So many girls fall in love with the wrong guy, simply because the wrong guy usually says the right things. – Unknown

The above quote was on my facebook feed this morning. Hit’s home, thank you. I can could have said it myself. I HAVE said it myself. I also lived it. Many women have. I’m going to share my side of what happened with my Ex and what I believe gave him this “super power”. I have analyzed it a lot. It truly and deeply affected me that I believed the words the Ex said to me even though there were a million red flags. I started to wonder and figure how I fell victim to it. The following information is my perception, my experience, and some of my education rolled into one. It helped me to figure it all out and put the puzzle together.

My Ex had a childhood where he was picked on a lot and girls either thought he was gross or paid no mind to him. He had very bad acne at the time, and acne can be a debilitating condition socially. He was treated for it and it cleared up. He started to work out. Finally when girls at school began to notice him – he had such anger he purposely blew them off.

He was raised by a single mother who made him her “partner” at 6 years old and beyond. He was her support system and she was/is a dominant personality. She has had several failed marriages and this was his role model. His father who remarried has a good marriage but distanced himself from his “first” family. I can cite several reasons I believe this occurred but it is still a negative situation. My Ex didn’t have a good male role model that showed him how to treat women. He grew distant and angry toward his father and on many occasions told me his father, “was a little geek, didn’t stand up for himself and became very religious”. (My Ex considered himself to be an Atheist even though it was always clear to me that he lacked a sense of what spirituality really was). The bottom line is that he relied solely on his mother, felt obligation, had too much responsibility, and took her word to be his gospel which was likely the core of the disconnect with his father. His mother pushed and forced her beliefs on him and because he was the man of the house at 6 he felt “partnered” and respected for it even though it is a damaging situation to him. His mother taught him “No, that is not how a woman would solved this problem, a woman would do it this way” and he told me this himself. His mother was very wrapped up in building a career and other relationships with men. I’m not condemning her, simply explaining the situation my Ex grew up in. She did quite well for herself but she traveled for work and left TV to do the babysitting a lot out of necessity. My Ex once bragged to me how his mother built up frequent flyer miles so his family vacations were “going to Europe” and his attitude was about how it made him better than the other kids in his school.

When my Ex left the state for College, like many kids he got to experience freedom and did all of the things we all do. He also started going to strip clubs often (like every weekend) as an impressionable young man. In one conversation he told me he didn’t think of strippers as “real people”. That bothered me far more than the fact that he hung out in a strip club during college. It shows what I feel is a “disconnect”.

Fast forward some and he has a lot of Female Friends. I mean many of them. They are the only people in his life he can “talk” to meaning that he doesn’t discuss personal things with his male friends. It’s all about being macho with them. He had 2 substantial relationships and a high ratio of just sex partners. For more evidence of the overly arrogant macho behavior and his subconscious dislike for women you can read my previous post He Removed the Condom During Sex. I think it speaks volumes about how he feels about women. (I’m assuming nothing has changed with him now which may or may not be true)

My Ex learned to listen to what women want and how they think because he was raised by a single mother who treated him as a “partner” and because he has tons of Female friends. This is not in and of itself a “bad” thing. It depends on how you USE what you learn. In my opinion; he simply learned how to reel me in by saying all the “right” things. He wanted to always present himself as the one “nice” guy in the world. He even told me “you haven’t met a man like me before that knows how to communicate with women”. To some degree that was true. However, it was also an act. He was the phony nice guy. He simply knew what I wanted to hear and how to lure me back every time I figured out the truth.

My Ex had more female friends than I do. One even questioned him on my behalf because he went on what appeared to be a date with another so called female “friend”. She flat out asked him if he would see other people at the same time as me. He also didn’t think much of his female friends at times. One friend in particular he had told me was a “goody goody” and that she was only into watching TV which he found very boring. He trashed both of his former Ex’s to me even though one he stayed friends with. He evidently knew the right things to say to her too in order to maintain the false friendship.

In my experience with this particular guy I have to say that too many female friends was a problem. He was the “go to” guy for his female friends for man advice, and he always had something to give them. But when it came to me he simply said what he thought I wanted to hear to keep me involved in the relationship. There was even one occasion where he told me about a “get rich quick” scheme he concocted that I knew was …. stupid. I chose my words carefully and expressed concern to which he got very angry at me for. But when he took the same idea to one of his girlfriends they supported exactly what I said, and only then did he believe me. He was the guy who put the female friends on a pedestal but not the girl he was actually involved with. In the future I will consider any man who has more female friends than male friends to be a red flag because of the experience I had. I will have to look at the bigger picture every time I get into a relationship in the future.

Platonic relationships are good, I have a few myself, but as I said earlier in this post… it all depends on what a person learns from being in them. In the case of my Ex, he had far too many and simply used them as a tool to learn better manipulation skills in my opinion. It helped teach him what he needed to know.

Tagged: ex, Ex-Boyfriend, friends, men with too many female friends, platonic