Why can't I let go?

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It's been almost three years now and I'm wondering if anybody else with Aspergers has encountered the same problem or if it's just down to personality? It's a bit of a long one so please bear with me.

I very rarely develop feelings for people but when I do I become emotionally attatched to that person very quickly.

I'm asexual and get nothing from having sex. I don't fall for people based on sexual feelings or desires, I fall for people's personalities.

The problem here is that three years ago I was in a horribly emotionally abusive relationship which I had been in for four years when I met this lovely guy *James I was working beside. We quickly became friends and had a lot of personality traits and things in common. He made me laugh, he made me smile and as the week's rolled on I started to develop feelings for him.

Eventually I got out of my bad relationship and started to see James more often. I eventually told him I had feelings for him but he said to me he did not have the same feelings back. Four weeks later he comes to me and tells me that this girl he had been seeing for two weeks (this was like girl number five or six he had dated in our four months of friendship) had cheated on him.

Not being fully aware of my sexual orientation at the time and putting it down to my first and only relationship being abusive I asked him if he wanted to be my friend with benefits. He came over practically the next day and we did it at least four times in the course of the 24 hours. He then started spending more time with me, coming over, doing stuff, sitting on the sofa together watching movies, playing videogames - he would drive literally over 30 miles just to see me. We still met up in his town and everything was going smoothly.

I fell in love with him, not because of the sex but because he made me feel like the best thing in the world and I loved everything about him, his personality, his laugh, everything.

Then he cuts short a day out saying a friend of his is upset and kisses me and says he will see me soon. Turns out that he found someone else. He called it off, but remained my friend for another year, spending more time with me that summer when his on/off girlfriend was no longer with him.

Then he just cut contact completely. No explaination. No nothing. Like I didn't exist anymore. Whenever I called him he would pretend he didn't hear me and even told a mutual friend when I was in hospital last year, '*** sake. Well, she's in the right place keep me posted' but never once called or texted to see how I was.

And here I am eighteen months later, still hurting, still trying to move on. Still trying to work out why he did this whilst he's having the time of his life posing with his new girlfriend on social media and not even caring about our three year friendship, or calling just to talk to me about what happened so that I can move on.

It's cruel. I feel stuck and depressed all the time. Is there anyway I can get through this?

I had a similar experience a long time ago and it happened right after another traumatic experience so I had a complete breakdown. I guess your situation is more complicated because you can still see or hear about James. My "James" left me for someone else a loooong time ago but it took me many years to get over him. What helped was realizing that I had been in-love/infatuated with an idealized version of him and not the real him that would tell me I was the one then sleep with someone behind my back.

In HS I developed a special interest in a boy who once told me that you can't love someone who doesn't love you back. I dissected this throughout the years and it makes sense now. The romantic love you see in movies, books, etc. is always reciprocal love, you give and you get back. Otherwise it is just a one sided infatuation. Also, don't buy the BS on social media, I would say 99% of the people posting happy moments are just putting on a front for people on their newsfeed.

This is coming from someone who had a pretty active love life and have been in-content with my spouse for almost 20 years.

I, too had an extremely difficult time getting over an ended relationship. What ultimately helped the most was seeing a therapist and working on Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). I did a lot of worksheets to sort out why I was feeling such extreme feelings of loss and betrayal, and eventually I was able to move on.