30F, 32M Ex getting married…
I just want to know if anyone else has gone through something similar and how you emotionally got through it, because I still feel deeply unsettled even after getting closure.
I was with my ex for around five years in a LDR and it was honestly the deepest love I have experienced. Recently we had a very honest closure conversation after years where, for the first time, he properly acknowledged a lot of things I had carried pain over for years. He admitted that the pain and lows he experienced during our relationship were nothing short of what true love felt like for him too. He reassured me that he genuinely loved me throughout those years and that he never cheated on me.
The issue is that there was another girl emotionally present throughout a lot of our relationship and she was ultimately the reason I left. They had history before we got together and during our closure conversation he admitted he often acted protective over her because he carried guilt around their previous dynamic for not wanting her the way she wanted him. He insisted he never saw her romantically while we were together and that they only became something after we had fully ended.
But if I am being honest, I had a bad feeling about this girl almost from the start of our relationship. She would constantly make it a point to be around him, join the same internships, work on the same assignments and even ended up taking the same job placement as him despite apparently getting offered a higher paying role elsewhere. I always felt like she wanted him and it made me anxious constantly.
She would interrupt our calls pretending it was for work related things and the turning point for me was when she got very drunk one night and specifically asked him to drop her home even though she had multiple other close male friends there who could have done it. I remember feeling physically sick and anxious over situations like this for years until I finally ended the relationship because I emotionally could not take it anymore.
Throughout all of this he would constantly reassure me that she was “just his best friend” and that he saw her “like a sister,” which is probably why their eventual relationship and engagement affected me so deeply psychologically. It felt like my deepest fear during the relationship got confirmed in the end.
During our closure conversation I remember saying something along the lines of “why are we even maintaining this strange half connection if you can’t even see me beyond just being your ex partner?” and afterwards he agreed it was probably healthiest for us not to continue any lingering presence in each other’s lives anymore. I respected that and even removed each other off social media myself afterwards.
What still hurts emotionally though is that during our actual relationship I often felt like my emotional boundaries around this girl were not protected in the same way. So now there is a painful part of me struggling with the fact that this relationship seems to receive the level of boundaries, protection and respect that I spent years begging for.
At the same time, the closure conversation itself was actually very loving, honest and emotionally mature. He apologised for parts of how things affected me, acknowledged the relationship meant a lot to him and said he was thankful for what we shared. So now I feel stuck in this strange emotional place where I finally got validation and honesty after years, but somehow the grief feels even more real now instead of less.
I also cannot lie and pretend I feel okay about their wedding happening, because emotionally a part of me still feels like the relationship that caused me years of anxiety and pain somehow became the relationship that “won,” and I genuinely do not know how to process that in a healthy way.
And if I am being brutally honest, I still do not want this wedding to happen at all. I know that sounds awful, but it is specifically because it is her. If he had found happiness with almost anyone else, I genuinely think I would have been happy for him. But because it is the same girl I spent years feeling anxious, threatened and emotionally unsafe over, it feels psychologically unbearable to me sometimes. I still get nightmares about this girl even now.
I just feel so unsettled, it’s been 4 years since our breakup. Please advise. I’m already going to therapy fyi.