What the Hell makes you think she’d have a change of heart? And why would I even want to talk to her again after the way she treated me? Besides, after all this time she probably doesn’t even have the faintest clue as to who I am anymore. I don’t see any reason why she WOULD remember me.

Coincidentally, today was just one of those (rare) days where I happened to randomly catch a glimpse of her. And apparently they’re still together, and I want nothing to do with married women. Honestly, the thought of participating in an adulterous act with someone just repulses me.

God, just thinking about that entire experience makes my blood boil, causes me to wish I never signed up for that damned class in the first place. It ranks at the top of my “worst life experiences ever” list, with this one coming in a close second.

Let me tell you, I absolutely cannot wait until I graduate, that way I don’t even have to run the RISK of noticing that woman on campus or anywhere else ever again!

how about try talking to her again?? maybe she had change of heart <3 .

Although most people over here are trying to prove you wrong (and you’re not) , I would like to say that I agree with you 100%!

I have been through the same damn thing over and over again.(I still am at this moment)
There are times when I want to ask people “are you seriously that naive?”. And yeah it’s true, once you get to the stage when you think she actually has feelings for you too, get the hell out of there! At first it’s all rainbows and love songs but then reality swoops in bites you in the ass.

So thanks for your post.

And if she supposedly “didn’t dupe” me, then what exactly am I suppose to “forgive” her for? Also note that everything that I wrote about took place almost TWO years ago.

It all depends on the life you led growing up, up to the point where you’re reading this blog post right now. If you’re on the fence right now about falling in love, go ahead and do so, and reap the benefits many before you have professed to you over and over again. However, some people were born being comfortable as loners or adapted themselves to be loners. Others may have wanted to be left alone as a change from their lives of the past, if they’ve ever been in an unworkable relationship, or thought themselves to be at the mercy of others too often.

I fall in this latter category. I am someone who values his own personal freedom, beliefs, and values very highly, over everyone else’s. I had the bad luck to be born into an entire family of helicopter parents (both my parents, as well as uncles and aunts) – and I’ll let the concept do the work for you. I was always questioned about the daily activities I did, what friends I made, how and why my grades were a certain way, and I was always lectured to like some kid about what I should be doing with my life – studying much more than relaxing. Even if I brought up good counter points, or brought up perfectly valid experiences from my own limited lifespan (I am 20), they’d always treat questioning them as a form of rebellion, scream and yell at me, throw tantrums of some sort (if you could call them that), saying variations of things like “We’re your parents, why would we want to hurt you?” or “We love you, we know better,” “We’re older, we have more experience, and you don’t,” “It’s for your own good,” and so on and so forth. Over the years as I grew older I could compromise with them on certain things, but those compromises always seemed to go their way. To make this long story short, in the end, with parents, and with “love and care” in general, I can’t distinguish between “love” and “control.” You can always pull out the tired old excuse that I should be more understanding of my parents, but none of you who are reading this has ever lived my life in order to make a full judgement of my character. I can understand the fact that I’m the only son they will ever have, because 1 – they risked their lives to escape from Saigon in 1975, from the Communists who were supposedly “fighting for the greater good,” because “they knew better and we (South Vietamese) didn’t”, and 2 – there was a guaranteed chance that their next child would be a Type I diabetic, and be plagued with health problems his entire life – I apparently was the lucky one, and 3 – they have apparently saved enough money so I don’t have to repay medical school loans and have a secure residency – (medical school was their idea, not mine), an advantage I am certaintly grateful for, but does not justify their parenting mentality. Personal politics aside (although I will mention a bit of politics later on in this piece), this is the main point that has led me to not seek romantic love and a “meaningful” relationship.

The catalyst came during college when I was in my first relationship. By then my misgivings about love were pretty much fully formed, but I wanted to see if I could be free in a relationship if at all, and perhaps turn over a new leaf. We dated for a whole year but our differences began to show through. We were both attracted to each other for what we thought were our genuine personalities but uncovered some annoying personal habits and beliefs along the way. She talked to me almost every day until the day we broke up, asking me about everything in my life. I think I spent a lot of time with her than my other friends, which in retrospect was not a good idea. She never really approved of some of the things I did, for example, she worried about me playing airsoft (which is technically sanitized warfare) and about my plans to obtain a handgun permit. (again, please put personal politics aside) I always wondered about how badly she wanted me to the point where I thought I was being robbed of seeing my friends. When she transferred away back to her home state I knew the relationship was done, but she tried to save it by saying she’d try and put aside all the differences we had and accept me for what I was. We made plans to see each other but within a month she called it off, saying that she couldn’t bear to see me stay for one day, and then have to leave for school the next day, even though I thought she could have waited until the summer break. In the end, it just wasn’t worth it, just another person trying to control you, and someone you feel you always have to satisfy, and live up to their expectations of you.

What did I learn? I learned to hate control – control of me. I want to have all the time in the world in order to work on myself, and to improve myself as a better person the way I see fit, to go about and do as I please within sane reason. I want to be the best of the best, at some costs. I want to be accountable to no one, no one close to me. I do not see why I should be chained to serve other people’s whims, to be bent to another person’s will. I do not want to be controlled, and then have it called “love.” These days it seems that “love” is used as a bludgeon by many people in order to justify so many beliefs and causes that it pollutes the meaning for me. If I were to be in a relationship, I feel like I would be controlling the other person no matter what I did. I can compromise, reason, empathize, give and take, but I know my limits, and to compromise with a so-called “soul mate” is unacceptable, because you have to give up something in order to make the bondage. And I am not giving up something anymore. People say that compromises make good relationships, but they have never lived life in my shoes. People say that giving the other person control over you doesn’t make for a good relationship, but I think that no control is the best control when it comes to relationships, and ultimately I deduced that no relationship would ever work for me, due to the nature of my character and beliefs.

And this is how it all came to be. Being alone is meant for people who fit, for lack of a better phrase, a certain psychological profile. But it isn’t for everyone, just as falling in love isn’t meant for everyone. To be honest, I don’t think anyone can understand what it feels like to shut yourself off from romantic love completely, this powerful feeling of numbness, this feeling of energetic invulnerability, that allows me to keep going every day of my life.

James, I hope you find whatever answer about “love” you are looking for, I’m perfectly satisfied with mine.

After receiving an email from him saying he couldn’t stop thinking about me, about things I said the first time we chatted, and that he would like to see what future got in store for us, I became obsessed. I assumed right away he’s probably the one, and I did my research. I asked a couple of his lady friends I suspected might have been in a romantic/close relationship with him on the profile, judging from my (not every time sensible) instincts. They both answered, one saying he’s a very good, genuine person, and another saying she knew him in person, though she also stated that he could be very unreliable (and she made a comment on his profile saying he’s full of shit, he told me she used to have a crush on him). Not only that, I googled him every possible way I knew, using his name (on the online service we met they display fullname of a person), e-mail address, for example. I found some of his videos online, addressing to another person, and I felt I was hit in the face. However I still had faith in him because that was before we met. And he didn’t lie about sharing the house with his sibling.

I liked him, so very much. I had respect for him and the life he’d been through. He said he was now happy and the past’s in the past. After getting carried away with my fantasies of a possible life together with him for a short while, he hit me with a message that he knew I was trying to contact a few of his friends, it bothered them and that I should stop, if there’s anything I wanted to know just ask him. After that my contact with him was limited to email, which made it even harder to have a live text-based chat which started everything. I tried writing to him, but found it to be too long if not too formal, and he wrote me back sometimes but as a guy he didn’t write much but enough to answered my questions, with less care on punctuation (just like his first email, maybe that’s his ‘casual’ style). He made a few mentioning of things he wanted to do to me, as I also responded. That’s not the importance of the relationship, what mattered was that I liked him but eventually turned something which might be potential into obsession.

He told me his life had been busy, because of the coming career that made him to have to be away to complete his dreams. Though he’d been busy, he spared a little time for a chat, or a few sentences on e-mail exhange, which helped remind me that he was still there. During this period he found out that I was making more than a couple of his friends uncomfortable again, and that was his last warning. True, I secretly tried to find out who he mentioned in some of his small videos was which I never admitted I’d watched because I doubted if the person’s someone he was seeing. (I didn’t realize my problem with trust issue then, and other problems that I had…it’s crazy).

The last time we had a live text chat he told me he’d be very busy but I shouldn’t worry because he was still there (he said, ‘I’m still here, right?’). After that he never appeared on online chat again which caused me to miss him more and more and it’s crazy. I had comfort thoughts and feelings that he actually liked me the way I did, and actually described those thoughts and feelings in my emails to him, not every message was answered, if not at all. I still remember his final note to me, he’d been busy that’s the way it was and I should accept it, and he hoped that I was ok with everything. I sent him a few notes telling him how much I wanted him and he never answered again. I gave him up, and was in a total depression for about a week when I had a migrane-like headache and once couldn’t even stand still without feeling weak and like I was about to faint). It was a terrible to know I could be in that state of not feeling very lucky in love, though I had been heartbroken a couple of times before him). Besides I had other things to do, like concentrating on my study and adjusting to my new part-time job and the crazy schedule.

I found no other solution, so I unconsciously told myself I must find another love. After confiding my hurting feelings to some ‘guy’ friends online, one was quick to offer to be my boyfriend. Even having an online boyfriend wouldn’t help. I created more drama, developing my infatuation for this new guy to find out later he’s a fake. I was terrified of what I had done to make that guy to see me as a psycho by trying to call him too frequent when he began to distance himself from the online world. I called him every other day and after the second time, I decided we should end this. But the person who received the phone was female, and I said wrong number. I called again to know that my behavior was inappropriate, being called a psycho by the receiving message tone. I never really missed him that much. I was eventually glad I found out sooner. I decided I shouldn’t be in a real relatioship, but trying to flirt with guys who might be interested in me (online only). Stil I was unhappy, I had to trace back to the root of all problem, and I knew who it was.

It was the guy in the story I told you about…I missed him tremendously, I cried and questioned myself what I did wrong, what went wrong, why he wouldn’t try to reach me. He was even on my birthday wish that he would come back. After some sad, emotional weeks, I decided I must let him go. I came to accept if it’s not meant to be then it’s not meant to be, though I had a glimpse of hope that we would be back in contact again. Some friends who heard of my unrequitted love story suggested me that I should write what I told them I felt for him. After a few drafting, I wrote him an honest, if not the sanest, telling him I only knew him for a short time, asking where he is in life and that he had always been on my mind (until at this very moment as I’m writing about him, my story). All I know is that I’ve tried, and if it doesn’t work I should be able to accept it. That message was sent in the beginning of December, 2008.

From the experience I know now there is this beautiful person inside of me that is growing up, learning form her mistakes, accepting her flaws, and I’m proud to say this and feel happier about myself. At the moment I’m coping with my love addiction and trying to keep my options open, still chatting and meeting people, making friends and getting to know them.

On love: I still think you will eventually find love by being yourself and not trying to change just to please anyone in particular, except for your own well-being. Now do I truly understand that happiness can come from within if we allow ourselves to be happy.

Best of luck on life and love

Okay, just kidding. But I do know exactly who you are now. You are just like my brother in the way you interact with women.

The woman you met was a tease. There is no other way to put it. At 24 she knew she was flirting with you and knew where it was likely to lead. Doing that while being involved with someone else shows why you are too good for her. It is possible that younger women (under 20) don’t really realize when they are leading a guy on and flirting, but trust me, by the time 20 candles are on the cake every woman knows how to use feminine whiles.

Not all women will do that, in fact most won’t. It’s the same as saying every male only talks to a girl because he wants in her pants. The reality is that portion of the population makes you leary of the rest.

My advice – don’t shut yourself off. Finding that one person is beyond explaining and not finding it is worse than any heartbreak. BUT — if ever again you are in a situation that you are starting to have feelings for a woman, she’s flirting on one hand and turning you down on the other — run fast. Don’t think twice about it, just end the relationship. She’s not the one.