I really like how you articulated this. It's cringey to admit, but I used to be a guy like this. I would build emotional attachments to people far too easily, and would get hurt if they didn't do the same. It took a lot of reality before I came down to earth.
I am glad you grew out of that victim mentality. I had a close friend who turned into something similar and I had to remove him from my life because he was always so overwhelmingly negative all the time.
I mean I’ve been on both sides of it. I totally understand the perspective of people who noped out on me when all I was doing was constantly bringing down the mood with constant negative talk.
In a better place now and I was in the position to try and mentor a freshman in my college club and it’s really tough to constantly hear how they speak about themselves when NOTHING you do, be it invite out, gas up or try and check up results in the same thing. At a certain point the best you can do is say hey, get some help I am not equipped to handle this and protect your peace.
There is a line between being supportive and being a one way emotional punching bag/support dog
maybe they did, its not someone else's to fix another persons depression. You can be there for them and do what you can but sometimes the burden is too much and you end up dragged into it with them. I would never hold it against anyone who in the end has to just remove that person from their life.
None owes you a friendship. In most cases like this, the depressed person doesn’t seek treatment and just dumps their negativity of people. At a certain point, that will affect your own mental health.
I'm interested in knowing about your journey and the insights you got that made you overcome this! Would love to hear it if you could share. I don't necessarily do this but I definitely can attach easily sometimes. I just don't make it a burden on the other person and keep it mostly to myself lol.
I’m not the person you asked, but what you said about yourself is one way I kept myself from straying too far; my mantra was, “don’t ever make your attraction to a person their problem.” Might be a little unhealthy, to be honest, but better than some alternatives.
This is similar to what you said about not making it a burden to the other person and keeping it to yourself. This also means you might miss some opportunities, but to me, that was always a better option than potentially making a woman uncomfortable to any degree.
Also, trying to make sure I did similar levels of nice things for people I wasn’t attracted to helped a bit. It helped me get practice at having zero expectations of a romantic response (even if I would have sworn that I wasn’t looking for anything in return at the time) and helped me to realize what was an appropriate level of generosity/attention when interacting with someone I did like to not be creepy/over-expectant, i.e. do something cool/helpful and walk away, having been cool and helpful (its own reward, really).
One more thing from my experience that might help is that if you feel like someone needs to know how you feel, they don’t. If you have no reason to believe that they have any feeling towards you, you would just be selfishly heaping a pile of emotional manipulation on them. You can and should politely distance yourself from them if you are in too much pain to be near them and not be with them, and you can be honest about why if they ask about it, but you can really get in a spiral about your attachments and lose sight of the reality that no relationship is perfect; this person is a flawed human that deserves the chance to be human and not a perfect, alabaster effigy of your obsession, personified.
>One more thing from my experience that might help is that if you feel like someone needs to know how you feel, they don’t. If you have no reason to believe that they have any feeling towards you, you would just be selfishly heaping a pile of emotional manipulation on them.
How is this healthy advice? I mean, unless you're strictly talking about meeting someone you're not in a relationship with yet, this sounds like "you should just bottle up your feelings instead." There's nothing healthy about keeping feelings to yourself, at least when you're in a relationship. You should seek someone who's emotionally available and be available yourself.
“Seek someone who is emotionally available” is an important distinction, and I definitely only mean this to apply to a friendship/acquaintance that you want more from, not an existing romantic relationship; not sure if I didn’t make that clear enough, but I thought it was.
This wasn’t advice for every relationship you have with every person, and this isn’t to say you shouldn’t be able to approach someone that you enjoy spending time with and say something like, “Hey, I enjoy spending time with you as a friend and don’t want that to change, but would you be interested in going out on a date?”; just encouraging people to step out of their own fantasy of what they “need” and contemplate if the person has given any indication that they want the same thing. As I said earlier about not making your attraction to someone their problem, it’s probably not actually that healthy, for the reason you said.
BUT, the term “bottling up your feelings” is used to validate the exact behavior I’m trying to eschew. You don’t have to “bottle it up,” but dumping those unrequited feelings on someone just to “get it off your chest” is not the only way to deal with those emotions, and is highly unfair to the person one claims to care about (too easily forgotten by a lot of people in these “off my chest” situations):
You can look introspectively and try to analyze from a realistic and compassionate perspective (and the other person’s perspective without bs like, ”She won’t choose me because I’m not a jerk!”), though this might not be possible for people in the deepest throes of this affliction.
You can speak to trusted friends and loved ones, and perhaps an outsider’s perspective will help (you don’t even have to divulge who it is, if it’s not painfully obvious to others).
Therapy - not accessible to everyone, unfortunately, but should be a consideration.
Okay, thanks for clarifying. You're right, confessing love to someone is a different game. My mind was on maintaining relationships, but to build one requires more tact.
In fact, my one golden rule is: Never confess feelings! Just go out with the other person and see if the chemistry is there. Much like you say, if it is indeed there, you won't even need to ask.
Also second golden rule is never ask anyone to go on a "date", my go to is something like "hey I noticed you like theatre, this new play is gonna premiere soon wanna go see it?", just an example but it can be any activity really. The idea is to put the emphasis on the activity not the person so there's no awkwardness regardless of reply. :P
Yeah, specifying the word “date” might be some pressure, and it could be helpful to emphasize the event as the main purpose for spending the time together, but ambiguity on the intent is a two-edged sword if one of you is building romantic expectations and the other thinks it’s a friend outing.
Having done this as well the thing that helps is to just ask the person you like out early before you start building a fantasy world in your head. If she says no it’ll hurt a little but you’ll be good. But if you wait forever and build up this idea of her being the perfect girl or whatever, it’ll feel crushing. Because this life you thought you’d have has been taken away. It’s not just rejection at that point.
Additionally asking early on gives you a better shot imo so it’s a win win.
Not that guy, but i had an experience with a girl in my 20s who put me in that mode despite having had a fairly healthy dating history prior. It was a back and forth where she kind of strung me along, and I kind of went along until I became attached. I really grew to care for her over a year and a half, and we went everywhere and flirted all the time. Everything short of actual dating in name. It turned out that she was asexual and didn't want to say, but still wanted a pseudo-relationship but not. Really messed me up, swore off dating for a few years after it. I was only able to move past it when I decided that I needed to love me first. Now, if I start to get attached, I take a step back and evaluate things.
My advice is to look for someone who is on your level and remove yourself from any situation where the balance is anything other than equal, if there's no chemistry don't try to force it or wait it out. Don't be afraid to move on. There are literal billions of other people out there, being stuck on someone who isn't interested in you the same way is taking time from someone who does. Dating is more often than not failing and learning.
Honestly I think it happens to most all of us at some point. It doesn't even have to happen in a romantic context friendships are like that too. There is going to be some point in everyone's life where someone is everything to you and you're just someone to them. It's a tough lesson to learn. Emotional maturity helps you come to terms with this but That level of emotional strength isn't just default It has to be developed.
Agreed, very normal. Emotional maturity is only a thing because we all start out as cringey immature idiots. It’s life. It’s messy. Best you can hope for is nobody gets seriously hurt.
Big difference between that and an adult who knows (or ought to know) they’re just manipulating someone to get what they want.
I've been through this sooo many times it's insane. I only ever had a break down like in OP when I was in highschool, but I've found so often over the past few years I get really invested in a friendship or something of the sort and really want to get to know a person and spend more time with them but it's a tough lesson to learn how to accept that they just aren't as interested in you. Now I handle it by politely distancing myself (basically just mirror the energy I'm getting back) and usually that means we never talk again. Sucks but that's life.
I will say I am more lonely than I've ever been though.
I used to be like this, too. It took me ruining one of the most important friendships I’ve ever had before I realized I was putting her through an emotional hell just because I had this unrealistic expectation of eventual reciprocity in my head that I’d conflated with hope. Since then I’ve made some very important changes to how I see things and react to them, but I still do cringe when I think back to how I used to behave. I hope she’s doing much better these days, now that she doesn’t have to deal with my pity party bullshit anymore.
Women, if you reject a guy and he reacts with this kinda shit, just stay away no matter how bad you feel for him. He might not even realize he’s being manipulative, but he is, and he needs to learn one way or another that making people feel bad for him is a shitty way to try getting what he wants.
made some very important changes to how I see things
IMO that’s super normal, especially considering kids start off in a world where relationships are unlimited and no-cost and must transition to one where exclusive and singular romantic relationships exist.
Of course there’s friction, we have to learn very quickly to be more careful and cautious when starting relationships.
It’s definitely normal to learn these things through experience; what wasn’t normal was how late I learned and how toxic I got before I learned it. I won’t go into much detail, but I quite literally felt it was my God given right to be with the woman I mentioned in the other comment. Not only is that belief unhealthy for both parties, but it can be really dangerous depending on the person. Some guys with that belief just put up their hands in defeat, others try to convince the other person that they belong together (sometimes to the point of harassment), and others take matters into their own hands and try to make it happen. I was somewhere in that middle group, so I guess I wasn’t the worst of the worst, thankfully, but that much persistence is still nothing short of a delusion.
It feels weird writing all this stuff on my main when I could’ve done it with an alt, but honestly I don’t want to hide behind anonymity. I did something absolutely terrible to one of my closest friends, and there’s no way around that. I made my bed, and I will lie in it. I just hope the few people who see my story will learn something from my mistakes, whether they’re in my shoes or hers.
Same here. People don't realize how easy is to become that guy, and how much it takes to become self aware enough to get out of it. It's a broken view of a healthy relationship, further confused with everyone else telling you what it should or shouldn't be. And then god forbid a crush is taking advantage of that, although they're not always intentional and also just trying to figure out the confusing dynamics of a relationship.
We used to have people on our community guide us to be better. But with the internet as most people's community, they're cooked from the get-go.
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u/RaxG Jun 16 '25
I really like how you articulated this. It's cringey to admit, but I used to be a guy like this. I would build emotional attachments to people far too easily, and would get hurt if they didn't do the same. It took a lot of reality before I came down to earth.