Without any initiation on my part, she did reach out to me this morning with a text, just saying that she’s sorry for the way she treated me and for being insensitive. I’m not sure if that’s in regards to how she broke up with me or something else, but I’m letting it sit for a while. I’m not really sure how I want to answer that or should answer it.

Anyway, thank you again.

As for your relationship history, it’s worth thinking about whether there is any common pattern in the kinds of disagreements and differences that come up repeatedly. If so, it could point to some pivotal issue that you’re trying to resolve through the relationships. But if not, it’s possibly you’re just having bad luck or running into the simple fact that our society is filled with a lot of unhealthy people, many of whom are not willing to work to resolve things.

And if this is an exception as far as the age gap goes and you just found this girl to be unique, that’s fine too and may not point to anything more. I always recommend considering whether these things indicate any patterns, but if you think deeply about it and don’t find it then it may not be there.

I think it was reasonable to stick around and want to support her with the drinking issue if all else was going well. I think you just didn’t know at the time, and only now realized, that the drinking was the tip of a deeper iceberg that involves her family issues and her enmeshment with mom. It’s not an isolated issue that can be fixed and make everything ok. It’s just part of a web. It sounds like really her relationship with her mother (and you don’t mention a father so perhaps her relationship or lack of relationship with him too) may be more core than the drinking.

It may be that until she really faces her family history and dynamics, possibly through therapy for that rather than just for drinking – though I would hope in a good alcohol rehab they get into those things too – she simply won’t be able to have a lasting healthy adult relationship. And in the short run, she may indeed have to avoid more conflict with her mom until she can get out on her own if the conflicts lead her to drink.

If I had to guess, it sounds to me like she really does care about you, but she is stuck in a real bind and has no easy way out right now. Her relationship with her family has lots of unfinished business and it’s just sad that you and the relationship got stuck in the middle of it. I stand by what I said though that it’s her responsibility to decide she wants to change that and to decide when she is ready to do so. All you can do is let her know you’ll support her if she makes that bold choice. But unless she does it soon, you probably will have to move on with your life. The “if only” hurts. But just remember that what seemed like a small “if only,” as in “if only she can deal with her drinking issue” has now shown itself to be a much larger thing. The relationship may never have been as close to working in the long run as it seemed so again it isn’t like you should feel it was right in the palm of your hands. It was probably always bound to end up in a situation as difficult as this given her family dynamics.

With her mother and the alcohol issues, I didn’t really find out about those until later on. We became friends for a while first, so the attraction grew during that time, and the parents, because we were only friends, didn’t really play a part yet. The alcohol problems she admitted to me sometime later because she didn’t want to be dishonest and felt like I should know (outside of her mother, I don’t think many, if any, people know about it, especially her one time in rehab). I stayed around because she had the drinking under control then, and I had already fallen in love with her and didn’t want to judge her based on that factor alone. The drinking got worse the last month, but it wasn’t so much the number of days she went drinking (it was maybe twice in a month), but more the number of drinks she had (which still wasn’t good). One of the other things she said when she broke up with me was that because of the stress with her mother, she felt like she was sliding backward and wanted to de-clutter her life so that she didn’t end up back in rehab, which I do understand, so that could have potentially added to the breakup (not sure if it still would have happened if her mother hadn’t been as aggressive about us).

Since then, I did attempt to contact her today, just with a “been thinking of you…how are you doing?” She did respond that she’s doing well. Oddly enough, after she had broken up with me on Facebook, she removed me from her friends’ list, but added me back tonight (which was after the attempt at contact). However, she had changed her status to “single” (I tend not to advertise that on my own page). Finally, I’m not sure how to eventually talk with her. Honestly, she still has some stuff that I let her borrow that I do need to get back, which, I assume, would require a face-to-face, but I’m not sure how open she would be to that since she couldn’t do it a few days ago. I’d rather just not have this lingering for too long.