Dear Jenny,
My boyfriend and I were together for almost 2 years. We had so much fun together and our relationship seemed perfect! But as time went on, he seemed to pull away from me, and as he was doing that, I kind of chased him. I guess you could say I was a bit clingy. A month into this uncomfortable one-sided relationship, he broke up with me, saying he wanted to end things and was just in a different place than I was. It has been a few months and I can’t get him out of my mind. I think about him constantly and everything reminds me of him. I have decided that he is that perfect guy for me and I want him back, 100%. Where should I start in winning him back? -xxSonia
Hi Sonia,
Where should you start? There are lots of places, but not one of them has to do with winning him back. I am going to talk a little bit about you and then go into your relationship; your ex-boyfriend has nothing to do with the conversation. 🙂
The reason why the relationship was so fabulous in the beginning was because both of you were finding things in one another that appealed to you two. You were finding qualities that you loved about another person that complimented the same qualities you saw within yourself. Even if you never saw these qualities, they were most likely your mirror image. You loved seeing that another person also saw in you all the wonderful qualities you saw within yourself. It made you feel great to know someone appreciated you; it feels good to be appreciated.
Then after a long period of time, like so many people do, he turned his attention to other things that he appreciated. Unfortunately, you felt it. You felt that he was no longer “interested” in you. And whether that be the case or not, it pulled at you and you got in your own head and then into “fix it” mode. While in that mode, it becomes difficult for us to see anything else besides what our main focus is. In this case; getting your boyfriend back. I am not going to go into detail of some of the ridiculous things we sometimes do when we are in this mode, but at the very least, it involves going outside ourselves and being someone we are not. In this case, things never work out for the best.
May I invite you to consider the possibility that if we have appreciation already within us, we will not seek it from others. It is an emotion that feels so great; some people call it a feeling of being high (on life).
Appreciation is one of the highest, if not the highest, emotions out there. There are so many things that we can do in order to feel this within ourselves. Feelings of unworthiness, fear, doubt, being less than, not enough, imperfect; these are all reasons why we don’t appreciate ourselves. And when we find a quality in another person that can help us to counteract these feelings, it feels so good.
I am also suggesting that maybe at the time the relationship began you were in a different place of self-worth, and what he had to offer was just what you needed. As time went on and expansion happened (it always does), your self-worth changed. But you seem to be struggling to get back to the way it was in the beginning. Things can never remain the same, change is constant.
The only thing you can do in this situation, when you want your past mate back and he doesn’t want to come back, is one of two things. You can either be happy and appreciative without your mate or you can be unhappy and sad without your mate. Because the choice of him getting back together with you is not on the table. You need to take this experience, as painful as it was, and appreciate that it happened. Appreciate that you learned and grew from it. Relationships never involve other people, they are just our teachers. When it comes down to it, every relationship is about your relationship with yourself.
Quite possibly, after gaining growth from this experience, when you have so much more love, happiness and appreciation within yourself, you can put more toward your next encounter. What if this guy, who you are so broken up about, was preparing you for your next relationship?
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