Old flame

I was madly in love as a teenager and still am. I dated my first bf for a little over a year, we loved eachother so much but it was too much for kids to to hand so after one thing or another we broke up. 5 years has passed and although I am no longer heartbroken,my love for him hasn't died. I genuinely feel he is my one. I want to tell him but he is now with someone else. Is it selfish to tell him and potentially ruin his new happiness? I just keep thinking life is short and we should tell people how we truly feel. Even if he doesn't return my love atleast I won't go through life wondering what if. Does anyone have advice? Is it a recipe for disaster? Am I crazy?

He's with someone else and it's been 5 long years. If he should have been with you, he would be (he's had ample time plus dialling/typing fingers as well as a brain capable of hunting you down via whatever means of research mechanism, I take it?). YES, it's selfish to tell him. And one could possibly say, arrogant and bloody-minded (on the surface). For starters, if it had been THAT amazing then he similarly would still be feeling it and accordingly found it too hard to take his current relationship beyond a few piddly months. And for finishers, it's highly unfair to put such an upsetting spanner in someone else's works rather than leaving any demise to come about naturally in its own sweet time (should demise even be on the horizon, I should add). In other words, that level of mutual connectivity and desire you purport to have had between you doesn't need any pointing out or reminders. It would have a life of its own - for BOTH parties - and would control THEM, not the other way around. And especially a male, given how they're NOT socially prohibited against reaching out and trying to take whatever it is they're hell-bent on taking possession of (under the fear of being labelled 'unladylike'). Here's the thing: while you're devoting your romantic time and energies to hankering after "the one that got away" you're mentally making yourself UNAVAILABLE (via your overall vibe), under the self-administered illusion that you have something going on in your love life. You're just looking for a safe port in which to hide from further relationships ("better the devil you know") PLUS gain a better conclusion about what really went wrong and why by basically replaying the record in the hope that the last few, previously un-heard bars sing a different tune altogether. It's called re-enactment and doesn't require a new but uncannily similar bloke to make it work, particularly if you're too loath to risk repeat heartbreak after having also had to start re-investing again from scratch with an unknown quantity. Furthermore, if in YOUR mind it had been right to break up at the point it did, then I fail to see any need for you to have been, quote, heartbroken. You'd have just been sad yet resigned and relieved. So obviously it was he who broke it off, since when you've not managed to come to any satisfactory conclusions (beyond 'too young'), meaning, it's this INTRIGUE (not knowing) that's nagging you, with you calling it love to justify its overwhelming power. Put it another way: had he been "the one" (ONE of the ones, to be technically correct and realistic) then, even leaving aside him and his own feelings/urges and time and ability to act on them, NO WAY could you have let 5 long years pass without having done what you're only now proposing to do. And, again, where's HE been all this time? There's probably a bit of Dog In Manger syndrome going on, too (ref 'he is NOW with someone else'). After all, he's managed to move on whilst here you are, downright paralysed, and "that's not fair" because it comes across as a tacit guilty verdict plonked onto only you (which demands justice via counter-proof). Here's the other thing: plenty of teenage sweethearts manage to 'handle' it and end up later marrying, even for life. So don't blame youth or the 'love being too strong' (no such thing!). Blame the fact that in terms of perfection for you, he was CLOSE, YES, but not quite close enough, as well as blame the fact that you can't quite find the global, golden answer to why you two failed/who REALLY was to blame, on the unseen, third player-with-a-hand in all of this: Fate. It obviously has someone else in mind for you, someone even better, for which relationship it WANTS you to remain in the dark, certainly in the first stages. Because that way you'll (ref "wondering what if?") treat the relationship with far more caution and respect until such time as the global reason DOES hit you. Which it will. Which might just be this... ...That Fate possibly engineered this 5-year desert as well. Maybe because your Best Of The Best has been caught in his own process, which length couldn't get somehow curtailed, not even for your 'present' sake, meaning, you were deliberately placed in a position/situation where you'd have to wait until he suddenly became single and your paths 'conveniently, magically' crossed. If that's the case then that's testament to your NOT having been at any fault, the exact opposite in fact [insert relationship-angel emoticon], meaning no other stop-gap relationships aka practise-runs were necessary. Nor certainly guilty itching enough to create the urge to scratch. :-) I could summarise the crux with this analogy: You're hungry again, enough to want a meal again. In fact, because you've for whatever reasons left it so long, suddenly you're starving. But, again for whatever reason(s), you don't want/can't be arsed to go shopping, carry it home, prepare the ingredients and cook them. So instead you're hell-bent on buying (ordering via phone or email so that it'll be delivered to your door) a ready-made, microwaveable meal... one that you KNOW you already like the taste of and how to chew, etc.... and basically already half-made for you (5 minutes and, PING!), WHEREAS if you'd absolutely adored that meal you would have ordered it LONG before today, hungry or not, simply for the joy of how it tastes as well as because NOT getting to have it would itself have created a sense of abject hunger. Put more simply: if it ended and the one with all the freedom to get it back together again did no such thing nor is more lately showing any signs of belatedly doing so then that, actually, is proof that it was NOT meant to last longer than it did nor undergo any re-run. So, now that you've got your appetite back/been allowed to once again register your sense of hunger - what have you got against shopping and adventurousness in terms of sampling NEW, quite possibly BETTER dishes [scuse pun] or just the one, perfect-for-you one? You're ready (about 2-3 months off, anyway). He's not. Equals, Not the one (the cream of the total pool of "ones"). Some MUCH better bloke is, and you'll be saying a prayer of abject gratitude for that WHEN it hits. But you need to be ON a path before it can cross with someone else's. So don't be a hermit or you might miss him and have to wait for the next one. (Phew, don't I go on!)

The thing is he has reached out to me over the 5 years. I told him drunkenly abouttwo years after we broke up that I loved him and he agreed that he met a girl that said she loved him but he felt it wasn't the same as our love. The next day he asked me to meet him to talk properly about it but I panicked and didn't reply. I don't know why I panicked. I truely regret this and think that I might have missed my chance. Again about another year later he asked me to meet up with him when I came home from travelling but I never did. I know you are going to say that I only want him because he has someone else. But I know he is my soulmate. I want him to be happy so I will not tell him how I feel. If he ends up being with this new girl for life. I will leave him be because I know he is happy and he deserves that, but if they ever break up I will tell him and I know I he will feel the same way. For now I will just live my life and wish him the best

"For now I will just live my life and wish him the best" LOL - here's my "I really believe you" face ---> ;-p *Don't react prematurely - read on... His having tried to contact you puts a completely different spin on this, but you failed to furnish that important detail in your opening post ("doh!", LOL). So, then, you basically chickened out of meeting up with him those 2 past occasions? Are you SURE you chickened out? Could it not have been your sensible side stepping in (with said panic sensation) to stop you from making a time-wasting mistake? I mean, where was his re-persuasion attempt right off the bat of the first one? Seems he was capable of dedicating too much attention to his pride, wouldn't you say? That lack of action is worth examining before you even think of proceeding. You can't argue with actions/lack of actions, you know, so I can only presume that either you DID both know that the relationship had come to its natural conclusion but that you and he must have been through certain experiences together, meaning, fondness/gratitude and sentimentalism did a great impression of love OR...you were at the time, for whatever reasons, a giant commitmentphobe. Again - worth examining. No such thing in this area as missing your chance or presuming that you only get one or any other limited number at the most. People who are meant to be together are like helpless magnets that, even if they do orientate out of each other's immediate orbid, get drawn back together whether they like it or not. But what the fact of his being tied to someone else right now COULD show is that this period *right now* is NOT the time for any third attempt. Think about what you'd be showing him. YES, on the one hand it would indicate you had no room in your heart for any other considerations, but think about the other side of that meanings coin: you can't control yourself under any duress (even of a positive variety) enough to keep a sense of social responsibility as would give you the ability to empathise with another woman's welfare and feelings and not wish to burst into and disrupt/devastate her life, a la, 'Who gives a sh*t what your current squeeze would think and feel, only you and I matter!'. Ultimately, as other people *do* matter (because we're a pack specie), that translates to this question: She loves me, but WHAT loves me? What calibre of woman? A woman worth making a whole life with? Whether he registered that meaning on his conscious level makes no odds. It'd still be 'in there' and could still sit there 'whispering' away and affect his ability to not only put fuller trust in you this time round to abandon himself more fully to the chemistry's fuller effects (whereby breaking-up a second time would be 'impossible') but to feel he has a woman with higher standards than ever before, for whom he has to work hard and keep ON working hard to match up to and impress (yet another barrier to breaking up). ;-) If you come to a man already gagging for him, you see, he gets the sense that he'll barely have to lift a finger to please you. (Get what I'm saying?) So if you insist on pushing it rather than waiting for the next opportunity to come around naturally, you're going to have to be very clever and subtle about it: "It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it, And that's what gets results!" (-sing along? LOL). So rather than you INFORMING him that you'd like to give it another shot, you're going to have to let him FIND OUT INDEPENDENTLY. There's the difference that makes ALL the more intelligent and long term-heeding difference, not to mention that it would then give him the confidence to be the one to do the repeat chasing despite his first two attempts yielded nothing (MUCHO importante!). So to whom can you (cough!) casually mention your heart's desire and regret to that he also knows? Is there a mutual (preferably gossipy) friend in this mix? * PS: Yeah, I can see he's (one of your) soulmates. Was just testing you out. ;-)

(sorry, I don't have a cold, that was meant to be ORBIT)

We have no mutual friends. We have a different circle of friends back then and his circle has completely changed now I don't know them so I can't do that. My only options are to tell him or leave him be. So I guess I will just have to leave him be . She's a lucky girl