Girls, Part 2. I’ve become a bit of an Incel, and would like to know your opinions. Am I the problem?

[Anonymous]

My first and since then my only girlfriend, now ex. Left me with trust issues that I still have to this day. I grew up in the military, overseas. We met in high school. She was the only girl who I could be myself around, and she liked it and thought it was cute and funny. I didn’t have to worry about her somehow taking being called cute as creepy and weird. When I first told her that, she liked it to my surprise. She actually kept the conversation going, and started the conversation. And for once it wasn’t only me putting in effort to get to know someone. We started dating for 3 months, after that her mom was moved to America. We agreed to long distance date. Six months later, come to find out she was cheating on me. If you’ve been cheated on you know that feeling, trust has been shattered, your heart drops, sudden rage and also depression at the same time. Anyway she begged for forgiveness, I wasn’t stupid so I said no, we’re done. Throughout the next several months she kept texting and calling me, trying to be nice and claiming it was an accident that she cheated. I settled with “fine, we’ll be friends. That’s it. Mind you this was December when I found out she cheated, and days before finding that out I bought her gifts. When she received them a week or two later she really started blowing up my phone begging for forgiveness. Over the next two years she became a completely different person, not good in any way. She’d by the way had never gotten me a gift for my birthday or Christmas when we dated, I bought her a gift out of the blue and a Christmas gift later. She started blaming me for all the bad things happening to her in her life and me being severely depressed cuz of story #1, I believed everything she said. Even though we were a thousand miles away from each other. She had even convinced me for a time, that she never cheated. And had changed the details of what happen. I finally dropped her, every picture, every text. Didn’t have gifts to get rid of tho.

[Smoke-n-Growls]

If you're falling down the incel path, I strongly encourage you to go to therapy.

I'm sorry you were hurt so badly. I was also cheated on in my first real long term relationship, so I can kind of understand - our situations were different, but it still sucks to have your trust broken in such a way.

Therapy really helped me overcome the pain and come out the other end of it much stronger and happier. And still with the capacity for love.

Seek out a psychologist you connect with. If payment is a problem, ask about sliding scale fees or if there's an affordable care network you can access.

Get ahead of this, though. Seek therapy. It'll help you reclaim your ability to love and provide you with the skills to hopefully spot red flag behaviour in the next relationship.

Love will always have some hurt to it. But learning to cope is not an innate skill. It's okay to need some help learning to cope.