Catfished. How do I move on?
Okay redditors. Please be nice. This isn't easy to admit.
So, I (f34) met a man (m35) in a Discord server almost two years ago. We hit it off immediately. Intense chemistry. Talking every day. Fell in love quickly, in a way we both claimed we hadn't ever before. We spent 1.5 years talking daily. Hundreds of hours on the phone and in text. He was learning my language. We were planning for him to visit. We wanted to have kids. We wanted to live together and experience life together. We told one another everything and never seemed to run out of things to talk about. He had some strange behaviours. He would only call me during work hours when he wasn't busy. For a long time he didn't have a phone. He would disappear at times and get angry when I asked about it. I sort of addressed it all to his childhood trauma, his hard life and avoidant attachment style. We set up goals for how to work things through. Grew closer. But he was always cagey about certain aspects of his life and blew up randomly when I asked certain questions. I learned to deal with it. I loved him.
I was working on finding comfort in that he'd never leave me. He was working on opening up and being honest and more communicative. I thought. About a month ago he broke up. Said we were fighting too much. A part of me hoped if we just gave it time, we could find our way back to one another, still firmly convinced this was my soulmate and the only person I will ever truly love. Fast forward a couple of weeks into the breakup, someone I don't know that knows him, contacted me and shared information and screenshots, proving he's married to a person he claimed to have been broken up with for years. A person around whom he'd always get angry when I asked.
So, he has lied so much to me. We had extensive conversations about people that lie online. People that catfish. That just want distractions from their miserable irl existences. That don't treat online people as real people. All this time, he was one of them. I constantly remember new incidents where he lied. It's been a Where's Waldo of lying, only Waldo is every single person in the photo and the job is more counting the Waldos than finding them.
I am absolutely shattered. I built a future with a person that wasn't real. I planned for it. I invested my entire soul into him and me because he was the one. I had finally found my one; and he wasn't real. It was all an illusion, of someone that was ... Maybe bored? Not seeing me as important enough to come clean. When I found out I told him I knew, asked him to never contact me again and blocked him everywhere. He no longer has access to my heart.
But my heart misses my boyfriend. It misses the man I thought I had. It feels like I fell in love with chatgpt. None of it was real, but my heart doesn't understand it. It's like I know intellectually that I was being played with and made a fool, but another part of me is looking for alternate explanations and holds on to the slim hope that one day he will show up at my doorstep and go "I meant it when I said I can't be without you and now I've made my choice". Obviously that's never going to happen.
My question is, how do I move on? How do I ever trust again? How do I find the real love of my life? Because right now I feel haunted and broken. I should be angry, but I'm not. I'm ruined, but also feel like it serves me right for being such a gullible dumbass ignoring a thousand red flags. I'm scared that nobody will ever compare to this ... God damn illusion of a man that didn't even exist. The real person was a coward and a manipulator. He used my weaknesses, my past trauma and gullible nature against me. But my illusion? Oh. I would have fought and died for that man. I would have chosen him for a million years.
I guess I'm reaching out here because I wanted to see if someone else has experienced this? And also hoping someone has advice or a story with a happy ending. I just need something to hold onto right now because I am breaking at the seams.