He’s moved on like I meant nothing to him

Hello again to this sub. I stopped checking daily and completely left it a while ago, as I had been getting more comfortable in where I was in terms of my breakup. I’m still doing alright. Not fully over it, but it’s been over four months at this point and I see the light at the end.

The reason I am back here is just to vent out the new development that has been made to this. As part of putting the whole thing out of sight and out of mind as much as possible, I dropped off most social media for a while. Recently, I’ve been slowly getting back on. I broke NC a few weeks ago to wish my ex a happy birthday, and the conversation went as expected, but it didn’t hurt any less that it felt so formal and as if it were between strangers rather than people who knew each other’s darkest secrets. It felt like the right thing to do in the moment as I didn’t want him to think I hated him or anything. Naturally it sent me down a bit of a spiral.

At that point i was thinking (wrongfully), I could handle being back in contact with him. Maybe now we can be friends. Maybe now we can stop acting weird and whether he gives me a second chance or not, it will be okay as long as he talks to me. No. My anxiety is high again like it was in the month we broke up. Shortly after, I find out he’s involved with someone new. Someone that he worked with and went out with in a group multiple times while we were together. We were long distance so I was never at those outings. But I trusted him with everything in me and when I felt insecure, I would remind myself he’s allowed to have friends and have fun without me and I tried to never act on my jealousy. From what I saw, they probably got together less than two months after he left me. He flaunts them in ways he never did with me. It took him until our first anniversary to even post my full face on his social media (still done privately).

I’m at a point where I feel almost numb to the whole situation. It hurts but there’s nothing I can do. The reality of the situation is that he dumped me and was a single adult man, able to do as he pleased. He owes me no loyalty at this point. The problem is his main reason for breaking up with me was that he couldn’t be in any relationship because he wasn’t able to give any partner what they deserved, and I deserve better, and I am too good to him, etc. He cried in my arms and said a bunch of beautiful things that I believed as he was ending things. He called me beautiful, assured that it was fully about him and not about me, and kissed me as I left.

I know I’m far from the first person this has happened to (in general). People lie and deceive others and they make things up for whatever reasons all the time. But it leads me to think either he lied and there was interest in this person all along, or he just didn’t like me that much (again, lied), or he checked out long before breaking things off (lied for months). Really it probably shouldn’t matter at this point, but all of those options make him a coward at best, a bad person at worst, and it’s all spinning in my head. When I confronted him he denied that the breakup had anything more to it than the reasons he gave me.

I don’t believe him. There’s a lie somewhere in what he’s told me, or what he’s doing. If what he told me was true and he was a normal, well-adjusted person, he would still be single. And at this point I won’t ever speak to him again. I’m above chasing after someone that sees me as so replaceable. All the hope that I had that we could rebuild things someday for months has been killed off and in some ways I feel free and glad that I found out this isn’t someone that values me nor someone I really want to be with before things went any further. In other ways I feel so sad that I did everything I could to make him feel loved, feel understood, make memories worth a lifetime with him, and it wasn’t enough. And I feel stupid for thinking so highly of him even after he abandoned me. I know it’s not about me. I know he was right about one thing, that I deserve better. Whatever he’s got going on, he’s gotta figure out for himself. I am not a perfect person and I am not a perfect girlfriend but I would never blindside someone that was so good to me and turn up with someone else like nothing happened the way he has. It feels like a deeper type of betrayal and apathy.

I know things are better off this way. I know with time, the wound will shrink and new people will show me loving the way I do is worth it. Hell, my friends and family already have. I don’t believe in things being “meant to be” or there being “the one” but someday someone will choose me over and over and removing someone from my life that wouldn’t has to happen for me to see that. Still, I can’t help but wonder what’s going through his mind. I saw a photo of him with the new partner where he was wearing something I gave him. Does he think about how I gave him flowers on our first date? Does he think about all the nights I spent listening to him talk and work through ideas and be angry about things and whatnot? Does he think about all the times we made sacrifices to see each other? Does he remember the time he expressed how happy he was that he could be fully himself around me? Does he think about how I was planning on uprooting my life to move to him in less than a year? He said I was the first girlfriend to ever make him have no doubt he was loved. So why wasn’t it enough?