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Because Jerkiness is the First Quality I Look for in a Sexual Partner

My boyfriend and I broke up two months ago (we had been together for two years). We broke up after a really bad fight. Toward the end of our relationship, he was convinced that I was cheating, which, with the evidence, I coudn't blame him, but I never actually did cheat on him. After we broke up, he started excessively drinking, and burning himself with his cigarettes. When I asked him why, he told me it was because he was depressed. I told him I wanted to get back together, but he told me he wanted to but couldn't, and that he hated having to be the strong one and say no. Soon after that, he started telling me he hated me, that he never loved me, blah blah.

I know him well enough to know that when he's hurt someone, he becomes a jerk. (One time when he accidentally elbowed me in the mouth when we were wrestling and I started crying, he became a jerk. Once I told him it was okay, it was an accident, he stopped being a jerk.) He recently got a new girlfriend who hates me. About a week after they started going out, he called me to come talk, and we ended up having sex. It was just like old times, cuddling after, laughing, joking, him stroking my hair, staring into my eyes, kissing me gently. Sorry, I'm reminiscing, lol.

I talked to him on the phone today, and I can tell he blames me for a lot. I was told he plans on moving from a friend, so I asked him about that. He told me it was none of my business whether or not him and his new gf were moving in together, and that if I had actually cared about him, it would be me and him moving in together. He also asked me why all of the sudden I'm all "I love you, I miss you" now that we're not together. He sounded very resentful toward me. I realize I did a lot of things wrong while we were together, and no, not just because he said I did, but because I actually did. He refuses to get together with me to talk because his girlfriend threatened to break up with him. What can I do to make it up to him? To make him realize I did love him while we were together, that I just had a hard time of showing him? If you were in his place, what would you want me to do?

Angel | age 17 | New Hampshire | September 6, 2009

Daniel says...

Sometimes relationships reach a point where they become so scarred and damaged that they are almost unrecognizable from what originally existed. You and your ex-boyfriend have fallen into a pattern of hurting one another and hurting others in your lives. Regardless of how your boyfriend feels toward you, it is difficult for me to imagine being able to commit to someone who made a promise to someone else (i.e. started dating his new girlfriend) and then wasn't able to keep that promise (i.e. had sex with you). That is certainly not what his girlfriend was expecting and you should hold yourself to a higher standard than that, too.

You need to ask yourself whether this is a relationship that is healthy (or logical) for you to perpetuate. You are asking yourself what you can do to change his mind, make up for some perceived fault on your part, or any number of other things, but it seems that the logical thing for you to ask yourself would be whether or not this relationship is capable of being saved (or, perhaps more importantly, worth saving).

If you do want to try to make it up to him, you need to force the issue and make him meet up with you or talk to you on the phone. He may not want to have the conversation, but an attempt to do so will tell a lot about what he is thinking. If you try to have the conversation and he ends the talk or hangs up on you, then he is clearly uninterested in actually fixing things and is only interested in sex. If that's the case, then what's there to save?

This article was originally posted by Daniel in June 2009.

Tags: sex, ask a guy, advice, relationships, jerks

Published on September 6, 2009 by Daniel | Read all recent Ask A Guy articles.