Please excuse my confusion, are you a woman jonathanstrange? Are you the OP of that askme thread?

It's funny how gender stuff can get so befuddling! I had the same questions...as I read through and my brain pieced stuff together I got confused too!

I dunno...really, that whole askme thread and the book that accompanies it...We seem to want to be able to turn ourselves into an either/or proposition as a species. From the Men are from Mars, version right down to the "there's two kinds of people - those who liked Sammy Hagar, and those who liked David Lee Roth", when in reality, there are SO MANY variables that go into why we do the shit we do, I can't see anyone being able to predict behavior of a fellow human being with ANY degree of certainty.

JS, in your case, it could have been total BS at the time, and then morphed into more the truth, until it was the total truth at this point, looking back. Or, heck it might be the other way. Maybe it was 100% true at the time, but now, looking back, maybe the fella might be thinking, "huh, that kinda WAS a line".

We change, the world changes, the idea of being one thing constantly is pretty tough. All we can really hope for is to act with integrity as much as we can and hopefully others will too.

You know, richat is right. I've used the line, "It's not you, it's me" before, and at the time, I truly believed that it wasn't just a line, that I was just too screwed up and lonely and self-involved to be with that particular guy at that point. But really, looking back, it was a total line.

To be honest, I'd be somewhat upset about this. The guy wound up with someone he met only a *month* later?

I've had many a guy tell me he couldn't get involved because of some external reason that supposedly had nothing to do with his not being interested, and I don't believe guys who say that anymore. If someone really wants to be with someone else, they'll make it happen regardless of career or pesonal development issues.

So now I take anything but a eager "yes" as a "no", and write the guy off.

Oh, I was pissed off. And obviously if I'd been the right girl then he would have pursued it - but I wasn't in the right place either, and had made that clear.

So it's a bit of both really - at least what he was telling me is still how he sees things in terms of his attitude to relationships at the time (she lived the opposite side of the country, and he wasn't expecting it to come to anything when they got involved). It doesn't seem to have been a line.

But the undeniable fact is that he didn't love me.

And, no matter how deeply in love with him I was, I couldn't and wouldn't compromise on that - if he didn't feel the same way - which it's patently obvious that he didn't - then I'm not interested.

Who wants to be in a one sided relationship?

Haven't read the askme thread, but it seems possible that he's being honest on all counts -- perhaps this woman is good for his career in a way that you (or at least his perception of you) weren't.

That doesn't mean he didn't love you. It just means he loved his career -- and whatever was most compatible with it -- more.

A part of us always gravitates toward one-sided relationships. It's a terrible tendency rooted in, I dunno, childhood traumas . . . ? But whatever the reason, it seems nearly universal.