It Hurts to Love....

Just like you, I got out of a really long relationship. At the time I grieved for the lost love, I contemplated that I would try to do better next time. I would exert more effort to let him know that I really cared. In my past relationship, my ex cheated on me so I went through that phase where I kinda blamed myself because I may have put in too little effort in the relationship to have made it work. The point here is that it is normal to be clingy because you are trying to hang on to this relationship harder than you did the last hoping that this time, it would be for keeps. I have to warn you though. Men do not always see it as a nice thing if the girl they are with is trying a little too hard. I once had a guy friend who told me that men like him are like birds, they have to be given their freedom otherwise they will try to escape. I really don't care much for the comparison but what are you gonna do right? I think you just have to focus on yourself a little bit more. Give him the space he needs. It may be hard at first but it is betterto do that than to suffocate him with your clinginess and have him really abandon you.

Don't be so hard on yourself, Gabrielle. Things that happened in the past do haunt us as we're afraid of making the same mistake, or afraid the same bad incident might happen to us. The fact is that if you keep on holding on to the past, you'll never get past it and it will affect your present. What you should do is to let the past go; no one knows whether the guy you're with now would repeat what you'd gone through. What you could do is to learn more about him and to take things a bit slower and cautiously. It takes time to recover from the past but eventually you'll still have to let it go. So just forget the past - let it be a lesson to learn - and focus on the present in order to prepare for the future. It's hard, but you have to do it. It's painful to see you "suffer" like this too because I know how you feel :) - you have to let go of the past. Hope what i'm saying here makes sense to you. Good luck and keep us posted of any developments :)