How to cope — M25 left by F23 fiancée via text
I don’t really know how to put this into words but I need to try because I’m not doing well and I don’t know what to do with any of this.
I’m 25. Five days ago I was counting down the hours until the woman I love came home for good. Instead I got a text at 2:33 in the morning and now I’m just a broken man trying to figure out how to get through each day.
M and I were together for over two years. She is my first love. I have never loved anyone the way I loved her and I meant every single bit of it every single day we were together.
The backstory is that her mom, who lives four hours away, never approved of us and had an intense controlling grip on M’s life. For the past month or so her mom had been pressuring M relentlessly to leave me. M was going back and forth, torn between her mom and the life we had built together. After weeks of that I couldn’t take the uncertainty anymore. I told M she needed to go spend time up there with her mom to see clearly that her mom was never going to be satisfied no matter what she did, and that if she truly loved me and wanted to be with me she needed to stand up and mean it.
She went up there about three weeks ago. By day three I could feel a shift in her. I couldn’t stomach the idea of an entire month of my life hanging on a coin flip so I shortened the timeline and told her she needed to stand up to her mom then or come move her stuff out. She came back down. She said she had been planning to stand up to her mom but that my pressure had forced her hand too soon. She said she was going to prove me wrong. She got a storage unit right across the street from our place, moved her things in there, loaded her family heirlooms into her car and drove them back to her mom and we set the deadline to come back home as May 4.
After that everything felt different in a good way. She was planning things we’d do together when she got back after the wedding. A baseball game. Boston. A new job with her previous employer starting May 19th with a formal offer coming Monday. Her dad had told her directly that she was throwing away something most people never find and that she’d have to beg and pray I’d take her back if she walked away. She had her support system. She had a plan. She had everything lined up. She knew I’d always take her back no matter what. We always said: love you forever and ever and one, mean it.
One thing she mentioned while she was at her mom’s stuck with me though. She told me she had changed my name in her phone to something else because her mom had been snooping through her messages. I didn’t say much about it at the time but looking back I think that’s exactly what happened. Her mom found our messages, saw the plan, and gave her daughter an ultimatum. It wouldn’t be the first time. Her mom has been married three times and has a pattern of exhausting people and cutting them off the moment she stops getting what she wants. She divorced M’s dad and cut him and three of their sons off from the family entirely.
Sunday night at 9pm M texted me “tomorrow the day!!!!!!!!” She told me she loved me. I told her how proud I was, that she had me and her dad and his whole family behind her, that I couldn’t wait to see her walk through that door. She responded with love and hearts and went to sleep.
At 2:33am Monday morning my phone lit up.
The text was long. Formal. It had bullet points — about mail forwarding, utility payments, what to do with the things she left at my place. It thanked me for the relationship. Said she wouldn’t be returning “at least for the foreseeable future.” Said she wouldn’t be answering any questions about her decision. It read like a corporate resignation letter. Not like something from the woman who was sending me hearts five hours earlier. The girl I know is concise and doesn’t add filler, so I feel like this was another opportunity to leave the door open for her.
Nobody writes something that structured and cold at 2:30 in the morning spontaneously. That was written before she ever sent me those hearts. Which means while she was telling me tomorrow was the day, something had already happened. Her mom got to her.
By morning she had blocked me on every social media platform. She wiped her entire Instagram — every post going back to high school — and reset her bio to show a university in another state. My texts show delivered. No response.
I just sat there staring at my phone not recognizing any of it.
Her mom is clinically bipolar and has spent years controlling M’s life. M told me recently that she had struggled with severe depression and anxiety for years and that medication had never worked for her because of how her genetics affect the way she processes it. She never disclosed any of that to me until late in our relationship despite how serious we were and how much we meant to each other.
My friends think her mom had her alone at that wedding and tore everything down. They think what happened — the overnight reversal, the blocking, the complete life reset, the new university across the country — looks like a manic episode, full parental manipulation, or both. They think she’ll come back eventually when she gets enough distance from her mom to hear her own voice again. Her own dad told her she was making the biggest mistake of her life.
I want to believe them. I really do.
I’ve been sick to my stomach since Monday morning. My dog was wagging her tail waiting for her to walk through that door and I had to watch that. I’ve cried more than I ever have in my entire life. I wake up every morning and reach for my phone out of habit and then it hits me all over again. It feels like someone died except she’s still out there somewhere and I just can’t reach her.
I know she hurt me. I know the way she ended this wasn’t right or fair. I know my brain is telling me to protect myself and move on and that a person who loves you doesn’t do this. But I can’t help it. No matter how hard I try I can’t stop wanting her to come home. I don’t think there will ever be a version of me that doesn’t love her or hope for her.
So I guess what I’m asking is — has anyone been through something like this? Where someone got pulled away by a controlling parent or a mental health crisis and it happened this suddenly and this completely? Do you think she will ever reach out? And if she doesn’t — how do you learn to let go of someone you know in your heart still loves you too? If she does, what would you do?
Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts. I can elaborate more in finer detail in the comments if needed.