I Took Him Back After He Broke Up with Me. Then He Broke Up with Me Again.

Shame on me?

Lee Bidoski
15 min readSep 28, 2024
A man and woman sit at a table facing each other with serious, sad facial expressions.
Photo by Fred Moon on Unsplash

He texted me that our last conversation made him feel “browbeaten, talked down to, unheard, and disrespected”, so he wasn’t willing to see me anymore and he wished me the best.

Not going to kid you — I cried. I hated myself for whatever I did to make him feel that way, because no one should ever make anyone feel that way. I had no idea what I did wrong, but clearly I was a monster so I deserved to lose him.

And then I start turning the pages of our story together to try to figure out what the heck happened.

Off the Charts is…Off

I met this man online.

At that time, I believed the best way for me to do online dating was to respond to messages from men that sparked my interest.

From the messaging I’d narrow it down to the one man I was most interested in. That’s the one I’d decide to focus on. When I agreed to meet with one guy in person, I’d stop interacting with any of the other men.

That felt to me like the best way because I struggle to do the whole ‘dating multiple men at the same time’ thing. When I tried to date multiple men, I felt some sort of pressure to quickly figure out who I liked most, using…

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Lee Bidoski

I’m a psychology professor trying to understand and improve our lives. Relationships | Dating | Health | Careers | Sports | Law Enforcement | Military