He moved on in the blink of an eye, and I’m still picking up the pieces.

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz or fill out this form.

Dear Hera,

Almost three years ago, I met the love of my life. Today I don’t think he was a real person and I’m hopelessly hung up on him. After a run of pretty bad luck in love, I was introduced to a friend of a friend who I instantly hit it off with. It was chemistry like I hadn’t felt with anyone before, and as our relationship developed over the months, it felt as if he was made for me. 

He was exactly my kind of funny, sweet, thoughtful, understanding, sexy. My mum adored him, which she very much hadn’t done for any past partners. He made me feel so loved, had an amazing skill for pulling me out of a bad mood, and next of all he started improving other parts of my life besides the relationship itself. He helped me move out of home into my own place and get career guidance. After two years together the whole thing felt pretty much storybook perfect. We rarely if ever fought, and talked through any issues that did arise. He was incredibly excited for me to go to university this year and offered to financially support me through it. I went on holidays with his family. He bought me a ring.

Then last October, he called me out of the blue to say we were breaking up. I didn’t get a sign or a warning that it was coming, and he wouldn’t give me a straight answer as to what he happened – only that he couldn’t commit to a relationship right now. I was left heartbroken without closure and, of course, a short month later he was publicly launching his new relationship with one of his close girl friends.

I want to be clear I have no delusions about my ex. No part of me blames myself or excuses him. The whole situation leaves me thinking there is no way he could have seriously loved me or respected me. I spent two years in a relationship with someone’s best performance of the character of a good partner, telling me only whatever I wanted to hear. My problem is that it was a very good performance and I fell for it completely. Given how abrupt our breakup was, it’s hard for my mind to not still view the relationship as essentially perfect up until the last 30 minutes. It’s hard to express really how loved and in love I was. And I know it was basically a fantasy relationship, but now I’m worried reality is never going to live up to that fantasy. That no one I meet could measure up to someone who was trying as much as possible to seem like my perfect person.

I’ve done everything I can to try and move on. I’ve blocked him, moved cities and changed jobs in an attempt to give myself a fresh start. I’ve filled my calendar with every hobby and social event I can to keep busy. And six months later, the character this man was playing is still all I can think about. Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I’m being constantly mentally bombarded with images and memories of my “perfect relationship”, and at this point I’m scared it’s never going to stop. I’m sure I won’t be interested in dating anyone new for a long time, but I want to become OK with not being with him. I know for certain he’s not at all the person I thought he was, but no matter how much I logically understand it, emotionally it won’t go in. I don’t want to spend the rest of my 20s pining after the illusion of someone who turned out to be a pretty basic fuckboy, but I’m at my wits’ end how to even begin to move on. 

Reality Check 

Dear Reality Check,

I’ve read over your letter several times, and in the end, I don’t know if I have anything more constructive to say than this situation profoundly sucks and if there were such a thing as justice, your ex would be in for a well-deserved wedding altar jilting in a few years.

“Love of my life” is a strong way to describe someone whose behaviour is best described by the “God watching you fall in love with someone he’s gonna use to hurt you for character development” meme. At best, this experience should be written up as a painful statistical anomaly. I wouldn’t even call this a cautionary tale, because as far as I can see, there is absolutely nothing to be learned from this – at least, not by you. You didn’t do anything to deserve this random allotment of pain, and any attempt to use this as a justification for increased romantic caution or developing a thick emotional carapace around your heart is a bad lesson, because most people do not behave like this, and I would hate for this to make you paranoid about all future relationships, based on this one corrupt, emotionally devastating data point.

Not all sudden breakups are categorically evil. Sometimes people have an epiphany that the relationship isn’t working for them, and no amount of protracted emotional negotiations will fix it. Sometimes it’s psychologically advantageous to vanish into the mist. What is cruel is offering no meaningful explanation as to what happened, especially when the other person is completely besotted and has no prior indication that anything was wrong.

If I had to guess, it sounds to me the most likely explanation for your ex’s behaviour is that he crossed the line with the friend he is now dating, and was so terrified of facing the consequences of his actions and being perceived as the bad guy, he simply jumped ship as a way of protecting himself from having to witness your pain, and incurring any reputational damage. Whatever the reason, it was a profoundly immature way to end a three-year relationship, and is the emotional equivalent of leaving your wife by shouting “look over there” and then vanishing down a convenient storm drain.

You will drive yourself insane if you try to eke any sense of closure out of this experience. He obviously isn’t brave enough to give you a real explanation for what happened. On the other hand, I don’t think believing your whole relationship was a lie, and he never really loved you, is honest or helpful.

Perhaps he was a good performer, and I’m sure there were many parts of himself he kept hidden. But nobody is that good at acting for that long. Even Tom Ripley couldn’t have kept the perfect relationship running for three years straight. I don’t say this to absolve him. But I think the worst thing that could come out of this is you not feeling like you can trust your instincts when someone next tells you they love you.

I’m sure he did love you, and I’m sure it’s also going to be really hard to trust the next person who says that. But as for respecting you – I think it’s much more likely that he doesn’t respect himself. He probably knows he behaved like a coward, and the reason he acted this way has more to do with his relationship to shame than his opinion of you. His actions were completely selfish, but this doesn’t strike me as the behaviour of someone who doesn’t care about people. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think this reads more like the actions of someone who cares way too much about what other people think, and that’s why he wasn’t able to offer you the honesty you deserve (and chose to break up with you over the phone) because he was too afraid to look you in the eye.

As for worrying someone else won’t live up to the fantasy, I’m sure in the depths of heartbreak, it feels like nobody else will measure up. All I can offer you in the way of hope is supreme confidence that at your age, you haven’t even scratched the surface of the wealth of love there is to be had in this life, and that not only will you meet other people who feel just as “right”  – you will eventually meet people that you love so much they entirely upend your sense of what “right” is, and introduce you to new kinds of love you didn’t know were possible and it hadn’t even occurred to you to hope for.

Obviously, this is a crazy thing to promise someone. But the world is a rich and mysterious place, full of fascinating and wonderful people, and I can guarantee you that, unless you get hit by a truck tomorrow, this relationship will not represent the peak of your romantic experience. I know “just trust me” isn’t very helpful from an advice perspective. But in this specific instance, just trust me.

This was not your failure to spot the obvious warning signs. This was a shitty, knee-jerk decision made by someone who doesn’t have the emotional maturity to take accountability for his actions, is probably terrified of real intimacy and will do anything to avoid “looking bad” – character traits that will continue to haunt him in every future relationship.

At the moment, it may feel like he’s “got away with it” and you’re left picking up the pieces, but I genuinely think people who behave like this don’t “get away with it” in any meaningful sense, because the call is coming from inside the house, and until he sorts his shit out, he will do this again and again in various ways, torpedoing happy relationships when they get too serious or painful or he makes a mistake, which is genuinely no way to live. That may not seem like justice, but ultimately, it’s better to have the capacity to trust another person and risk getting hurt along the way, than to constantly be on the run.

It sucks, but I think you just have to give yourself time to grieve, know that this had nothing to do with you or your judgment, and try to move on. Six months is a long time to feel like shit, but it’s definitely not an outlandish amount of time to be getting over a foundational love, especially one that ended in such a confusing and abrupt way. It won’t last forever, and you will move past him. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do but give yourself time to metabolise the pain.

Be patient. Put your energy into improving your life in small, material ways. Go for lots of long walks. Watch lots of prestigious and miserable movies. Spend time with your friends and family. Go on dates, if you can eventually stomach it. Listen to music. Read books. Put your energy into creating things, learning a new skill or language, and having new experiences. It sounds like you’ve already been doing this. Keep doing it, and little by little, the pain will fade.

Try not to overthink it. I cannot emphasise enough how little this seems like it has to do with you, so there’s no point in getting out the string and evidence board. You will fall in love again, and when you do, try not to let this experience stop you from trusting the evidence of your own heart.