Is he a fickle man: chasing after him hard, rolling over the sheets and gradually becoming indifferent

Lulu sent me an email to vent her frustration. She mentioned that her boyfriend had just left her heartlessly. Before this, he had spent over two years waiting for her downstairs in the dormitory every day, sending her flowers through classmates, buying her all sorts of expensive gifts, and whispering many sweet words. However, after they started dating and shared a romantic night together, he gradually became indifferent and eventually disappeared from her life completely—after two years of arduous pursuit, their actual romantic relationship lasted only four months.

“He probably never really loved me from the beginning,” Lulu wrote in her email. “If I had known he was such a fickle man from the start, I wouldn’t be in so much pain now.”

Did Lulu encounter a romantic scammer? If not, why did her boyfriend go through the trouble of pursuing her for over two years, only to leave her after they started dating?

Passion built on imagination is most likely to drive people to take all sorts of romantic actions. However, the reality of everyday life after the passion fades can reveal a person’s true nature. People with immature minds often mistakenly believe they no longer love the other person.

Many people fail to distinguish between passion and love, and even mistake passion for love. The main components of love are intimacy and commitment—that is, the two people have a lot of closeness and a sincere commitment to each other’s future life. Intimacy is based on mutual understanding, which requires spending a considerable amount of time getting to know each other. Passion, on the other hand, is merely a catalyst for love. All instances of love at first sight are driven by passion, and at that point, the two people do not have enough understanding of each other to call it love.

It is not uncommon for couples who go through great difficulties to be together to break up shortly after starting to date. This can leave people puzzled: Were all those romantic moments fake?

Of course not.

When people are in the passion phase, they tend to idealize the other person and instinctively do many things to please them. However, once they enter the reality of everyday life and truly get to know the person in front of them (rather than just relying on imagination), they may start to have disagreements. At this point, if the person is not mature enough, they may think the other person is not good enough (instead of recognizing their own shortcomings) or mistakenly believe they no longer love the other person. As a result, they may be unwilling to delve deeper into understanding the differences between them and learning how to coexist, ultimately choosing to end the relationship.

This is why couples who seemed to be deeply in love can break up so quickly.

After being immersed in an idealized image of their beloved for a long time, the “disappointment” that comes from reality can be hard to accept.

Relationships that take a long time to develop can be quite fragile. During the pursuit, the pursuer often overly idealizes the person they are pursuing, treating them like a goddess. This can lead to unrealistic expectations once they finally get together. After a period of dating and getting to know each other, the gap between the overly idealized image and reality can be significant (the pursuer may forget that no one is perfect), ultimately causing the relationship to fizzle out. The pursuer may then feel disillusioned and question their initial infatuation. This is probably what happened to Lulu’s boyfriend.

Of course, it is also possible that Lulu encountered someone who is extremely irresponsible in relationships. If that is the case, she should not only reflect on her judgment but also feel relieved that this person left her life before she became too deeply involved.

Generally speaking, women who claim to have been deceived by men often play a part in the deception themselves. No matter how calculated the man’s deception may be, there are always signs. As emotional beings, women usually have keen intuition and can sense danger. However, they often only wake up to the reality when the man’s true nature is revealed. This is usually because they choose to focus only on what they want to see and automatically block out any warning signs.

Even if Lulu did encounter a romantic scammer, this brief relationship can still teach her how to love and help her gain a deeper understanding of herself and the opposite sex. In this sense, it might not be such a bad thing after all.