I’m a 26 years old female. I was in a relationship for 11 years; it was my first childhood love. We were in a long-distance relationship for the first four years, always chatting and calling. My family never loved him because he didn’t meet their expectations, and I was afraid to go against my family. Frankly, when he proposed to me, I said yes because I always wanted to be with someone. He was my first male friend, and I always pushed him to pursue his career.
However, I later realized he wasn’t the same way about our relationship. He felt suffocated and considered our relationship toxic. He confided in a third person about our issues, who advised him to leave me. One day, he texted me that he was in a relationship with someone else, and that night, I was shattered. He repeatedly broke up with me and even pressured me to become physical, threatening to break up if I didn’t. I convinced him to stay because I wanted to wait until marriage, which I had communicated from the start.
After a year of breaking up and patching things up, I discovered he had been chatting with other girls on dating apps during our breakup. He always insisted that since he wasn’t in a relationship with me at that time, it wasn’t an issue. We patched things up again, and he proposed marriage, saying I needed to marry him by next May or he would marry someone else. This was becoming too toxic, and it continued for four years. In April 2024, he verbally abused me, and I finally decided to stop tolerating it. Since then, I’ve made new friends, as I had lost almost all my old friends who were advising me to stay away from him.
I met someone who is 21 years old, and he makes me happy by chatting with me and motivates me to pursue my CA degree, as I lost my career path in my last relationship. However, my ex is trying to reach out again, and it’s affecting my new friendship. My friend thinks I’m still not over my ex and that the efforts of the past four months have been wasted. I feel I’m not over my ex and am becoming attached to my new friend. Please suggest what I should do.