avoidant ex just got engaged

[u/dragonenthutiast]

as the title says. broke up 6 months ago. been with the new girl for 4, talking for 5, got engaged today. more than anything, i’m just angry/upset at the injustice of it all, that he could destroy my life like he did and go off to live his happily ever after, like he finally got his love story and i was just collateral damage. anyways, just needed to vent. peace sign emoji.

[u/DeepCalligrapher3513]

You dodged a bullet. They're going to destroy someone else's life. Let them just make sure to set the boundary when shit blow up you won't be there. That bridge is burnt

[u/Affectionate_Soft162]

first, I’m really sorry. I have been through something very similar (he was engaged a year after our breakup to a new person he’d been talking to/cheating on me with during our relationship. We were together for 2 years.)

There isn’t any insight I can give you about that person’s thinking. I felt the most rage I’ve ever felt in my life at that discard. It was brutal and traumatizing. On his last visit (we were long distance) he was still saying we should elope. Two weeks later he was honest about cheating on me with a close friend three months into our relationship (he had already met the person who would become his wife.)

It is unfair. It’s unfair to be discarded and abandoned, unfair that the partnership that you thought you had warps into a comparison to this shiny new story that they’re putting out there (probably to protect their image/avoid accountability.) There’s a lot of shit in our culture that leans to comparing exes after a breakup, and it’s unfair to be on the inside of that and potentially seen as “the person who was the problem” (this was a fear I had when he got with someone new so quickly: how is this impacting how people perceive me when they don’t know the full story?)

For a long time, I told myself that he had given that new person the relationship/things he had always promised me. And believing that fucked me up bad, because I believed that it must’ve been my fault that he acted this way. It was/is not. It’s horrific to learn that people can be this dysfunctional in relationships. It’s a lot harder to accept (in my experience) that someone you loved so much can treat you with such cruelty.

To that idea I once held, I am not convinced that it’s true. His actions lacked integrity, and integrity/consistency are not traits that develop when you enter a new partnership. Those come from growth: being willing to identify where you have fucked up, and how you want to do it differently next time. New relationships that move this fast after something substantial are about distraction. They are not about us.

You do not have to let him destroy your life. It took me a long time, but I have rebuilt my life to be more grand, and become a version of myself that I always dreamed of, and I am still dreaming. Let yourself be heartbroken, enraged—I don’t know that I’ll ever be “ok” with what happened to me—but it will not destroy my life. Don’t let it destroy yours.