Fearful avoidants and sincere friendships

If you need to question if your ex is sincerely capable of friendships (and relationships and connection), is that someone you're interested in maintaining contact with or keeping tabs on? There's a reason you broke up with him. The quotes you provided that he said about other people are fairly chilling. What are you looking for from a relationship? Are you able to move on to find them from someone who you don't question their ability? I do agree with tnr9 that there is more to help you heal if you focus on what you want and why you chose him to give it to you rather than on him or his female "friends." I'd definitely block the entire bunch of them to help you move forward.

FA is an explanation for behaviors and capacity, but it's not an excuse. People can have trauma that inhibits their ability for intimacy, reciprocity, trust, etc. and there's nothing anyone else can do about it. That doesn't mean accepting unacceptable behavior. His comments also sound to me like he has additional mental health battles than just FA... FA makes you scared and ashamed but not disconnected and uncaring to the extent you say or believe you don't care if your "friends" live or die. Personality and character are also factors, attachment styles and mental health comorbidities aren't everything.

This is why there's no point in focusing on fully diagnosing another person to make your own decisions. Start with what you want and what your needs are and then decide if the other person, exactly as they truly are, fits into your life in a way that is healthy for both of you. You know something is very wrong here, and that's all the information you need to know about your ex for now in order to make informed decisions for yourself and what's best for your own life.

Hi Alexandra, I agree with you 100% in that, I really should start focusing on myself.

The thing is, our LDR was throughout covid and largely online, I only got to meet him twice and they weren’t very long visits. So a part of me always wondered, maybe we could’ve worked out if everything was in real life?

I say this because everyone around him in real life ADORES him, they think he’s a kind, interesting and wise person. His students, their parents, his family all these people he meets, they only have praise for him and nothing else.

I know towards the end of our relationship, we would argue so much about how to close the gap, he would say I wasn’t spending enough time with him but also expected me to sort out my future on my own.

He told me to quit my job immediately, but refused to discuss or plan how we should move forward financially, he would get really defensive about it which made me feel insecure about moving so abruptly. Communication was really strained and I got progressively meaner when we argued (as did he, his reactions were a mix of saying mean things or completely stonewalling).

I feel guilty and ashamed about how aggressive I got and I don’t have an excuse for lashing out but at the time i just felt so helpless. I apologised, but it still hangs over my head like I was the instigator and the idiot that ruined a good thing.

There are days where I feel like I’m going insane, and I question if I even made the right decision “I must be a horrible person, because everyone around him is super happy and supportive. I’m just the jerk that was holding him back and causing him grief. He’s so much better without me anyway.”

I started in the same situation. I met my husband long distance during covid. I'm not saying that to make you feel bad at all or like you "did it wrong." I'm saying it because, even with external obstacles, if it's the right match it just doesn't get so hard for things to keep moving forward. And I've been there a LOT, with relationships that were really difficult (usually anxious/avoidant trap relationships in retrospect) that I thought we were supposed to fight through because love will find a way, or if I was good enough they'd want to make it work. So I've tried many, many times in my past to keep chugging along trying to make something work that just didn't click right, finding every which way to try blame myself. Some things I learned: first, blaming yourself completely for a mutually incompatible situation doesn't help. As we say around here about relationships, it takes two to tango. Second, blaming yourself is actually a dysfunctional insecure attachment defense mechanism to try to give you an illusion of safety and control in a way: if you take on a disproportionate amount of the blame, then it's also all on YOU to fix it. Which means another person can't hurt you by making independent decisions you don't want them to make, if you just find the right way, you can control everything to get your needs met and get the situation you want. But it doesn't work that way, especially when the other person's attachment issues and mental health issues are also in the way. Then you're fighting with your own issues, you're fighting with their separate issues, and you're fighting with a relationship that doesn't quite mesh.

I don't think spending more time with him would have changed anything, because if he was more capable and wanted something more serious at that point in his life with anyone, he'd have made it happen. It's extremely common for insecures with intimacy issues to have long distance relationships because there's built-in distance. Instead, he was saying anti-social things to you, and starting fights with you to add distance and obstacles instead of removing them.

Just because you see everyone like him from afar doesn't mean you should doubt your own instincts. Maybe he is good at hiding, in fact I'm sure he is, if he said such shocking things to you in opposition of what the reality seemed to be. He may be presenting a facade to them, or they may be just as dysfunctional as he is (like often attracts like, after all), so they appear on the surface to get along better. It doesn't make it true.

It is okay to introspect and say to yourself, "hey, this relationship didn't work and he kind of sucks, but I could have handled aspects of it way better. How can I improve my own conflict resolution skills, communication skills, and healthy / mature relationship skills in the future?" I watched a ton of videos on improving communication in romantic relationships, as well as did a lot of research on attachment and what secure and healthy relating looks like, to avoid continuing to get stuck in bad patterns. It's okay to forgive yourself for not fighting fairly or well and to have learned you've got some spots you want to improve. Especially since he was also doing the same, not fighting nicely. It wasn't just you.

In fact, one of the most important indicators of compatibility is how a couple fights, resolves conflict, and repairs. As I got older and more experienced, I began to see it may be even more important than, do you have fun together in the good times? If he's lashing out at you, telling you to quit but not having a further discussion with you about how he is interested in incorporating you into his life if you move there? Come on, that's not a mature guy. Someone who can handle something serious with another person makes room for them in their life while discussing what they are looking for in life (even if they don't know you yet well enough to know if they see life with you specifically yet, they have an idea of if they want to move through traditional milestones or want something different than that, and then you gauge if your life stages are in a similar place). Again, not saying any of this to make you feel like you made mistakes, I'm saying it because I've had people string me along, and I was fully responsible for being very AP and bending over backwards to minimize my own needs to keep them around way past the expiration date of the relationship, and allowing it all. And what I've learned from having toxic relationships versus a very secure marriage is, again, it just doesn't need to be so complicated. People even used to tell me that when I was younger and an unaware insecure, and I didn't fully understand because I was so used to chaotic relationships that stalled out eventually, for which I kept blaming myself instead of being honest about compatibility and if I was choosing the right partners. Because I didn't know how to do those things when unaware, and I didn't know they were questions to ask or skills to learn. It took me personally years to do those things, but the reason I got to a secure relationship was because I went through all the crappy breakups and realized I wanted to change things up, and learned to stop focusing on other and start being compassionate and accepting towards myself while emotionally cleaning up my side of the street and learning what healthy partners looked like in addition to how to be one myself.

I hope that helps you put some focus back on you, and to get the voices of others out of your head a bit.

Thank you, I really needed to hear this today I just felt so small and inferior by his taunts towards the end of the relationship, because I could see it all coming true - him being more successful, popular and eventually making more than me. The dumpers remorse was eating me alive while I watched everything unfold, his female "friends" being so smug about growing close after I left and everything just taking off for him. 

Maybe it was due to my inexperience, but I always thought I should stick it out since I saw potential in him becoming a good partner (at the start anyway) but in the end he still blamed me for not trying hard enough and giving up. 

I know deep down that I probably wont be happy even if I stuck around, because he always wanted me to be hyper-independent so that I deal with everything on my own while he does his own thing. I try my best to not cause trouble, but moving to a new country with no network and literal death to my career... my independence would've been shot. 
He keeps saying otherwise, but he always prioritised his band and his dreams before any sort of solid plans for US. 

Despite knowing this...I still get anxiety when I think about how he's doing, even though I know I should be focusing on myself. It just feels so ... unfair. He got to walk away learning more about himself, he feels like he dropped a liability and gained a bunch of friends and success, meanwhile I'm really struggling to get back any ounce of confidence I have left in me. Sorry for the rant I just thought I'd be better by now, but I still feel super broken. 

Another great thing to remember, following up on if nothing changed would you be happy... never date potential, only date the person in front of you. Entering a dating situation expecting someone to change is setting yourself up for unmet expectations and resentment on both sides.

I want to challenge the story you're telling yourself about it being unfair. You didn't write anything that indicates he learned about himself. Everything was his way or the highway, and the things he said to you about others in his life were the words of a miserable person. A person like that is not at a stage where he's interested in learning. The terrible things he said to you towards the end may have been more lashing out to try to prop himself up and make you feel dumper's remorse because he felt rejected. He says terrible things about other people, he ended up saying terrible things to you... that's just him. Don't let your perception of him or his opinion define you, YOU define you. Rebuilding your self confidence after a bad situation is important, so don't abandon yourself, especially not over assumptions. Don't speak harshly to yourself, like calling yourself a liability. Is that really your own voice in your own head, or did someone else put those words there several years ago?

1) Unfollow, hide, block or unfriend all his social media. Trust me. You will feel better not peeking at his life's highlight reel. He is your drug, and you need to go cold turkey right now. A year down the road if you're still interested in how he's doing, you can check his socials.

2) Be grateful you didn't give up your life and move in together. I moved in with the fearfully attached guy I met at the beginning of covid lockdowns, giving up my rent controlled cottage, moving my pets. 9 months later, I had to leave so he could be with another woman. I now live in a tiny studio apt, and he got to keep the pets because I don't have room. You were smart enough to catch onto the fact that he will always put himself ahead of you and the relationship. Congratulate yourself for dodging a bullet!