Driving Myself Crazy Over Nothing.

[minorissues]

Sometimes it frightens me how I'm in my 30's and I still haven't learned how to properly control my emotions. Feeling super down at the moment and figure maybe posting here will distract me.

 

I don't date very much and I am currently in a less-than-stellar state of affairs (not happy/underappreciated at work and living at home with my parents for the past year, though actively looking for my own place and may very well sign a lease this evening.) So I have not been actively dating as I'm incredibly insecure at the moment, which has left me feeling super lonely and bitter.

 

Over the summer, I started dating a guy I had met at a bar...we got along and he pursued me and I thought I'd give it a shot, just to make sure I wasn't missing out on a good thing. I posted about him here a few times back then; he was in his 40's and we got on pretty well for the first month. He was a gentleman and seemed very interested in me. There were some signs of "shadiness", i.e. he refused twice to add me to his Facebook and refused to talk about our past relationships and where he saw our relationship going (he would mostly joke around these points.) Red flags right there, I guess; I never knew whether he had been in a relationship before or whether he was perpetually single or what. He never asked me about any of this either. He then left for a vacation and came back two weeks later, at which point things between us were never the same again. He still kept in touch regularly via text and occasional phone call, but he rarely made concrete plans and was not in touch every day as he used to be. After seeing each other a few more time the past couple of months, he continued texting regularly. Finally, for the sake of my own closure, I asked him to have dinner with me a few weeks ago and asked him straight out whether he is seeing someone else yet and why he insists on continuing to communicate with me if he has no interest in things between us going any further. He reacted as if I was crazy; got really defensive, started joking about it, basically wouldn't answer my questions and acted like I was being unreasonable for asking. When I walked away from that dinner, I think it finally hit me that I have held out hope for this person for months and was hanging on to bread crumbs.

 

The next day, he e-mailed me an article following up on something else we had talked about at dinner, as though nothing untoward had happened. And my heart just broke. I know this thing between us has been over for months now (if it ever even really began) but something about how I have been just sitting around letting him treat me this way has just really hit me in the gut. I feel stupid, immature, lonely, panic-stricken. I feel like I've been used and disrespected and like I haven't learned anything from my past failed relationships. I've been waking up in the middle of the night with panic attacks, thinking of all the things I did wrong with him to make myself unworthy of a relationship and how I never learn and am going to keep getting played with and then tossed away like trash. I can't eat, I can barely function at work. All I think about is this guy and how he was too good for me and all the things I did to make him treat me the way he did. It's amazingly sad and I don't know what to make of it.

 

I have been dating new guys and working out 4-5 times a week and trying really hard to stay busy but I keep having panic attacks and hyperventelating and mentally self-flagellating myself for everything about myself, from how I hate my introversion and occasional social awkwardness to how I never learned to properly ride a bike (and so had to decline a bike ride invite from him at the beginning of his courtship.) It's ridiculous.

 

WTH am I supposed to do with myself?

[Summersday123]

I can sympathise with you so much. I feel exactly the same virtually all the time. I too have recently been dating someone who is a little, shall we say, emotionally broken, and doesn't really do the whole love and caring thing, but I can't get him off my mind either. He's basically stopped talknig to me, but he says it's cos he's ill. I suspect otherwise, but I just can't break it off, just incase he's telling the truth. All in all, I can't offer you any suggestions, but just know you are not alone. I feel exactly the same. You're not gonig mad .... or if you are, you're not the only one! x