I love my girlfriend, but I can’t stop getting stuck on her past — looking for an outside perspective
We knew each other at school when we were younger, and I had a fairly strong crush on her for several years. I never told her. We weren’t particularly close friends, and I also liked other girls.
Then our schools/classes split, and we basically stopped seeing each other regularly. Around that time, my feelings for her started to diminish naturally. I became more focused on other girls.
She started dating her first boyfriend roughly a month before I started dating my own first love. So by the time she got together with him, I definitely wasn’t as strongly into her as I had been earlier, and I wasn’t sitting around waiting for her.
There was still very light contact between us for the first couple of months after she started dating him. She also tried to meet up with me in a group and messaged me at different points. Eventually that contact disappeared completely, and we both went on with our separate lives.
We both eventually had our first serious relationships, and interestingly, those relationships ended at roughly the same time. After that, we unexpectedly reconnected, and that’s ultimately how we ended up dating each other.
So I don’t think the accurate story is “I desperately loved her while she chose another guy.” That’s not what happened. But she also wasn’t completely irrelevant to me when she started dating him.
For some reason, my brain now cares a lot about exactly how much I liked her at each point in that timeline. It seems to treat the difference between “I liked her a lot,” “I still liked her somewhat,” and “I barely cared” as if figuring out the exact answer would somehow explain what the situation meant.