Six months later

While we’re on the topic of exes coming back-

This man afforded me an amazing winter romance, cared and gave and paid for me like I’ve never seen before, until he ‘confessed’ to me he was a cuckold. He was the reason I signed up here to get a second opinion that would yank me out of it. From then on the ick started growing and I ended it with a short phone conversation, followed by a talk he asked for (big mistake) which developed into a bizarre last phone call where he cried and confessed his love until I hung up. We dated for roughly four months, three of them long distance. I tried to let him down easy on that break up call because I was sad, too, and didn’t block him because I felt scared for his situation (diagnosed borderline). Six months later on a Sunday evening I get this.

The only word I can think of is grotesque.

He lives two countries away. For the peace of our parting ways I came around to accepting the problems as distance and impracticability, not as me sensing things in him that I simply can’t reconcile with a serious relationship. I wonder if I was being too mild with him, but then I assume that he probably would not have understood me anyways. When after I had sent him his belongings in April I never received back my shirt as agreed upon, I have had this assumption in the back of my head, that maybe he never sent it to me for whatever kind of tactics.

It did hurt a little and at the beginning of this week I was so angry I shed a tear. I, too, have sweet memories of last winter and him coming around like this denies the warmth and the little good there had been. This man might have been chaotic and worse, but at some point there was hope and affection in me and I thought he was genuinely interested in and respectful of what I thought and am. But now I feel like he never knew me. Reading this message is a bit scary, the tone is that out of place.

This is not the first time I receive a weird warming up message by a man months after having had contact which confuse and, if there were stronger feelings involved, hurt me more than the shenanigans I put up with during dating him in the first place. And each time it is a message that reads itself as if an AI mingled up romantic words without being fed the information of context. Does he remember a single thing? It’s like men wake up in the morning and they ask themselves what am I feeling and who am I gonna importune with that? I feel unseen like we never met at all.

Thank you for letting me write this off my heart. I am cautious to talk to my friends about this to avoid conflicts on standards and being destabilized by man-positivity.

I wonder if and how I should try to get back my shirt because in fact it was dear to me and expensive and I have missed it a bit.