Even after 20 years, I still can’t get over the only girl I’ve loved

DEAR BEL I’M HAVING a great deal of difficulty getting over an old relationship. I can’t seem to find closure and it’s had a bad effect on my life. I want to move on, but haven’t been able to.

The relationship lasted a couple of years. I was not a good partner, due to outstanding issues from my own childhood abuse (I’ve since had professional help with this).

I was pretty bad — drank heavily, put on weight, refused to meet her family and wouldn’t discuss marriage. I never told her I loved her.

She left her parents’ house to buy a flat near me, but the relationship ended before any discussion of us living together. In the end, she found another man.

I’m not proud of my behaviour and think I have a lot of unresolved guilt over how selfish I was. Frankly, I don’t blame her for leaving me.

But here’s the thing — this relationship was more than 20 years ago, yet

Twenty years? Many, many people are afflicted by huge grief (see, for example, today’s letter, from Sheila, below) and yet choose lives full of all the positivity and joy they can muster.

But you, Simon, 20 years? there springs into my mind an image of a man bent nearly double by the weight of the huge burden he carries on his back, bound to him by padlocked I haven’t been able to let go. When you have had issues of childhood abuse, you feel unlovable. I’m plagued by the feeling that I had someone who loved me, but I blew it.

Since then I’ve had opportunities for other relationships. I was a senior manager (retired at 49) with a wellpaid job and not completely unattractive, but I’ve not been able to bring myself to start another relationship. I gave up alcohol and have never indulged in casual sex.

I hope my girlfriend went on to a happy marriage, but this has ruined the past 20 years of my life, and if I don’t get it sorted out then it’s going to ruin the next 20.

I know that sounds selfish, given how I behaved.

Everyone I know gives logical solutions, but logic can’t get you out of a place that feelings got you into. Can you help me find a resolution?

SIMON steel bands. But look closer! Around his neck hangs the key to those padlocks. And yet this poor man has either forgotten, or chosen to live with, the heavy burden — because he’d feel rather lost without it.

twenty years of allowing such a short relationship to ‘ruin’ your life? to most people, that will make no sense.

I’m sure you’re feeling exasperated right now, judging me just the same as all those tough-minded people you know who’ve offered ‘logic’ as a sticking plaster for your wound. tell me, what else would you have us do — myself

and your friends? You see, you’ve had counselling (good for you for seeking it) and are, therefore, capable of giving your feelings a name — such as ‘unresolved guilt’, for example.

You have confronted the issue of childhood abuse and seen it as at least a partial explanation for unloving behaviour long ago. So where to go from here?

Surely there is no alternative but to take your corrosive regret and guilt and subject it to the full glare of . . . yes, logic.

You may not like it, but unless you start thinking hard, you will allow your negative feelings to destroy you. Countless people have behaved badly in earlier relationships and maybe even driven away the one they suspect might have been the ‘love of their life’ (not a concept I believe in, by the way).

Countless people have also accepted lessons of regret and guilt as aspects of their full humanity. this is rational — and mature, too.

If a man or woman has difficulty ‘finding closure’ for a number of years after the end of a marriage or the death of a loved one, then everybody would agree that such feelings of loss are perfectly normal.

But if you are still prey to destructive anguish 20 years after the end of a very short relationship, then I’m afraid your sadness could be borderline pathological. which means (to put it simply) unhealthy. Locked in one place.

Something is making you cling to it, and it’s for that reason that I believe you should return to therapy. It could well be that you’re actually suffering from ongoing depression because your life has not delivered to you the happiness you long for — and so, somehow, you are seeking to shoulder the blame.

In telling me that you think the next 20 years will be ‘ruined’ by this long-ago failure, it’s as if you want there to be an excuse for your loneliness and frustration.

PeRhaPS your extraordinary guilt is not because you treated that young woman badly, but because you treated yourself badly. maybe she didn’t really love you — certainly not enough to help you get over your issues.

maybe she’d have gone away even if you’d lost weight and turned teetotal. maybe she never wanted to marry you. maybe the failed relationship was most useful to you in making you seek help for those childhood traumas. who knows any of the answers? Certainly not you. and yet, you present me a litany of flat certainties.

Don’t expect a gift of ‘resolution’, Simon, but go back to counselling in the knowledge that you have to start a process.

Nobody else can lift that old burden from your back.