I was never really chosen, and it’s breaking me
I need to say the full truth somewhere because I feel like I’m drowning in this.
For almost 4 years I had a very intense emotional and physical connection with someone. It was never a “normal” relationship, and part of the pain is that it existed while he was building a real life with someone else right in front of me. We share friends, spaces, circles, interests. I watched him continue his life normally while I slowly became more emotionally attached and more confused.
What destroys me now is that I genuinely believed that, with time, we would become closer and more emotionally connected. I thought the bond would deepen naturally. Instead, the opposite happened. Especially during the last year, I felt him becoming less present, less available, less invested. But his words never fully matched that distance.
Toward the end, I was the one trying. I told him I missed him. I told him I wanted to see him. I tried to communicate openly instead of disappearing. His response was emotional avoidance mixed with casual conversation, as if what I had said never really landed. Eventually I stopped replying because I felt deeply hurt and emotionally alone in the connection.
He never reached out again.
That’s the part I can’t process. How does someone just let something like this fade into silence after years?
And I think what hurts most is that I’m starting to feel like I was never truly important to him in the way he was important to me. Like maybe I was emotionally meaningful, but never enough to actually choose, prioritize, or fight for. Meanwhile, he continued building his life with someone else right in front of me, and that has shattered something inside me.
I can’t reconcile the intensity of what we shared with the complete lack of effort and action in the end. That’s what confuses me so much.
We haven’t spoken in 4 months. But he’s still everywhere around me through mutual friends, conversations, and shared environments, so I never fully get distance from it. I feel trapped between trying to move on and still emotionally living inside something unfinished.
I honestly don’t know how to let go of something that felt so emotionally real to me, while at the same time accepting that maybe he never intended to hold onto it the way I did.