[marshjs]

My life feels like it is in shambles at the moment. I am a college student who has royally messed up and am in desperate need of advise.
In high school I was a girl who went for the bad boy. We were off and on all through high school and by the time the summer before I left for college came around, he proposed. I freaked, I had bigger dreams than to marry right out of high school and live in our small town. I left for college a month later and haven’t seen or talked to him since. The only reason this is even applies to my current situation is that the entire time we were together, he cheated on me. I got to college and went on this rampage of breaking boys hearts before they could break mine.

Then, I found the nicest, safest guy I have ever met, Mike. We took it really slow because I was very skeptical of being in a relationship. It took us a few months of being exclusive for me to finally date him. He was absolutely perfect both on paper and in real life. In retrospect, I think that I almost made myself love him because I thought I should. And it was great for awhile. We had all of the same friends so everything fit perfectly. That is until he started making plans about after college. He wanted us to be in it for the long haul. I couldn’t do it, I was in the same place as I was before. My plans of going to law school came before everything. After being together a year, we broke up. He said he couldn’t be my friend or even see me. That put a huge damper on our group of friends. The break up effected everyone.

Throughout all of this, I always had a secret crush on his player bestfriend/roommate, Sam. Sam and I got really close after the breakup. We always were good friends but the vibe was changing. Needless to say, the sexual tension was getting to both us. One drunken night, we had sex. We agreed it was a one time thing and it wouldn’t happen again. It did. Finally, we admitted to each other that we had both had feelings for each other for a long time. We felt horrible about Mike, but for some reason we continued the secret relationship. For the next 3 months we were together secretly. It was exciting and fun and awesome. I was skeptical of his past but eventually I really started to trust him and we were talking about how when the time was right we would break it our friends and Mike and have a legitimate relationship. Things seemed great. Then on New Years eve we all had a party at his house and Mike was out of town. Sam had gone to bed early and I went upstairs to check on him. I walked in on him having sex with a random girl. I was devastated. Three of mutual friends found me crying in the bathroom. In my drunken state, I told them everything that had been going on.

Sam apologized minimally, but mostly blamed it on him feeling guilty about Mike. Since our friends now knew, he decided he had to tell Mike everything. Mike doesn’t want anything to do with either us. Not that I blame him. Sam keeps telling me that he still cares about me. And obviously all of our friends are mad at us. It was karma. There is no getting around that. Funny thing is, despite it all, in between visions of a hurt Mike and Sam having sex with that girl, I still keep thinking about Sam and I getting back together.

So here I am, with no one to talk to about how as I was screwing over the people that mean the most to me, I got screwed over by the first boy I actually took a chance on. I’m hurt by Sam did. If he cared about me, he wouldn’t have slept the girl. Meanwhile, I couldn’t feel worse about hurting Mike that way, or the friends this is affecting. What kind of person am I to have done this? That is where I am at. I have no idea what kind of girl am, the girl I want to be, or how I fix any of this.

Any advise as to how I fix my life?

[AskApril Masini]

You’re asking the right questions. If you try and understand what led you to the behavior that has become your downfall, [i]then and only then[/i] can you begin to heal and make corrections.

It sounds like from what you’ve written, that your first boyfriend hurt you and the pain was tough for you to bear, so instead of accepting that pain is part of life and dating involves break ups and pain, you decided to use guys and break their hearts so they couldn’t break yours first. This behavior helped you avoid pain. By doing this you skipped the step where you have to go back and understand that your hurt in that first break up was normal and natural and part of life and will come again. You’d do best to explore that hurt and know it’s going to come again, and understand that you have the resilience to tolerate it and get through it.

My guess is that you chose your ex-boyfriend’s best friend because he was safe (another form of trying to protect your heart from hurt), but whenever you date an ex’s best friend, you’re asking for trouble — and you got it.

I think you need to take this entire episode as a lesson to be learned from and work on YOUR OWN issues with fear of hurt, and understanding that hurt is part of the dating process and part of life.

I hope that helps and that you’ll let me know how things go.

Follow me @AskAprilcom on Twitter and on Facebook at this link: [url][/url].

[marshjs]

I appreciate you getting back to me. I’ve been having a lot of self epiphanies lately. Things haven’t improved in the days since that post. Our mutual best friend (who is also my roommate) is now not talking to me for lying about the situation. I can’t say that I blame her.

So now that I am left with next to no one, all I can do is work on myself. Figure out what the hell is wrong with me and make some serious life changes. My first instinct was to just get up and go, transfer to a new school in a new city, a new state and just start over. Unfortunately, transferring would mean I would lose credits and interfere with my financial aid. I guess I am stuck here in the middle of my mess. I have 8 months left on my lease then I think I am going to get an apartment by myself. I have never lived completely on my own, but I think it might be good for me. Living in the same house with girls who are dating my exes, the best friends of my exes just isn’t healthy. I need to be able to separate myself from the situation which is impossible currently.

I need to figure out what I am actually looking for. I was always on the search for the next new boy, but now I am just wondering why. Why do we all constantly look for a mate? Why don’t we think that we are not good enough on our own? It is such an ancient concept that we need a soul mate, that one even exists. It was the legend of the Greek God Zeus that began the concept. That we were 2 headed four legged creatures that were separated from our other half at the beginning of our existence by a lightening bolt. A legend as ridiculous as that is why we think have a soul mate that we need to find?

I have all kinds of theories going through my head about what is wrong with me. What is wrong with human nature to begin with. I don’t want to find my way back to normalcy, I want to find a new place that actually means something more than my current superficial life.

[AskApril Masini]

You’re avoiding the issue by intellectualizing. Re-read my last post with advice in it, to you. 😉

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