention. An intervention consisting in bringing over five girls, ketamine, and whiskey.

The girl comes over, finds me kind of out of sorts, and is alarmed by the state of my place. We still go to dinner and a movie and start talking about our feeling about each other. That goes on for four weeks and she then drops the--by now expected--bomb that she's still not capable of the committed relationship I want. But she still wants to see me.

This is when I realized that she was NEVER going to be capable of what I wanted and I had two choices: mope around in a yearlong valley of depression again or get my fucking life together. So, I told her that--if she did feel anything like the love I felt for her--she'd cut me out of her life. I asked her to do that for me. I told her I just didn't have the will to do it. All things bowed to my love for her.

Thankfully, she agreed and has been true to her word. I've wavered in my commitment to non-contact a few times over the last eight weeks, but she hasn't and I'm starting to get my shit together as a result.

Fuck Cuch.

Just... fuck.

I did the stupidest thing you could possibly do.

I fell for a girl I worked with.

This girl started roughly eight months ago. She walked into a room and everybody started paying attention. She was younger (there's a four year difference between us) so I didn't even think of doing anything. I became the guy who was chasing the guys away from her so somebody would actually get their groceries rung up instead of watching every male cashier and bagger drool. It turns out the whole time she had a thing for me, but I was either oblivious or was ignoring it.

Then over Christmas we started talking. Just as friends. I was in Canada at my parents' house and we started talking over Facebook Chat. One night we talked from about ten at night till five in the morning. We never even stopped to think that we were revealing all sorts of stuff after only really "knowing" each other for a few days. We just instantly trusted each other, which was big for both of us.

I came home and I started trying to resist having a crush on her. She was my buddy. She was the one who was online waiting for me when I got home to hear about my day. Didn't even occur to me she was doing this because she had feelings for me. I should mention she also had a boyfriend. The relationship was...dodgy. He lived a couple hours away and was supposedly cheating on her. Then one day it all blew up. Neither of us could resist it anymore. We revealed our feelings, and she intended to break up with her boyfriend.

Then she didn't. He "changed".

I was already transitioning from a social drinker to something a bit more, and this put me right over the edge. I started downing rum and cokes on a nightly basis. Forget homework. I got to class, I got to work, then I went home and drank. My depression flared up again. It got really bad. The whole time I was trying to get her back. She was "confused", so I kept trying harder.

Finally after about two months of this I snapped out of it and realized I had to change my life. It's taken a while, but I'm over her. It wasn't easy, and I worry it's not actually done. But getting the rest of my life back on track has kind of helped in that regard. Working on doing more stand up (which is quickly becoming my passion), restoring friendships I was kind of losing with the drinking (I'm a terrible drunk. Abusive, mean, sad, I once fell asleep bawling to a friend after hurling a shoe as hard as I could right at her head), working out, getting some fresh air, and diving back into work have all helped.

As for her? We're friends again. Free of the baggage. She's quit our mutual job which also helps. Now we're free of the gossip which helps a lot. It's nice. I hope it'll last.

Sorry to burden people with that, but it seemed like the place and I felt like getting it off of my chest. I intend to be back around here a lot more. I've been...weird for a while. But it's time to start watching and appreciating film a lot more and getting back with CHUD.

Yeah, I had a big ol' smile on my face that slowly melted into a cringe the further I got into that story.

My anger issues, lack of sense of what's appropriate, and seemingly insane levels of enmity for people I perceive as bullies--Objectivists, Republicans, "real Americans" and the like--make a whole lot of sense now, don't they?

Yeah.

Martin, Lloyd, Cuch, so sorry for all of this. I got wrapped up in my own stuff for a second. Believe me, it seems rough but it'll work out somehow eventually. I'm lucky in that it happened, I had the downward spiral, and I seem to be coming out of it all within about six months. Not everybody works like that. But it will improve. It'll be okay somehow. I believe that.

You are going to feel so stupid when you realise how wrong you are. That goes for every single person here.

Also, saying shit like "there's nobody better" or "I'll never find anyone else" strikes me as basically a passive implication that you are on a pretty undesirable tier of humanity if nobody else will ever be willing to date you or will suffice compared to your ONE TRUE SOULMATE OF LOVE WILLED TO YOU BY THE STARS IN THE SKY AND DELIVERED FROM HEAVEN WHO CAN NEVER BE REPLACED (hint: they can and will be).

Look, just fap. Have plenty of female friends and fap. It's almost the same. Also, play Mass Effect. You can date like, I dunno, FOUR hot chicks in that.

Also, jerk off before you make ANY decision relating to your ex. And pretty much every other decision in life.

This is the only way I can decide on breakfast cereals.

Fell in love with my best friend of about ten years about a year ago. Went pretty awful. We're both pretty bad at talking about our emotions, so we both ended up getting really passive aggressive and ended up doing a lot of things to hurt the other one. I don't think either of us meant to - we're just both really emotionally disconnected and talking about our feelings for each other became a near impossible talk loaded with anxiety and repressed anger. She can be cold, cruel, and is full of fear. I seek too much validation from others and I often have a hard time expressing my own needs or desires.

She moved away recently (with new boyfriend), but we're still trying to keep in some form of contact. And although I think we are both trying to make a genuine effort, the fact that we both have such a hard time talking about our emotional selves means it's really difficult right now to knock down the walls we built up between each other.

It's tough, because I love this girl. LOVE HER. Being with her would be one of the absolute dreams of my life. I know that I have to get over these emotions, and that there are others for me that would be just as good. But I have also lost my best friend/closest confidant and I'm absolutely torn up over it. These two feelings, being mixed, lead to complete and utter confusion. I'd do anything just to have her back as my friend (the closeness I have with her is something that can't be compared to the relationships I have with others. It's just always been like that. I've been through near everything in my life with her), but my other emotions just can't stay down no matter what I do and get in the way.

In short, falling in love with your best friend = not as fun as it is cracked up to be. It has been a mostly painful experience for me, one that seems without solution and without end.

I need some rebounds and fast. I just never had much game in the bar/party scene, most relationships I have seem to be based around friendship. And I'm pretty wary of close friendships with females right now, as this situation has mostly made me even more emotionally disconnected and distant. I'm pretty wary of close friendships with about ANYONE right now to be honest. I've isolated myself from others to what is, probably, an unhealthy degree.

This situation has also been quite the boon to my creativity/writings/ambition. As I pull away from others, I seem to be putting more and more of my focus on writing and shooting short films with friends. Making art can be an extremely fulfilling experience when one is lost and lonely. It'd be nice if anything made sense right now, but I believe that is the universal condition of an intelligent, artistically minded 24 year old.

I tried to shit, but only farted. Am I in the right thread?

Best advice ever.

Guys, this is all going to be white noise in ten years. Power through. If you die at 40 and spend 4 years on a failed relationship, that's TEN PERCENT of your life. Fuck that.

And there's always someone better because NEW EQUALS BETTER. True story.

Also, it's better to NOT FALL IN LOVE WITH FRIENDS because the success rate on that is pretty eh.

And that's not to forget that unrequited love is generally pretty creepy

Thank you for the obvious and judgemental advice.

Not obvious enough, because people still keep doing it.

(And I'm only being judgemental because I made the same mistake years ago.)

God, I remember when I saw There's Something About Mary when I was younger and I was like damn jerking off before a date = a great idea!

Haha. That made me feel better. I see myself as bitterly imparting such judgement and advice to a man younger than I who has made the same mistake in a few years. This is the most likely path of my future.

Life's a big bag of silly.

Right... If you change "onto" to "into" and the "shit" is a euphemism for something else, then you get a closer approximation to what I'm really getting at here.

Exactly. Spunk clogs your brain and makes you do stupid things. This is just a fact. You can't think clearly unless you clean the pipes. In fact, I'd go one better and advise most people to do this once a day just as a precaution. Besides, it helps to prevent prostate cancer - you can look that up. It's true.

Well, I ain't THAT much older than you, it just happened when I was a 17 year-old shithead who handled the whole thing terribly. But there are also way more constructive ways to break up with someone rather than saying "You know, Jake, I don't think this is going to work. I can't even look at you in class without thinking of your dick in my mouth."

My reaction was pretty much "WAIT NO THIS IS GOOD KEEP GOING I CAN THINK OF YOU BENT OVE- oh, god. What?"

And I was retarded for her (puppy love, go figure), which caused me to handle it terribly - by going with another female friend to her place, getting wasted, practically crying to her about it, and then making failed attempts at hitting on her while she pretty much sat around and dealt with my crap with eternal patience.

When I first told this girl I had feelings for her, it was her instinct to immediately be angry and yell at me about it. Me being pretty much her only guy friend to never try and make a move on her was more of a comfort to her then I knew at the time. She has since apologized for her reaction, but my reaction to her reaction was to try and avoid the situation, as I am not very good with conflict situations and it created a far larger conflict then I expected.

As the months went on, I continued to act like a scared, confused, idiot. Caring too much only seems to make a person DUMB, DUMB, DUMB.

Been there, done that in the first two years of college. Except in my case, she was coming off four years of an all-girls' school and was desperately in need of friends. I needed a girlfriend, I thought. I made the 'all or nothing' comment (after spending roughly about a year as good, close friends while I was falling) and proceeded to make her cry.

It's probably a bad sign that it still bothers me twelve years later. But, lesson learned.

Phil is also right, though. I met somebody better within three months. That didn't work out either, but it shows how fast things change.

I regretted my own personal "all or nothing" comment about 5 minutes after making it.

Hopefully someone better will be around the corner.

Hey at least you told her how you felt and wasn't one of those guys who hangs around a chick as her friend, hoping she'll realise how much she loves him and what a good guy he is. That shit's hilarious.

And I'm not trying to mad-dog anybody here, but after seeing a few pullquotes from a handful of y'all, I think it's a point that bears repeating: Get your own act together and get used to living with yourself and being a complete, single person with an active, healthy social life before getting with anyone else - this applies double if you're one of those dudes who's ACTIVELY looking for a woman and somehow manages to convey that in every single thing they do (read: desperation). Don't just go out to meet women. Go out to meet people. Occasionally, there are men who *gasp* have single female acquaintances! You just got the key to the goddamn kingdom!

Do NOT be that guy who's constantly pining for every girl who crosses his path because he feels like he needs a woman to complete him, because any stable, self-respecting female will run for the fucking hills. Again, speaking from experience here as I scared off a ridiculously hot, incredibly sweet girl who was interested in me a few years back (during the period of the second time that my ex and I broke up, so I can bitch at y'all about multiple breakups, too!) because I was pretty much like "OH THANK GOD A WOMAN WHAT WOULD I EVER DO WITHOUT YOUR KIND PLEASE VALIDATE MY EXISTENCE".

Her reaction was essentially: "Wow, you just did a complete 180 from a person that I thought was cool and a lot of fun to hang out with to this desperate, weeping, flaccid penis of a man. I am hot and foreign so I will go pluck another man from my quiver and you can continue your routine of weakly masturbating in the shower and then retiring to your friends' couch to start drinking whiskey at noon, you moronic trainwreck."

And looking back on it, I can't blame her! It probably would have been a disaster anyway because I would have been leapfrogging from one relationship to another, and I absolutely did not have my act together enough to even think of dating a woman.

EDIT:
Yeah, this is the sort of creepy unrequited love I was referring to: the quintessential "nice guy" type who's afraid to show his attraction and keeps doing things for a woman (being her doormat) in hopes that all of his "favors" to her will yield him some sweet, wet, quivering vagina.

Never forget, guys: Women owe you absolutely nothing, ever.

And one more incredibly important thing: For the love of God do not let your emotions ride on the actions/inactions of your ex-whatever. It's self-destructive, it's giving them way more influence over your life than they deserve, and it's dumb. It's basically the equivalent of me walking up to you and screaming "DEPRESSION!" in your face, and boom, you're suddenly depressed. NEVER give anyone that much power over you.

For all intents and purposes, the relationship is over. That needs to become your mantra regardless of which party decided to end things and regardless of the terms upon which your relationship ended ("We're still friends! I still love her! Puppies and butterflies! I wish I could stick his erect dick into a running garbage disposal!").

Jake pretty much knows whats up. It's unfortunate that 90 percent of males have to learn this shit and are not born with the knowledge.

Relationships are like warfare. They're unfair, there's casulties, the weak don't survive, and many of the strong don't even make it out. They're pretty much the craziest thing we go through as people, yet they're so rewarding for stretches of time that we endure all of it.

It becomes so difficult also, when you care about someone so you're trying to be honest with them - yet you're also so damn conscious of what Jake is talking about that you try and put on a strong face to show her that you're not a blubbering, pathetic mess that needs her for validation. She knows me too well, and she can read right through all my "trying to be macho" bullshit.

Back to weakly masturbating in the shower, and trying my strong guy routine on a girl that can't read my thoughts without me speaking.

ugh

Well, it's being conscious of this stuff that's going to drag everyone (almost everyone) through to whichever conclusion they may find, where they will inevitably meet new people and get their heart broken by them, too! [/Eternal Sunshine]

Also, it's sort of like deprogramming. You have to consciously change your thought/action patterns to NOT be hooked on this person. It sucks dicks and it's hard, but it has to be done unless you want to go insane.

And don't let yourself get eaten up by regret, either. This goes for both breakers and breakees - I initiated the breakups with my ex because I was unhappy, but I wasn't fully aware of it at the time(s), and instead of actually communicating those facts to her I did some semi-passive-aggressive shit and then eventually just had breakdowns that led to splits, etc.

I absolutely wish I had been able to be more honest with her right when all the problems first started, but I wasn't in a good headspace at all and was just grasping at straws, and it took a counselor to essentially tell me "You're miserable in this whole thing and basically slowly killing yourself because of it." And even then, I still wasn't great at handling the whole thing, but at the same time we were both headed in entirely different directions and it wasn't fair for either of us to remain in something that was just in stasis.

I still get lonely here and there, but when that happens I go hang out/talk with my roommates or call up friends or just go outside, and the misery ends up being fleeting. After the first few weeks of moping around, I got to the point where I wasn't really depressed, I was just kind of lost, and that was when I started going out and interacting more with people and just finding stuff that I wanted to do and doing it, and that's when the mental shift started (which is why I'm so gung-ho about "GET THE FUCK OUT OF YOUR APARTMENT YOU DOLT"). Now everyone's commenting about how upbeat I am compared to before and how I'm almost nauseatingly positive. But I got every reason to be! My life kicks ass. I'm taking care of money problems and setting myself up for the future, I'm having loads of fun with awesome people, and I'm just enjoying "me" time right now.

You feeling ok Phil?

It bears mentioning that this isn't always a mistake, based on personal experience and a reasonable number of happy long-term couples I know. But all of the other stuff you mentioned (getting your own act together, etc.) has to come first.

And to anyone here - if your relationship is anything at all "like warfare," you're doing it wrong. In fact, if you use melodrama and overwrought metaphors to characterize your relationship/dating situation in a social context (rather than silently to yourself), you're just going to convince everyone in your vicinity that you're an undateable, solipsistic windbag. We've all had our moments as this guy, sure, but you've got to grow out of it.

Right, I shoulda added that part as a caveat along with Evi's "nice guy/white knight" bit. It CAN work, but certain things have to be in place.

And with regards to your last part, you're totally right about that, too. I had a friend who started badmouthing his girlfriend around us every chance he got. When he was with her (and they were around friends), everything was fine. Lo and behold, they broke up within less than a year because he was screwing around on her due to his own pent-up resentment.

Okay, weirdly, as of today, this is no longer operative: "Thankfully, she agreed and has been true to her word. I've wavered in my commitment to non-contact a few times over the last eight weeks, but she hasn't."

This only worked for me, so it's probably not universal, but I actually found listening to something so insanely maudlin and over the top in it's 'OH MY GOD, WHY DID SHE LEAVE ME' sort of shocked me out of the break up blues. After my first major break up I ended up flicking through my music on my IPod and landed on THE PAST IS A GROTESQUE ANIMAL by Of Montreal.

It's such a ridiculous, over the top, over wraught, portrayal of a relationship gone wrong that it sort of gave me an immense amount of perspective and it made me be generally mopey rather than 'OMFG, WHYYYY!!!!!!!!'.

Honest to fucking God, Jake's post and Dave's post both need to be painted on the walls of single guy's bedrooms the world over.

Also, remember, if your relationships keep turning out exactly the same, the problem isn't women, it's you.