Hi Lupe
I am so sorry that you are going through this. This kind of pain cuts to the very heart of who you are. I have some ideas for you, but I dont think they will make the pain go away--but they may give it more meaning in your life.
I hope that you will not stay long in your feelings of being abandoned and alone. Some of these feelings can have different meaning depending on how you interpret them. You have not been abandoned--you were clear with this man about your limits and he could not live with those limits. You each understood that for him to dance with other women in this way was a deal breaker. You set the limit, and he could not go a long with it. The limits that you set were true to your values and you can be at peace with that.
Another way to look at the aloneness: with your last boyfriend, he drove you absolutely nuts because he wouldnt leave you alone. In those days, you would have LOVED some alone time. So, alone is sometimes good...sometimes it is something that you choose...sometimes it feels very empowering. Right now, alone feels really, really bad. I thnk you can find a little insight if you look at why?
You set up a choice for your boyfriend where he had to choose between you and dancing cheek-to-cheek with other women. When you set up that choice, he chose dancing with other women. In a sense, he also set up a choice: allow me to dance with other women, or choose to live without me. You each made your choice, and both choices hurt. His hurts, yours hurts. But you made the only choice you could live with at this point.
You said in one of your posts that men have to be trained to behave a certain way. I dont think it really works that way, and I think that the struggle you had with him is the reason why. Training someone (anyone--man or woman) means that they didnt CHOOSE a behavior. When someone chooses for themselves, and not just because they dont want your reaction, then that choice will carry over when you arent present, or when you two are having a bad day. Letting someone choose is always better than training them.
You are probably responding to him, as Ami says, out of your pain from the past. And you can ask him to stop dancing with women based on the fact that your sense of value is damaged when he does. But you should also realize that he may be doing what he does out of his OWN damaged sense of value. He may think he needs this attention from other women in order to feel good about himself. (BTW, this is probably at least some of the reason why people take dance classes---very few are in it for technical reasons...and the major dance studios usually play to that reason when they make their sales pitch!) Can you extend that same understanding to him? Can you say, I will continue to live with this misplaced need for attention, because I know it comes out of your woundedness?
At any rate, if your relationship were to continue, you would be in a constant tug of war over whose need for value got fulfilled: he doesnt dance, and you feel valued but he doesnt. He does dance, he feels valued, you dont. One of you has to break the pattern and decide to get your value somewhere else. In a sense, you each decided that you could not do that.
Something I noticed as you wrote about your unhappiness, was that the other women in the dance group figured into the scenario quite a bit. As a matter of fact, I wonder if they werent the REAL cause of your pain. It was as though he were the prize and you and the other women were fighting for him. I dont know if the fight was real or imagined--but it was very painful for you. You have been as angry with them for approaching him as you were to him for accepting. I think there are some mother-wounds there, and I hope you will sit with those feelings for a bit and see what comes up. Maybe you can also examine what it would take to feel that you had already won the prize.
Why in the world did he text you last night??? He could be a real ass--although, in my experience, real asses dont bother, they just go along their merry way doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place. It could be that he genuinely did not want to make the choice that he did, and is reacting out of pain.
I could give you all kinds of advice about how you could have, should have done things...or even what to do now. But anything I said would be just that--my response--and I think you should sit with your story a bit and see how you want it to end. Its your story and you can write the ending. You may not be able to get him to quit dancing with other women, you may not be able to get him to stay. But you can write it as lonely, or making an important choice in your life that left you without a boyfriend. You can choose to never tango again, or you can explore what this has uncovered about your wounds that needs to be healed.
I hope you dance.
Much, much love, Lupita,
CB
