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Can't get rid of this girl
i n c u b u s
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Well not so much the girl but really what she stood for. Let me make this make sense for you. I used to date this girl in high school, and to put it extremely simply, it ended horribly. But for the most part, the relationship itself was pretty much everything I ever imagined or wanted. It was like she was made for me and she was what I saw when I closed my eyes and imagined my dream girl. Like I said, it ended worse then a train wreck and she turned out to be a horrible person on the interior.
Skip forward to today, I am currently with a girl who I've been with almost a year now ( and made the best b-day cake of her life thanks to you guys!) and things are on the OK-ish side. My problem is that I have based pretty much every relationship since high school off of this girl. As much as it pains me to admit it, I feel like I can't fully give into anyone who doesn't come close to how I remember my ex. The worst part about it all is that I checked out some of her (my ex) myspace bulletins, something I never do, only to find that she hasn't changed one bit since high school. She's still the same egotistical, self-centered, snake in the grass blessed to have the looks she has that she has always been. This makes me sick to my stomach simply because I feel like I can't get past this girl who doesn't deserve to have a second thought by me (lord knows she never gave me a second thought).
So how do I get past this girl so I can emotionally move forward with my current/future relationships?
Skip forward to today, I am currently with a girl who I've been with almost a year now ( and made the best b-day cake of her life thanks to you guys!) and things are on the OK-ish side. My problem is that I have based pretty much every relationship since high school off of this girl. As much as it pains me to admit it, I feel like I can't fully give into anyone who doesn't come close to how I remember my ex. The worst part about it all is that I checked out some of her (my ex) myspace bulletins, something I never do, only to find that she hasn't changed one bit since high school. She's still the same egotistical, self-centered, snake in the grass blessed to have the looks she has that she has always been. This makes me sick to my stomach simply because I feel like I can't get past this girl who doesn't deserve to have a second thought by me (lord knows she never gave me a second thought).
So how do I get past this girl so I can emotionally move forward with my current/future relationships?
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i n c u b u s on
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I'm confused. How did a "my perfect girl" relationship end in such a train wreck? It didn't just end out of no where, right? Focus on the negative aspects of your relationship with her. Think uhh, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when he is remembering the "good" and "bad' things of his relationship. If you can get those negative thoughts into your head, this new girl will seem (and probably is anyway) pretty fantastic.
Maybe you're just not that into this girl, or the ones you've dated since. I would hope if you met someone you could truly love, that after a year you'd be more than 'ok-ish' and still wishing for you ex...or rather the idea that your ex represented for you.
Are you really wishing for your ex? Or are you just putting her face on a dream you had of an ideal relationship. The relationship you thought you had before she turned on you.
I think to get past this you need to evaluate a couple of things. Is this ex, or idea of her and your perfect woman, a reasonable goal? Can a *real* person measure up to the ideas of what without being fake and a "snake in the grass" as you put it?
Is your idea too concrete and too solid. "She has to have curly blond hair, shorter than you but just barely, she has to like ____ music, but also know the finer points of _____." blah blah blah...just too many things and then when they aren't the same it's a let down because the woman you're with diverges from that. If this is true you'll be a lot happier to let those nitpicks go, maybe you're just caught up in how happy you were during that time that you're stuck on it and want to recreate it and keep thinking about how your current relationship is not that.
Or is what you're missing from your relationship but was in the old one you keep thinking about a reasonable desire. You want someone who generally enjoys some of the same things with you, the conversation flows easily, you have chemistry and you find them attractive and are excited to see them. Then, as much as it sucks to say...maybe your current relationship just isn't "the one". I think the hardest relationships to end are probably the ones where you do genuinely like your partner, but that's not always a reason to stay.
That was muchly the same impression I got.
Either that or you are simply unhappy at something lacking in current relationship, but without figuring out exactly what, or trying to fix it, you're simply focussing on a tiny section of a past 'perfect' relationship.
Pinpoint what is lacking. Deal with it. Then you'll stop giving a shit about the ex.
OP mentions that several times.
Remember, no matter how hot this girl is, someone, somewhere, is tired of her shit.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
This is basically what goes through my mind, not the literal girl herself.
Also, to answer Sarcastro's guess, the ex is just a tad bit more attractive but honestly I don't judge my current gf off of that. I am very attracted physically and emotionally to my gf now and when I say that things are OK-ish I mean that we've been getting into a lot of pesky arguements over little things for the past few months that have really taken it's toll on me. If we ever ended up splitting it would probably be for reasons like that and not because of my inability to see past the dream my ex has set for me. That being said I truly do love this girl and will do everything I can to make things work with her, I would never be the kind of jerk that wouldn't be able to fully love my gf just because she's not as "hot" as my ex.
My problem is not being able to move beyond love towards something more concrete like engagements and marraige. Also, in the event I do split with my gf, the potential future gf's that would ultimately come across the same wall with me at this point in the relationship. I get that anxiety that tells that I certainly love this girl, enough so to marry her, but would I be making a huge mistake by marrying her further down the road just because this girl is not my "dream girl"?
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I ask because you keep saying that she "was your dream girl", but you separate the good things she did from the bad things about her. She obviously wasn't your dream girl if she had some really awful qualities.
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Here's the thing, bro: I can promise you that on the best days of your relationship with this high school girl, it was still a tremendously lame experience in your life compared to the present or future. Remember "all the cash [you] dumped into this chick the last few months of the relationship?" Yeah. In the grand scheme of things, I promise you that the money you spent dating her doesn't signify--you didn't really have that much money to blow on her in the first place. You were in fucking high school, remember? Your annual earning potential prior to earning a diploma or a GED was maybe $15,000. You never really got a chance to do anything too terribly nice with this girl (compared to what you can do now) because you were in high school.
Speaking of how being in high school makes for lousy relationships:
Relationships are way more fun when you're an adult because you can be adult about them. You can go out to dinner at nicer restaurants more regularly because you have positive net income. You can get more creative about dating than hanging out at the mall or watching dumb movies that star Adam Sandler. You don't have to balance your dating life with homework. You have your own car. You have your own house or apartment or at least a room in a place you're sharing with other people your own age, so you don't have to have sex in the back of a car in a sketchy parking lot, and no one cares if the neighbors or your roommates know you're fucking.
As far as feeling like this girl was your soul mate--be serious. You can't seriously believe that this person was made for you and vice versa when both of you were still growing and developing. Neither of you were experiencing the final product in the other yet. What you WERE experiencing was an overwhelming surge of adolscent horomones that left you feeling irrationally-mushy over someone who, by your own retrospective admission, was far from perfect.
You're older now. The hormone rush is nowhere near as severe as it was when you were in the last throes of being a teenager. And you miss that. Alright, that's fine, but keep in mind that what you're really missing is being completely, retardedly irrational as a result of a chemical imbalance in your brain.
Is this current girl the one you're going to marry? Hell if I know. I'm inclined to say probably not, since you only define the relationship as "okay-ish." But I promise you that life really only ever gets better after high school, in every single respect. Try to keep that in mind.
I really don't think that's true.. or at least it's not what you mean to say. Something just really doesn't add up.
It sounds like you're really, really wrapped up in the superficial. That was not a good relationship. It wasn't your ideal, unless your ideal is girls cheating on you. The relationship itself was a facade carefully crafted to cover the fact that she was seeing someone else. It should not figure into any "ideal" you might have in any way.
Every relationship is going to have its merits and faults because every person is different and every person is going to treat you differently. Some will have more merits than others, and some will have more faults, and that is based on the way those two people interact with (or "relate" to) each other as well as a number of other circumstances, such as timing. It's cool to make a list of things you'd like to see in a relationship that really matter to you, and try to aim for it. But it's not really appropriate in *any* case to try to rebuild with other people a relationship you had with this one girl in high school. In my opinion, recognizing that is part of being able to have a mature committed relationship with another person.
So basically, you need to let it go. You seem to be able to see it for what it was, so it's time to bring into use whatever coping mechanisms you have to help you get over it.
Keep in mind, if you "dream girl" ex lied to you about the guy she cheated on you with, how much of her being the perfect girl was honest and truthful?
The only issue is with your current GF, if you are sure you don't want to marry her, do you break it off now, and continue the search for this elusive "dream girl"? or just stick with her, and enjoy the relationship while it lasts? (or not enjoy...whatever) well that's really a decision only you can make.
It's kind of hard for me to pick out once concise sentence that really illustrates what I suspect is going on here, but I bolded a couple of the parts that did jump out at me. The elements at play in this description are feeling and imagination. It's not the girl specifically that the OP is fixated upon--it's the emotional response he got from being in the relationship at the time. Especially in a relatively-immature teenage male, that emotional response is governed much more by raging levels of hormones than by Reason or Rationality.
I strongly suspect this is actually less about Girl A versus Girl B and more about how Incubus has physically and emotionally matured, but intellectually he's still coming to grips with the fact that he's no longer subject to the whims of his wildly-shifting chemical levels, so things feel differently than they used to, and he doesn't know why.
Fucking limed so hard, and spoilered out of courtesy.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
No, you aren't over this girl because the thought of her torments you in your current relationship.
Damn talk about hitting the nail on the head. And as was again accurately guess, I am a 20 y.o. college junior. I'm not scared that this will haunt me for the rest of my life but rather I'm looking for a way to just drop the notion of this girl entirely because it's only holding me back. The advice so far given has been pretty awesome and I appreciate it, particularly SammyF. A stern slap in the face with the hard facts is probably what I need right now.
Also for those who are still a little confused about why I still fixated on a relationship that was in itself pretty horrible: It wasn't the fact that it ended badly but rather how I recieved the good times and the majority of the time I thought was in this "perfect relationship" never knowing that it was pretty much a lie. I have accepted this fact but when I recall back to the situation, its the times where I'm blissfully unaware and happy that I set the bar at which is totally stupid I admit but hey thats why I'm asking for help here.
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Thank goodness: you're not crazy, you're simply becoming a man. Mazel tov! In celebration thereof, here's a quick sampling of some of the random manly advice I've accumulated over the years:
One last freebie, and I actually mean this one seriously (all those points are serious, but you don't have to learn them right away):
You don't have to call her and say "hey I forgive you" or anything like that, but you still seem kind of angry. Let it go, man. You were an immature, emotional kid at the time, so it felt really bad, but honestly just like the relationship wasn't as good as you remember, the breakup wasn't as bad as you remember, either.
Best of luck, man.
I've got to call you out on this one, man. I'm 31 and dating a 23 year old, and I must say, she's pretty fucking interesting.