Need Help Deciding What to Do About Ex - Love Triangle
Alright, so this is gonna be pretty long-winded and sound pretty crazy, but I need some advice and after reading some threads on here this seems like a pretty decent place to get that.
Anyways, basically the situation that I'm in, is that I dated a guy for about a year and a half and he was my first love, lost my virginity to him, etc. He's four years older than me so he'd already dated quite a few more people than me. Anyways, during the time that we were dating everything went along pretty smoothly other than the occasional argument, and we got along really well. Conversations were great, sex was great, everything was amazing, and I really fell for him and he fell for me too. I'd never connected to anyone in the way that I did to him. Every now and then, though, we'd get into arguments because I'm really close to my family and they didn't particularly approve of us dating because of the age gap, and he felt bad for essentially making me choose between him and them. I was able to manage fairly well, but it made me pretty unhappy that at times I would have to lie to my family about where I was/what I was doing in order to see him, and I went into a bit of a depression.
He noticed I was getting depressed (this was after about 9 months of dating) and we ended up breaking up because we were both unhappy, not with each other, but with ourselves and the situation I was in. We had both become incredibly reliant on each other, though, as he had just moved from out of town and had basically no friends in the area, and I felt increasingly isolated due to lying to my family and sometimes friends. This caused us to continue to stay in contact, even though he began dating someone else immediately after saying that "it helped him move on". During the time he was dating this girl, we would hang out daily since she lived about an hour away and could only see him once every two weeks or so. While we were hanging out we acted as if we were still dating - we would try not to hook up or get involved, but it just ended up happening anyways every week or so if not more often. The fact that this was happening made me really upset and I would cry every night before leaving, basically begging him to take me back, as pathetic as that sounds. Eventually, I realized he wasn't going to, and went on a date with another guy. My ex got extremely pissed off about this and decided that he didn't want me seeing other people, and as a result he broke it off with the other girl and we resumed dating.
From that point on, everything was a lot better and we were happy to be together again. He was leaving in about 8 or 9 months to join the military but we decided to make the best of the time we had together. This lasted for a few months before I started to feel insecure in the relationship as though he was talking to other girls (this seems to happen every 6 months or so). This caused me to start acting weird and he picked up on it, and things went down hill from there. Every month or so we would discuss potentially hanging out less often (we were hanging out literally every day at this point) and then we would never act on anything since it was too hard to stay away from each other. We would just come back together, go back into old habits, and continue on somewhat happily.
About a week before Thanksgiving, he told me that he wanted to stay together when he left for the military and I agreed that it was something to think about, and honestly probably would have if recent events hadn't occurred. About a week and half later he had apparently changed his mind and told me he wanted to take a break. I later found out that this was because he slept with another girl after we got into a fight about the situation with my family, who I was still lying to. When he proposed taking a break he presented it as simply not hanging out as often, like we had talked about before, so I agreed and we decided we would text each other occasionally but not see each other for the next week. During this week, I found out about the other girl he had slept with and apparently they were involved during this time. I was not pleased.
I confronted him about it and somehow the blame got placed on me, for snooping around to find this out. We ended up breaking up, but for some reason I expected it would be like the last time we broke up and didn't really move on. The week after we broke up he went out of town to visit his family and called me every other night or so, acting like nothing had really changed, and flirting with me extremely heavily. He came back from the trip and we hung out, ended up hooking up, and then I had a break down when I realized that despite this he didn't want to get back together. He just kept telling me to give it some time. After this, I also went on a vacation and decided that I would try to initiate no contact. I was unsuccessful with this and succeeded only for days at a time. On Christmas, I saw that he had changed his facebook relationship status to being in a relationship with another girl. I called him the next day and was upset, and he told me that hearing my voice and actually talking to me made it hard for him to be with another girl and that he was remembering how much he loved me. I told him he couldn't say things like that while he was dating someone else, and we decided to go no contact again.
This lasted for about half a week until I got back from my trip. I hung out with him, and surprise surprise, we ended up hooking up. I felt bad about it and kept telling him it shouldn't happen and that he had a girlfriend, but it happened anyways, and afterwards we both regretted it. I left to hang out with some friends and then ended up coming back to stay the night there when he heard that I was going to be spending the night at a guy's (just a friend) house. We hooked up again when I came over, and in the morning I wrote him a note apologizing for everything that had happened and telling him how much he means to me.
I told my friends what happened and they encouraged me to tell his new girlfriend what happened since she deserved to know. I regret this now, but I told her about everything, probably somewhere deep down hoping they would break up. The only thing this resulted in was my ex getting extremely pissed off at me, blocking my number, and refusing to give my stuff back. The other girl, even though they had only been dating for less than a month, for some reason stuck around. I talked to my ex's roommate to get my stuff back and went over to pick it up. He informed me that my ex and his new girlfriend were arguing constantly, and that he had already cheated on her multiple times, and she had cheated on him as well.
Eventually, my ex got caught in the act of texting some other girl, and his new girlfriend came over and got extremely violent and punched him in the face repeatedly before dumping him. He called me after this, told me I was his only close friend in town, and begged me to come over. I felt like I had to go, and that I had some responsibility for him, so I went over in the middle of the night to talk to him and try to help him out. We talked for a little while and then decided to go to sleep, but ended up kissing and he told me how much he loves kissing me and I told him how much I love him, and he told me that he loves me too. He wanted to hook up but I declined, but he still end up getting off to my ass... Anyways, he still had a lot to apologize for, but I was willing to accept where we were at for the time being, and I ended up spending the next night as well and we hooked up again. We then spent the next two days together and he told me he would never get back with the other girl. The next day, yesterday, actually, he got back in contact with the other girl and apparently decided he wants to work things out with her. He called me last night to tell me that he doesn't want to string me along any longer and that he loves me as a person but isn't in love with me anymore - even though he said he was just a few days ago, and it is obvious that he still cares about me deeply otherwise he would've broken contact long ago. He wanted to remain friends and said he had negotiated with the other girl and told her that if they were going to date, she had to let us stay friends since I'm so important to him. She is apparently still deciding whether to date him or not, and doesn't know that while they were broken up he was with me and called me immediately after she was gone. I don't know whether to tell her this or not.
If I do tell her, she may or may not leave him. But he will 100% certainly get pissed off at me and refuse to talk to me. If she does leave him, I know he'll come crawling back eventually since he'll have no one else. If she doesn't, all ties will be cut. If I don't say anything and they end up dating and we do stay friends, I know that it's likely the cycle will just continue of us cheating on the other girl and then him ditching me for her constantly. If we don't stay friends, it'll be really hard for me to move on, but I could have more certainty that we wouldn't date again, and it'd probably be for the best. But for some reason right now it's hard for me to move on completely from the idea of dating him.
Thoughts? Advice? Criticism?
