“To all the girls, if you read this, I hope you won’t be like me – a woman who unintentionally destroyed a good man’s career, motivation, and confidence.
It all started 3 years ago when he was in australia studying for his final year of bachelor degree, while I already graduated and started my job. If I were to evaluate him now, I would rate him at least 9/10. He never cheated on me, he never once talked about or praised other girls in front of me, he was extremely focused on his studies and was a good example to his fellow course mates and younger siblings, his hobbies were mostly about self-improvement, career advancement, and learning new skills, which can be boring to most people, he would have Skype video call with me a few times a week when we were in LDR, and he was a caring boyfriend too. However sometimes things in life just didn’t happen in the way it should have happened. Back then he was just maybe 4 or 5 out of 10 to me, because I failed to appreciate him, and thus destroying both our relationship and his career.
Just like any other girls, I get jealous too, but it’s not because my ex was very good-looking or attractive to other girls, but because of 2 things, first is he was being too helpful to the point where his female course mates would study with him, second is he treats everyone very nice, and I felt that as his girlfriend, he should treat me much better instead. So due to these reasons, we fought quite a number of times, despite being together for close to 3 years. He is also a person who doesn’t know how to defend himself or use the most appropriate words or sentences to explain himself, so during our fights, I was always the winner. And also I tend to go against his interest like programming and coding, because at that time I thought it was useless, why not just focus on your studies and be an expert in your own field, instead of wasting your time on something else that you might not even need in your future career, so we also fought about it, especially during some weekends where we visited each other’s place, and he just spent hours to learn those computing stuff. I mean it wasn’t actually that bad, but at that point of time I was already quite pissed with his interest, so seeing him spending so much time on it just got on my nerve even more.
Tho he only had to be in Perth for a year, I felt that it was actually quite long, especially back then I was still a pretty needy girlfriend, so eventually I started to be more suspicious, more jealous, and more insecure too. As usual, we would fight, but it was all because of my silly and unreasonable factors, like he added new female friends on fb, and I went crazy and asked why he added them or accepted their friend request, and some are even angmohs. He did explain to me that the reason was because of group work, and it was easier to communicate and share information among group members through social media. Before our worst fight happened, this incident whereby his plan to return to Sg for a winter break was ceased. He decided to attend a workshop that he was interested in, and it only happened once a year during the winter break, and so he had to give up his flight back to Sg. I later found out that it was actually a web development course that costs a few hundred bucks. I totally went all crazy since I already disliked his interest in computing, and now he gave up on coming back to Sg just to waste his time to attend this rubbish course.
The last straw came after a big misunderstanding. Now as I recall it again, it wasn’t actually a fight, it was just me being a big idiot. We were having a video call and he told me that he was heading to bed after we finish talking, and I legit thought he would go to bed like he always did, but a few days later when I was scrolling through fb, I saw his friends posts on another friend’s birthday celebration, and I saw him in those pictures and videos too, which he didn’t mention to me at all. After that, I took quite some time to compose a very long message to breakup with him. Right after sending him that message, I blocked him wherever possible where there was no way he could reach me. Some of our mutual friends tried to contact me too, but I thought they are much closer to each other, so they will help him cover up his lies, so I ignored them too. I went through a hard time by myself because I don’t have many close friends.
After he returned to Sg, he came to my place to look for me to explain to me, but there was nothing that I could do about it because I was already attached to my then-fiancé. During his explanation, he said he was really going to bed, but that night was the birthday and farewell of another exchange student, and his friends were celebrating at their dorm and invited him too, so he just went down for a short while to say goodbye to him, and then went back to bed. He didn’t know that he had to share with me such 5-10 min activity that wasn’t so important. Regarding his winter course, it was actually a rare opportunity because some of the speakers were famous profs from ivy league like MIT, Harvard, cal-tech, and he said it is very rare to have such course in Sg, that’s why he chose to stay back instead of returning to Sg. At that time, I was already attached, so even if his explanations were valid, I could no longer accept him.
It was only in the recent months I found out that my actions have severely impacted his life. He was an excellent student, but because of me, he failed to focus on his final sem, and did very badly in his final exam tho he still passed. He previously wanted to study an MBA and CFA too, but little did I know that he had stopped pursuing his dream. With his resume and degree, he can easily find a decent job with around $3-4k as a fresh grad, but from what I heard from our mutual friends, he is doing a $2k+ job that only requires a diploma. Honestly I’m not that close to our mutual friends too because of that incident, but they did say the breakup had significantly caused who he is today. Tho we have stopped talking, my friend actually passed me a hefty red packet on his behalf during my wedding solemnisation. Knowing how little he earns, I felt bad to receive it, but I still did receive it as his form of blessing. I honestly have no idea whether he has any future plans, but apparently he has been working for the same low-pay position in same company for two years with little to no opportunity to progress.
If you ask me, will I be with him again if I wasn’t attached, the answer will always be yes. Right now there is nothing I could do to rebuilt his confidence and motivation to pursue his dream anymore. I’m married, and I can only devote to my husband, but I feel deeply sorry for what I’ve done to him. If only I was mature enough to understand his situation, if only I knew he was happy doing what he enjoyed, if only I could resist the temptation to meet new guys before he returned to Sg, if only I could be more understanding to walk through difficult path with him. It only took me a few minutes to block him from reaching me, but these few minutes was what resulted in who he is today – a poor broken soul with so much potential to succeed in life. All he wanted at that point of time was just one very simple thing, which was my time to listen to his explanation, but I never gave him any chance to explain himself and ended our relationship when he was still studying overseas.
So once again, to all the girls out there, if, if you ever happen to come across similar situation, please, please never be like me. Your ignorance to a guy may just be as easy as you thought, but you will never know how much of an impact on him you can make. There is no harm listening to explanation, especially when a guy is trying really hard, finding ways to reach you just to talk to you. It is easy to block a guy with just a few touches on your phone, but you will never know that you’re indirectly killing him from inside.
Once again, I’m really sorry for what I did to you JL. If I could return to where we were 3 years ago, I would have listened to you, and you would have been much better than who you are today. I’m really sorry.”