Expert: Sam E - 2/14/2007

Question
IM almost 20 years old. MY boyfriend is 20 .I don't know what to do. if i should get over him or not, i have tried to get over my boyfriend but its very hard because then my thinking is ... i would hate to know that he is with another girl. i have been with him almost a year and lived with him for 6 months and then i moved out because he became abusive and then i became abusiive to and began to hit him. i still love him and weekends i still spend time with him and sleep over. i go to school and then i find out he was with his friends with some girls too. they all had a partner and except him, its hard for me to believe that, im a very jealous person and i get mad easily, he says im to demanding and he thinks that im trying to control his life. its not that i want the best for him. he has friends that are in a gang were his from too. he does drugs and tries to hide it from me. its so hard to get over him, i love him but i know that this is not healthy and when i try to let go i always come back because i feel lonely. but at times i still want to work out the relationship. what do i do? please help me on some advice.

Answer
I’m going to copy and paste this for you to read. It is from relation expert Greg Berendt:    
  He just broke up with you (or you with him). So really, he's not that great a guy, unless you are just an awful person, which we don't think you are. Or you broke it off with him, so he can't be that great or you would still be together. It's the paradox of a break-up. First is what we call Revisionist Romance Disorder. RRD, like an acute case of 20/20 Blindsight, creates an inability to see the past as it actually happened. Additionally, those who suffer from Revisionist Romance Disorder cannot control the need to rewrite their relationship to match the feelings they want to have about it. With RRD, an incessant cheater becomes "a really good guy" who was just scared of getting too close. The drunk that forgot your birthday becomes "the one that got away." It's an easily identifiable disease, but like all afflictions, the first step to overcoming it is to admit you have a problem. And your problem is that if you truly want to move on, you need to stop rewriting the past and see your relationship for what it was: the good and the bad, the ups and downs, the baffling, the maddening, and the ridiculous.

To do this, you need to put aside all feelings of embarrassment or shame over how the relationship unfolded -- or ended. It's okay to have been disappointed by the fact that he forgot your birthday, or never put forth any effort with your family, or seemed to care more about his work than you. If he's a cheater it's okay to hate him for it-it's a totally natural reaction to being betrayed. As much as it sucks, you need to force yourself to remember your very worst times together, his most irritating habits, and the hard truth that not only can he live without you but he'd rather. Ouch! Yes, indeed but doesn't that make it easier to be without him? When you rewrite the past and make your romance seem so perfect (example: He cared so much about my friends that he had sex with one of them; it wasn't that weird that he always called me by his ex-girlfriend's name), your loss starts to seem unbearable. And it's not. Believe us. The demise of this relationship is the result of it not being a fit, a match, meant to be and certainly not the love of a lifetime. You need to stop pretending that it is. Remember, it's called a break-up because it's broken and who wants to be in a broken relationship? NOT YOU!
Violence beats out all other forms of a dysfunctional relationship! Even cheaters!!

I want to add that violence is not love its not healthy and it will get very old very quick. Plus that, you know that you could never bring a child into this relationship so what would be the point of continuing? Stop seeing him., Stop sleeping with him, stop going over there! Deal with the pain and loss than after some time has passed you can be friends!
Write me anytime!
Sam