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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2159 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 27, 2023

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Long term lurker looking for some Wednesday Wellness advice.

I broke up with my girlfriend of 6 years a few weeks ago. The core reason was that I wanted to meet other people - she was my first and only relationship and while what we had was amazing in many ways, I couldn't shake the thought that I might be missing out on more. If I'm going to marry and have kids with someone I want to be damn sure that they're the right person, and I wasn't. I decided to throw away an incredibly stable and largely happy relationship for the chance of something even better. I felt that if I didn't I would live with regret, or just end up breaking up later down the road, which could be even worse. I'm worried this makes me seem selfish and naive.

I've never broken up or been broken up with (again, first relationship), but boy are they fucking hard! She moved out of my place and I don't see or talk with her any more, but I'm paradoxically still surrounded by her every day. I'll drive past restaurants we used to eat at, hear songs we used to listen to, see things in my house that remind me of her. I remind myself this is what I wanted, it's not like this new reality was thrust upon me without my consent, but it's sometimes hard to remember why I wanted it in the first place. I'm wondering if losing her was the only way to make me realize how much I needed her in my life.

Time heals all wounds and I know things will only get easier, but I haven't let go of her yet. And I'm not willing to let go quite yet either, which means things may get even harder before they get easier.

Just musings now, I'm continuing to think and reflect the next few weeks. Happy to answer any questions or take feedback/thoughts from folks.

I don't know what you did right or wrong and won't pretend to.

I'll just note that the worst romantic mistake I ever made was dating a mediocre girl for a year in college. I never should have dated her, she was fine but I was never serious about her while she loved me.

Dumping her hurt like a bitch. I hated to hurt her like that. Watching her cry that hard hurt so bad, and she was wearing my rowing sweatshirt when I did it; and she took it off and refused to wear it out, so knowing she walked home in the cold made me feel so much worse. I dumped her on Friday and cried until Monday. It was like putting my dog down.

On Monday the woman who is now my wife got back from her visit home. She brought me a care package from new England. She'd been advising me "as a friend" to dump the gf. She had been scheming, like a sexy teenage Palpatine, on this subject for weeks. By Thursday she was my gf. This was the best decision I ever made.

I can't predict how it will end for you, but I can say that regardless I understand your pain. I hope all goes well.

I will add some counterbalance and say that the way she feels should be irrelevant to your decisionmaking beyond the possibility of you wanting to get back with her and her feeling bad reducing the chances of this happening.

In the west where "individualism" is the name of the day you have to focus on maximising the outcomes for yourself given your environment because sure as hell nobody else is going to be out there looking for you. I don't think it's possible for anyone to tell just from your post that what you did was not optimal in expectation (it might have been, it might not have been, random strangers over the internet don't have the info needed to make that calculation, only you and perhaps those other people close to you do).

Now you may well have fucked up here, but the reason for that would be that you threw away something good and now can't find anything on the same level, not because "you wasted her years"; she is a human being with the same level of agency as you, if she felt it wasn't working she should have pushed for marriage earlier or broken it off herself when she thought it wasn't going the way she wanted her life to go. Under the standard modern western mentality her failures and suffering are on her, not on you, you have nothing to answer for.

I wish you good luck in the future and hope you are able to meet someone even more amazing who you are sure is the woman you wish to spend the rest of your life with.

How old is she? This really seems like something you should have thought about 5 years ago?

You're a fucking idiot. I threw away my first love for the same reason, and regret it to this day.

Where you never able to find someone else to wholeheartedly love?

Yes. After six months, and meeting my parents, I said "I love you" on vacation on an island in the Great lakes, she did likewise. Then a month later she broke it off. It turned out she went back to her abusive ex husband, who laughed at me for saying "I love you" and called her trash to my face. Less than year later she left him again, but didn't tell me. Or communicate with me at all.

She left me in the fall of 2019, and then COVID happened.

My condolences, and best wishes.

To add a counterbalance here: I don't think anyone here has nearly enough information to clearly state that you've made a mistake. A life-long commitment with children is a huge one, and you have every right to feel a sense of security in your decision when you make it (I'm saying this as a married guy with a 2 year old). I also find it patently absurd that others are holding you accountable to robbing this girl of 6 years of child-bearing-years, it is not your responsibility to provide someone with children, and further, if you have doubts then you don't want those doubts materializing in your relationship later where they could affect your child.

I agree with @self_made_human; you fucked up pretty seriously imo. I realize that you're not feeling the best and I'm sorry to pile on more, but you need to realize this now so that the next time you have someone good you don't set them aside because "what if I can do even better".

My wife and I have discussed this topic because I was in a similar boat as you - she was the first woman I ever dated, and I had to make a call as to whether I should pursue other options just to see what's out there. She, on the other hand, had dated many men over the years before meeting me. I mentioned to her (long after we got married) that I faced this choice, and basically there are two salient points she made based on her perspective:

  1. It was good for me that I chose to not set her aside, because at minimum she would've started dating others and who knows where things go from there. More likely she would not have considered a relationship with me again.

  2. Having dated many people she was able to gain perspective on just how many losers are out there. You're doing decently if you just find someone who is a good person even if they aren't good for you, let alone finding someone who is a good person and also good for you. So basically, if you hit that mark on the first try, be grateful because you saved yourself a whole lot of trouble.

If by some miracle your old girlfriend would take you back, I would suggest that. If she won't, then definitely don't make this same mistake again next time.

So basically, if you hit that mark on the first try, be grateful because you saved yourself a whole lot of trouble.

Or alternatively stick with her while you secretly search for someone who is a good person as well as is good for you. Now this is not an honourable thing to do, but there is no honour left in the modern west and I would not judge a man additionally for doing this beyond what I would judge any normal man who accepts and lives by the modern western belief system uncritically.

I suppose you can just marry the first four (or ten). You can fuck them as children, or murder men to marry their wives. Plus all the sex slaves. That would be the honourable thing in your religion, as per your prophet.

While @BurdensomeCount is clearly trolling for reactions, you're still to blame for being so willing to take the bait and swallow it whole, and this was pure personal attack. You've been banned four times previously for this sort of thing. I'm making it two weeks this time, only because I am feeling the Christmas spirit.

What is the point of a 6 years relationship?

Based on that woman tolerating that, she was probably not a good partner. It shouldn't take more than a year to figure out whether a person is good or not, ideally in chastity. If you can't, ask your older relatives, that's what family is for.

Women only get a couple decades of healthy reproduction, taking 6 whole years away from them is cruel.

I might be missing out on more.

Can you elaborate on that? What is it that some hypothetical woman would bring to the table that would make wasting ~8 years of your adult life worth it (realistically speaking you're not gonna be serious before at least 2 years with a new partner even if you found them tomorrow)?

Hey man, good on you for taking the leap. You're probably right that she's not the one if you're not entirely sure. You're probably also right that you don't know who or what you're really looking for yet. It takes time and experience to know.

Believe it or not, this is actually a unique and wonderful time that you will look back on with fondness. I remember my young breakups and boy do you FEEL like you've never FELT before. It's sad, it's powerful, it's bitterly beautiful. Embrace it, feel it, listen to sad music, draw a picture, just really get it out of your system. You won't be able to feel this hard when you get older (or you will, but it will be a lot less romantic and a lot more bitter). Young hormones are a hell of a(n awesome) drug.

Watch this video and give it a think. I think I watch it once a year, it really puts things into perspective for me. https://youtube.com/watch?v=V_eCrIO0ECw?feature=shared

I feel for you buddy.

I broke up with my girlfriend of 7 years for largely the same reasons. My reasons were based more on the physical chemistry between us; I had largely lost physical attraction to her and, really, I wanted to have sex with other women.

This breakup was two years ago, and I still think about her often. Part of the reason is that we still talk from time to time so it hasn't been a complete break in relations. She was and is a wonderful woman and there were many things I admired about her. But I just wasn't sure she was the right one, and, like I said, I really wanted to mess around with other women.

Do I regret breaking up with her? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. When I was in the relationship, I felt largely unfulfilled. I would see a beautiful woman walking by and be filled with negative feelings about my own relationship. It was a major sticking point for me and, honestly, if I'd stuck it out, I would have lived with a lot of regret. At the same time, my ex adored me and treated me incredibly well. I don't think I will find another person who will treat me so well and who's intellect and work ethic I admire so much.

So...give it time. Six years is a long time to be with a person. It's good that you have cut off communication, this should make things heal more quickly. Just make sure you find things to do with your time and minimize time spent by yourself. I've always found alone time is what brings on the thoughts of rumination and regret. It's hard to break up with someone. It's especially hard to break up with someone, not because of anything they've done, but because it just didn't "feel" right or because you wanted to sleep around. Good luck to you.

Well, where is your love life now? How many years has it been?

I decided to throw away an incredibly stable and largely happy relationship for the chance of something even better.

If you read or heard that from someone else, what would you think?

I would think they are a typical westerner and not much more about it, par for the course, as they say. In fact doing so shows they are risk taking, which is a quality I personally admire, so probably slightly positively predisposed towards them.

That they weren't willing to settle and had some balls? I would've said the same thing of my ex-gfs, but when I met my future wife it was a whole new level of satisfaction and happiness.

The core reason was that I wanted to meet other people - she was my first and only relationship and while what we had was amazing in many ways, I couldn't shake the thought that I might be missing out on more. If I'm going to marry and have kids with someone I want to be damn sure that they're the right person, and I wasn't.

What would make someone "the right person?", in your mind?

My modestly informed opinion that you dun goofed.

Of course, the optimal stopping problem and the sub-problem known as the Secretary Problem is relevant:

The basic form of the problem is the following: imagine an administrator who wants to hire the best secretary out of n rankable applicants for a position. The applicants are interviewed one by one in random order. A decision about each particular applicant is to be made immediately after the interview. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. During the interview, the administrator gains information sufficient to rank the applicant among all applicants interviewed so far, but is unaware of the quality of yet unseen applicants. The question is about the optimal strategy (stopping rule) to maximize the probability of selecting the best applicant. If the decision can be deferred to the end, this can be solved by the simple maximum selection algorithm of tracking the running maximum (and who achieved it), and selecting the overall maximum at the end. The difficulty is that the decision must be made immediately.

The shortest rigorous proof known so far is provided by the odds algorithm. It implies that the optimal win probability is always at least 1/e (where e is the base of the natural logarithm), and that the latter holds even in a much greater generality. The optimal stopping rule prescribes always rejecting the first n/e applicants that are interviewed and then stopping at the first applicant who is better than every applicant interviewed so far (or continuing to the last applicant if this never occurs). Sometimes this strategy is called the 1/e stopping rule, because the probability of stopping at the best applicant with this strategy is about 1/e already for moderate values of n. One reason why the secretary problem has received so much attention is that the optimal policy for the problem (the stopping rule) is simple and selects the single best candidate about 37% of the time, irrespective of whether there are 100 or 100 million applicants.

Let's assume it takes about a year to figure out if a longterm partner is The One, and you have a budget of 10 years or 10 LTPs. I'll assume a typical age range for "serious" relationships as somewhere from 25-35.

In that case, 10/2.72 is about 3.6, so you should go for about 4 steady relationships where you heartlessly break up, and then snag the next person who happens to beat all the ones that came before on whatever metric you care about. Unfortunately, you've spent 6 of said years, so not only did you break her heart, you did so in a less than optimal way :(

However, if I was in her shoes, I wouldn't even consider taking you back, someone who is willing to end an otherwise happy relationship over this isn't someone you wish to settle down with, not that I haven't felt the same way you did. However, when I did break up with my girlfriend of 5 years, it was something we both knew was coming for unavoidable reasons, and not a mere whim.

At any rate, good luck finding someone else, or at least having her take you back.

In that case, 10/2.72 is about 3.6, so you should go for about 4 steady relationships where you heartlessly break up, and then snag the next person who happens to beat all the ones

I do not think this is the right way to frame the Secretary problem result. The optimal solution to the secretary problem is that you should reject the first 1/e proportion of applicants and then accept the next best one to turn up. That would suggest you should spend 10/2.72 = 3.6 years searching for people and then selecting the first person after that point who happens to turn up better than everyone else, not that you should have 3.6 relationships where you break up, unless you're assuming that each relationship lasts exactly 1 year and that you immediately find another relationship after ending your current one. For instance if a relationship would last 3 years on average the 3.6 relationships here already put you outside the age range of 25-35.

Under this paradigm you should search around until 25+3.6 = 28.6 and then accept the first person who turns up who is better than everyone you've managed to get a relationship with between 25-28.6. This also has the benefit of being scale invariant to how easily you can find relationships, as if you can find relationships very easily you'll have lots of people in your 25-28.6 sample so will have a high floor for who you settle down with, but that's fine because you find relationships easily, while on the other hand if you were able to have no relationships between 25-28.6 this would suggest you accept the first person who turns up, which again sort of makes sense for you to do because you're probably not getting anyone else if you turn them down.

I am assuming each relationship lasts 1 year. Real life has enough additional complexity that I doubt that simplifying conclusion makes any difference, and on average, a year seems like the rough amount of time needed to know if things are going to work out in the longterm with a new partner.

There are all kinds of wrinkles in a real life context, such as being exposed to additional evidence regarding the quality of one's partners before "interviewing" them, not having to see strictly serially, not needing a strict amount of time for each relationship, having each relationship change your SMV and so on.

But either approach shows that OP wasn't being sensible in how he handled things.

Does it feel bad to make love in a relationship you already know is ending?

I've felt worse things, like appendicitis.

Actually, not particularly, it was when cuddling and being sweet that that the pain of separation chose to time travel back and hit me when it hurts.

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