Dear Coleen

I MET the guy who is now my ex-boyfriend online five years ago. I’m divorced and he’s separated from his partner of 29 years, although they still live in the same house.

They have an open relationship and she is seeing someone else. To complicate things, I live abroad while he still lives in the UK.

We visited each other but he always spent special occasions, such as Christmas, with her and their two grown-up children. Of course, my daughter, now 12, and I were upset by this. One year he was meant to come for New Year’s Eve and he rang before the flight to say he’d lost his passport, and I didn’t hear from him for days.

We broke up last year after I received abusive messages from his ex and their daughter, so I changed my mobile number ( for the second time).

I felt more heartbroken than when I got divorced.

Over the past 10 months he’s been emailing me saying he’s miserable without me and wants us to be together. When I looked on social media, I saw he’d been on holiday with his ex and they’d attended a few events together. But I gave in eventually and he came to see me. He said one day he wants to marry me and that things are going to change.

We spent a lovely day together then he returned home to the house he shares with his ex and I received a foul email from his daughter. She’d copied her dad into the email and he contacted me and told me not to worry but not to contact him again as he’s changing his number.

If this were happening to anyone else, I’d tell them to run for the hills but I love him so much. I haven’t heard from him in five days – what do I do?