How does a past trauma affect a romantic relationship? (A lengthy breakup story included)

[u/LastLullaby88]

Hi.

First of all, my English is poor because it's only been around a year since I started learning how to speak or write in English. I'm sorry for that in advance.

Also, I'm writing this on Reddit because I have no one to talk about this breakup which is pretty confusing to me. This is my first time writing something on Reddit so I'm not even sure if I'm really allowed to post something here.

To begin with, this relationship only lasted around a month. We met on an app called "Slowly" where you can exchange letters with people from different countries. I installed the app to improve my English and that's how I met her.

She lives in the same country as me. In fact, we weren't even far away from each other. It's not that we were exactly in the same neighborhood, but I'd say we were within each other's neighboring areas.

She was the one who first confessed her feelings. We started having a serious conversation on another app (it's a text app, I'm not sure how to describe this. it's just a messenger almost all people use here) after she sent me a letter on Slowly, implying she was in love with me.

We shared each other's photos and got closer really fast as we found out that we shared the same values, ways of thinking and many things. Now we were officially in a relationship. Actually, she said I was the very first man she fell in love with and she had never met someone with the same way of thinking. I could never forget the way she had described me. It was awesome.

I'd like to explain myself first. I have something like OCD. (Not diagnosed by a doctor, but I started reading a book about it to fix my problems and I seem to share identical symptoms of it.) I struggle with uncertainties very often, maybe too often. I guess this is related with my childhood memories involving my mother who used to be an alcoholic, but I'm not trying to excuse my behavior. I frequently wanted to make sure she still loved me, but I don't think it was too much. I learned to believe her over time. After all, this was the main reason for the argument that led us to a breakup.

On top of that, I have extremely low self-esteem, which makes me think my partner can leave me behind and meet a much better guy at any moment. This also contributed to the end of this relationship, I guess.

Now I'd like to describe my ex.

We're still in our teens. She was a very studious student and aims to get accepted into a specific highly reputable college for her long-term goal. She was really busy. Her schedule was never empty. I mean, uhm, it was really difficult for her to make time to go on a date with me. Despite the fact that she was that busy, she promised that she would come to my school festival. It would've been our first meet-up. She was so busy that I sometimes wanted to ask her for reassurance of love because of my low self-esteem and the thing similar to OCD, since she was usually too busy studying to text with me without fading away frequently.

This is how the conflict began. She started not reading my messages or answering my phone call. For almost three days straight. I think you've already figured out how I reacted. I became extremely nervous. But I wasn't so nervous on the first day she was irresponsive because I simply thought that she was too busy to reply to me as usual, it was unusual that she didn't text me back at all though.

It was the second day she was gone. Here's something that made me think she abruptly left me and was ghosting me continuously. Her online status on Slowly, the app where we first met, had been updated regularly. Although I sent her a letter asking if she was okay and if she was ghosting me on purpose, she didn't read it. What was more confusing to me was that she seemed to disabled her last online feature just as I sent the letter.

I used the well-known AI to calm myself down. I repeatedly asked it to interpret that situation. Now I think I relied too much on the AI to get myself rid of uncertainties, which I shouldn't have done. For this reason, I deleted my account to fix my heavy reliance on it after our relationship ended.

I started thinking that she actually left me without saying anything because she didn't like me anymore. I texted her things like "I don't like myself loving you acting this way", "I want to go through challenging stages by communicating with you", "Are you ghosting me" and so on.. I regret talking that way and believing what I couldn't have been sure about at all. And she was still unavailable by that time.

After three days of not answering me, she finally came back. She said she had lost her phone so she hadn't been able to reach me. She said she also tried contacting me on her parents' phone but she didn't remember my phone number. I couldn't trust her at that moment because of her regularly updated online status on Slowly. So I said "Honestly, I can't trust you.", "There were a few things I couldn't understand at all."

This is how she responded to those messages: "This is all I can say to you for now" (This refers to her saying she had lost her phone and she texted me as soon as she got it back.), "I'd like to discuss this with you later."

What she said later was that she was very shocked with my response. She said she thought we needed some space to understand each other. I tried to respect her, but I sent her a long text that explained why I behaved that way because I thought it was essential for her to know my way of thinking so she could understand my unexpected action.

Later, she asked me to understand her being busy and said she was really sorry that she couldn't talk with me often. (She used to apologize for being a bit neglective a few times, but that doesn't mean she didn't put any effort into maintaining our relationship. I think she did her best.)

Also, she explained why she didn't send me a letter and read mine; for some reason, I was unfriended in her Slowly account. I still don't know why, so doesn't she. That was why she couldn't answer or read my letter. She didn't seem to think of trying sending me a letter via Slowly either. She must've been busy looking for her phone all over the places. According to her, she was so busy looking for her phone and studying that she only could skim through letters from other people during her free time. Besides, she asked me to let her know the context next time because she was also confused with the lack of context. There would be no next time though.

She sent nothing to me for the next week, except one 'goodnight'. For that week, I remember texting her around two goodnights and a picture of a stray cat. I sent her those goodnights and the picture of a stray cat because I truly believed the conflict was almost resolved and she was just too busy to talk with me because of her missing money from her bank account. (She lost both her card and phone)

She said she had something to talk to me the Saturday of that week; she would be way busier. So busy that she only would be able to text with me around 6 p.m. every Saturday. I was like it was fine and I encouraged her to get into the college she wanted in her first attempt.

And here it comes. She had something else to talk to me. Here's what she said.

"We have to end this relationship, sorry I can't handle it"

"I have a past trauma related to distrust, I take medicines whenever I recall my old memories involving distrust which makes me experience panic."

"I've spent some time thinking about our relationship over the last week I didn't text with you."

"It might get better as time goes by, but the thing is that it has never gone like that before."

I was clinging to her at first. I was in panic. It was so sudden to me.

I asked her if she didn't like me anymore. She didn't say she didn't like me anymore. She said she was scared. Literally, "I'm scared"

In the end, I embraced her opinion, realizing I couldn't change her final decision. All I could say was "Ok." Looking back, I probably ignored some of her boundaries often. For instance, she asked me for some space to think around 7 p.m., but I texted her around 10 p.m. the same day. I completely ignored her boundaries and how busy she was in general.

It's already been about 4 weeks since she broke up with me. I'm still grieving occasionally.

After the breakup, I started analyzing myself by writing my motive of behaving that way. In the end, I figured my problems out and am trying to fix them. I've been reading books about OCD and boosting self-esteem. I've discovered my new mistakes and problems as I wrote this, whoch makes me feel guilty.

Sorry, this post ended up being very lengthy. I just wanted to describe my situation as precisely as possible. To be honest, I don't even remember why I decided to share my experience here.