Hi there!
So I was in a relationship with a man just over a year, he completely opened me up to an entire new world full of exciting opportunities, a wide friendship group, adventures, new music many many of our shared interests were the same and it was so fun exploring them with him. We also had the same core values in us so a healthy future looked possible. However he revealed some childhood incident in which he received a sexual offence caution at 14, he’d never dealt with this at all and it now cropped back up at the age of 31, he felt he had to tell me this due to my job and him being vetted (which passed anyway). From this point work also went crazy for him and he was telling me his low libido was due to work (which it partially was) but what he wasn’t telling me was it was really due to what he disclosed. I understood relationships were more than just sex so I supported him through work and him telling me about his record and never demanded anything more from him, just that work pressure will soon ease up and we’ll be back to normal. Anyway I found how he cheated on me on a one off incident and then he told me he just couldn’t be with anyone that knew about his caution so he left me regardless of how much I tried to be there for him.
Now I’ve now been single for 4 months and just started dating again, however I know I’m trying to squeeze these people into the cookie cutter shape that hey ex left. My entire world was perfect before the cheating, I told myself many times I couldn’t ask for anything else in life. But now all I’m doing is searching for someone like him who can fulfil that future I had in my head minus his insecurities. I’ve definitely upped my standards now but I feel like they’re too high? At the same time I feel I don’t want to lower my standards either and having second best, I also feel that due to living in a more isolated area in anxious that I may never find that again and it has gotten me down thinking I’ll never find that happiness again.