Happy New Year!
Caveat; these are not my words. So don't shoot the messenger. This is the professional opinion of my friend the PhD. Everything he said was predicated on what I told him. I was honest with him based off what I perceived.
If you disagree please explain why you disagree. Maybe we can all learn something.
OK, here's the Cliffs. What I remember of them anyway. He said a lot.
* She has real feelings for me but she's confused mainly due to her very ltr crashing and burning.
* He didn't think I was a rebound. He thought, from what I told him, she connected with me whereas rebounds usually aren't emotional.
* She had strong feelings for her ltr ex and was hurt badly by the failed relationship. So, she definitely has commitment issues.
* He's certain she didn't respond to my text not because she's a b***h (from what I've told him of her) but because she feels bad is carrying a lot of guilt and cares for me.
Some ancillary things that may or may not go along with her feelings for me. 1. She thinks from the way I worded my text that I'm mad and I'm going to berate her. So she want's to avoid that pain as it would only add to what she is dealing with. 2. She is comparing what she feels for me against what she feels for this other guy and doesn't want to poison the well so to speak by starting to talk with me again. 3. She realizes she's made a mistake but her ego/self image is so tanked from her failed ltr and the choices she's made that she isn't able to reach back out to me yet (1 1/2 months). I don't know about this one because in my text I said I hope she's well. I thought it was fairly friendly. Although he may be right, who knows? 4. I didn't ask her any questions in my text and she expects me to call her. 5. She's invested in this other guy right now and isn't going to talk to me even though she does care for me (I thought this was similar to number 2).
End Cliffs.
I wasn't a psych major but I think what follows is called projecting. I hadn't thought about this in detail. It may be old hat to those of you who're veterans but for the rest of us it's something to think about. It ties together some of the things he touched on above.
She had very strong feelings for the guy she was in her ltr with. Then things went bad and it ended up being a train wreck. This caused her a tremendous amount of pain. Whether she is conscious of it or not she's still dealing with that pain and she's confused. So fast forward from Feb, the end of her ltr to May or so, when she met this other guy. She met this first guy. The guy she's seeing now. Nothing came of it for whatever reason and the dude moved away. She meets me sparks fly, we connect in more than one way and everything is golden. He believes she's being truthful about telling me she wasn't intimate with the first guy.
Here's is the new concept for me. She then remembers what happened last time she had an intense connection and feelings for someone, i.e., ltr. It caused her a lot of pain and hurt her badly. She associates her strong feelings for me with what happened with her ex, i.e., pain. She now correlates strong feelings with pain. The feelings (cause) and the pain (effect). She ends up getting scared, after all no one wants to suffer more pain. So she reaches out to this other guy. The guy that nothing happened with and latches onto him. She told me there were feelings there for him but the doc thinks that was more than likely projection, confusion and a self defense mechanism at work. She knows that if she leaves me she won't have to deal with pain like she did in her ltr. She'll hang with this other guy for a while then eventually realize that all of these feelings she thought she had for him aren't what she thought. During this time she's comparing her real feelings for me against what she feels for this other guy. Even if she does feel something for him it more than likely won't be in the same ballpark as what she feels for me. Another thing that will cause her feelings for me to increase over time. I'm not around. Absence makes the heart grow fonder type of thing. We're currently not talking even though I sent her one text in 1 1/2 months.
He said to stop beating myself up over it. It was OK because I didn't become emotional. I didn't supplicate to her, beg or grovel. This other guy is a long distance relationship. He said they don't work 99.9999% of the time. I personally have tried several long distance relationships. I fly for free and they still didn't work out. So when they're together on the weekends she's fine. However during the week when she's home in KC she feels the loss that I filled for her.
As he spoke and explained all of this, I couldn't help but think this makes sense. So me being a logical guy I said, I may be wrong and she might have not felt much if anything for me. She might have been a total bull sh**er. He said, if what she's emoting is real you can always feel it. He asked me if I felt it. I said yes. I may not be psychic but that was pretty obvious to me.
I then asked him how can all of this happen in two months? Again being doubtful I added; maybe she just wasn't that into me. We weren't together that long. He said if a woman who's experienced this loss does something like this it's always sooner rather than later. Also, he said if what I'm telling him is even semi-close to the truth that as long as she doesn't have some sort of underlying pathology he's positive some or all of these things are occurring within her. Yeah, here I thought my buddy from college was just another dumba** like myself. Who would have though he's a Jedi Master. Or at least sounds like one.
So almost as if I'm talking to a weather man I ask him for his forecast. What do you think is going to happen? He said based on what he's read and seen that in a few months I'll probably hear from her. She'll probably text because it's less risky emotionally for her than calling me. This is how women operate. It's emotionally driven for them. Yes they can think logically but if something causes them to feel, like in a relationship, they'll usually abandon logic in favor of what their emotions are telling them. Now he said here's the rub. She hasn't even been out of her ltr a year yet. He's positive she's still dealing with baggage from it. It may take her another year or two to fully recover from what happened to her. Or the time you're apart may be long enough for her to figure everything out. He suspects because she's a bright educated woman that it'll be the latter but who really knows.
He said when I do hear from her, and if I'd consider taking her back that I need to figure out if she's healed or still damaged. If she's OK then it's my decision to reconcile or not but whatever I do don't be too easy on her. He asked me if I'd ever heard the saying, "I'd never want to be a member of a club if they'd have me as member." People want what they can't have. It's just human nature.
I sat there digesting what he had to say and I asked him; what should I do? He said there are two schools of thought and it really depends first on what you want to do and secondly what kind of person she is. Basically you can call her and have a face to face or do nothing and let her come to you, or not. He favored calling her which goes against what, I think is, the party line. I told him the consensus is for me not to contact her, drop her like a hot potato, etc. He said if she was younger than about 27 he may not contact her but. However, he'd probably still call her. She's in her 30s and well educated and that it'll be acceptable to contact her. It shouldn't blow up her ego like it would a younger person.
The danger of having a conversation is not to be too open with what you're feeling for her. The mistake guys make is they profess their undying love, devotion and then it rarely works out for them unless they're dealing with someone with extremely low self esteem. If that's the case you really don't want to be dating someone like that anyway. The flip side is if she's still damaged. If she is, she won't know what she wants and will probably repeat this pattern again for a while. If that's the case I shouldn't get back together with her. It's just going to cause me a lot more pain down the road. The doc says in these situations guys think her behavior is their fault when in reality is all her doing.
From reading this it may sound like I'm trying to get her back. I'm not taking her back. I'm interested in the theory and how it applies to women's behavior.
I thought this was interesting. What do you guys and girls think?
What do you agree and disagree with?
* Edit. I'll agree, initially I did want to figure it/her out. Solve the problem, finish the mission. I'm confused though. We say we aren't trying to figure out women. Isn't that what game and this site is for, to explain and decode women's behavior? I've written this novel just to throw out there what my friend doc PhD thinks about all of this and to get the group's reaction to his preference to contact her.
