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We were going to marry but after I found out he’d been sleeping with other girls he told me he was too young and called things off
Dear Coleen
Two years ago, I was planning to marry the love of my life. We’d been together since our early 20s and all our friends said we were the perfect couple.
But six months before the wedding, I was doing some washing and found a condom wrapper in his work trousers. I confronted him and from the look on his face I immediately knew he was cheating.
He broke down and told me he’d slept with several girls in the previous year, mainly because he was so freaked out about settling down so young with somebody he’d been with for so long.
After the worst few days of my life, he told me he’d made the decision to leave me and he wanted to call the wedding off.
It was the toughest thing I’d ever been through and together with my mum I had to un-plan the wedding and go through the humiliation of telling all my family and friends that he no longer wanted to marry me.
That was two years ago and I haven’t so much as been on a date since. I’ve been asked out by men at work and friends of friends but I always say no because I just don’t know how I’d ever begin to trust anyone.
I’m now 31 and my mum and friends say that I need to start building a life for myself again but I genuinely don’t know how.
Coleen says
Well your mum and friends are absolutely right. You’ve grieved enough. Your ex doesn’t deserve for you to waste any more time. A similar thing happened to a friend of mine, except they had just married.
They were together 13 years, got married and within a few months he left her.
So in a way, your ex-boyfriend was brave to tell you how he felt before going through the wedding, if there are any good points to take from what he did.
Your ex obviously felt too young to be tied down. There’s nothing you could have done about that and at least you didn’t have a marriage to unpick.
So instead of wallowing in what happened or beating yourself up, think of it as a lucky escape because you could be going through a messy divorce right now.
It sounds like you have great support network and you’re only 31. So go out and have fun.
Don’t worry about finding somebody because that will happen when the time is right.
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