My Ex Had A Break Down After We Broke Up. What Do I Do Now?

Dear Dr. NerdLove:

I’m an 18-year-old straight cis male and soon to be college freshman who made a big mistake in my first ever relationship that is still praying on me. About a year and a half ago when I was 17, stuck at home doing online school and bored crazy, I struck up a friendship with a 19-year-old girl I met on voice chat for a game. She lived several states away but we had a bunch of private chats and got to know each other. She was really funny and smart, she had a very sensual feminine voice, and as an awkward dork who never had any kind of girlfriend before, she made me feel sexy and confident. 

Our private chats quickly became very explicitly sexual. We progressed from narrating imaginary sex sessions between our player personas to actually masturbating at the same time over audio. I was slightly confused because I wasn’t sure whether I could consider myself to have lost my virginity or not. (Or taken hers, since she claimed to be a virgin as well.) So I started pushing to make plans to meet in person when the pandemic was over. She was hesitant which made me lose some of my confidence. I told her I at least wanted to chat over webcam instead of just voice, and she got really upset. Finally she said she was afraid I wouldn’t like her if I knew what she really looked like. I said that was totally okay, I knew she probably wasn’t a six-foot-tall supercurvy redhead like her character. She disappeared for a few days and I almost thought she had ghosted me. Then she messaged me and told me she was overweight,and asked if I still wanted to chat on camera. I said yes, and in the time between when we managed to set up the chat psyched myself into picturing a cute chubby girl with a pretty face and huge chest. I even got excited because someone like that seemed more likely to actually go for me.

The instant her camera came up though, my heart sank. She was way bigger than I’d been thinking and if I’d just seen her picture without hearing her voice, I would only have a 50-50 chance of guessing her gender. I know it’s a horrible and cruel reaction but I was overcome with disgust at the thought that I had listened to her masturbate and come. Also, to my sudden paranoia she looked way older than 19. So in my panic I thought I had possibly been catfished by someone in their 30’s.

But I still wanted to come up with some excuse that would make her want to end our relationship so she wouldn’t feel rejected. So off the top of my stupid head I told her I had something to confess too, which was that I’d lied when I told her I was 18. (Which I had, only because mods can be over-zealous about banning under 18s and anyone who chats with them for explicit chat, even if they are of age in their home state or country.) And the truth was I was just 14. In fact I was 17 but live in a state where the age of consent is 16, which it is in her state as well. But I’m a scrawny dork and below average height so I guess she believed I was 14. She right away closed the chat and that was the last I saw or heard of her.

I mourned the loss of the relationship I thought I had with my imaginary image of her, and moved on except I couldn’t get over wanting to make sure she was at least okay. I got in touch with someone on another forum where she used to post who knew someone who knew her IRL from whom he could find out what happened to her, because I wasn’t the only person wondering. And what I eventually found out crushed me. They reported she found out a guy she’d been sex chatting with was actually a 14-year-old boy, and had a literal nervous breakdown over the fear of being arrested. She dropped out of community college and has been too afraid to leave her house or go online for over a year. Her IRL friend who goes to college in another city visits her every few weeks and says she spends all day watching TV and movies (the same movies over and over)and has panic attacks if anyone tries to get her to do anything else. Her parents don’t know what to do with her because they’re apparently really poor, they can’t afford mental health counseling and need her to either start earning money or move out but they don’t want to throw her out in the street. They still don’t know the cause of her breakdown, her friend is the only person IRL who does and she made her swear not to tell them.

The person who told me this has no idea there was no actual 14-year-old boy, that the supposed 14-year-old boy was me, that I had an explicit relationship with her, or any of it. I’m completely torn about what I should do. Would it help her to heal if she knew she didn’t actually do anything illegal? Or would knowing I rejected her for her appearance only make her feel worse? Should I try to get in touch with her myself? Try to get someone else to pass a message on to her, which might have to mean letting them in on the truth? Or just leave her alone? Is there any possibility I could get in trouble for telling a lie that caused her to have a breakdown? I realize I got myself into a stupid and terrible position, but now that I’m stuck here what can I do?

Sincerely
Not Actually Jailbait

Hooooo boy.

Alright, this is a complicated one, NAJ, and if we assume that everything happened exactly as reported, then there really aren’t any good answers. But I’m going to stress “exactly as reported” because… well, I’ll get into that in a moment.

But before I do, I’m going to take a step back and reiterate something I’ve said over and over again: if you haven’t met them in person, you aren’t really dating. Yes, I understand that in the far flung future of 2022, we make strong emotional relationships with people we haven’t actually met in the flesh. Hell, I’ve got friends I’ve known for literal decades, who I haven’t met in person; our friendships started in one forum and have moved across multiple platforms over the decades. But here’s the thing: there’s more to a romantic relationship than just an emotional connection, because romance ain’t just emotion. As the man said: love isn’t brains, it’s blood screaming at you to work its will. That is: love is chemical too, and physical and a host of other things that can’t be replicated or experienced exclusively through text or even video chat.

There are hundreds of little cues and details that directly affect who we are or aren’t attracted to that we only experience in person – how they smell (hygiene and pheromones), how they taste when we kiss them, the timbre of their voice, the way they feel when we touch them, even little things like how they treat the waitstaff at a restaurant. Without those, you are functionally dealing with an incomplete picture. I can’t tell you the number of relationships I’ve seen that started off online and fell apart once they met in person. Hell, I can’t tell you the number of dates that I have personally been on where we hit it off like a house on fire on the dating apps… but had no chemistry or attraction once we met in person.

But in your case, NAJ, you and your play partner had even less to work with. You – and she – weren’t dating a person; you had a relationship with an imaginary person. This wasn’t necessarily a catfishing situation, but your relationship was decidedly with the person you built up in your head over the course of these sessions, not the flesh and blood woman on the other end of that Internet connection. Not to sound cyncial or to dismiss your experiences – what you felt and what you experienced was real, to you – but you were filling in a lot of empty spaces with things that you were bringing to this. Traits that you thought she would have based on those interactions, aspects of her that lined up with what you hoped for and expected because you had this fantasy in your head.

The same goes for her; she had feelings for what was ultimately a person she constructed in her head. She had some baselines to start from, but ultimately she – like you – was constructing a person based off what she hoped for and fantasized about. To a certain extent, you catfished each other.

But then reality came in and smashed your fantasy to pieces. You learned that the person on the other end of the line was not the person you’d built up in your head. In fact, there was so little resemblence that you… well, honestly, you kinda freaked out. And hey, I get it, you’re young, you’re inexperienced. You can say all you want that you knew that she wouldn’t be the statuesque goddess that was her game persona… but let’s be real here, more of you was hoping that it was at least a little true.

This is why I’m not giving you too much stick for your reaction. You’re young, you don’t have much life experience to rely on and probably even less experience with dealing with these sorts of surprises. So you panicked and you reacted in the moment. It wasn’t the best thing you could do, but you were both trying to save face but also to give her a gentler out than “Um… I thought you’d be hotter.” And… well, it wasn’t the best choice, and one that may have lead to a worse outcome than being told the truth.

Leaving the outcome aside for the moment – we’ll get to back to it, don’t worry – what happened is that everything up to now has been the result of your making the best decisions you could at the time with the information you had. Now you have different information – and you’re a little older and a little wiser for it – and you will make different decisions in the future. So, as much as this was a case of failing your Wisdom saving throw (with disadvantage; you’re 17, you’re gonna be rolling with disadvantage on those for a while), it’s also a learning experience. You know better, and you’re not going to make this mistake again. If you have a moment of surprise and disappointment like this again, you’ll handle it better… if only so you don’t accidentally trigger the outcome you got this time.

And one of the lessons to take away from this is: honesty is often the best policy. That doesn’t mean being bluntly or hurtfully honest; “brutal honesty” tends to be more about the brutality than the honesty, a way of hurting someone without having to take responsibility for doing so. But there are ways to say “hey, you’re not what I expected” or “I’m no longer interested in pursuing this relationship with you” that don’t shred their soul. It will still hurt – there really isn’t a way to tell someone you’d been fucking around with that you’re done suddenly without it hurting – but you can focus on causing as little necessary pain as possible and avoid unnceesary pain.

None of those ways involve lying about not being of legal age.

Now about that outcome…

So, remember what I said about “if this happened as reported”? It’s not that I think you’re massaging the narrative to look better or that you’re an unreliable narrator. I think it’s that we’re dealing with a game of telephone here. Just as you and your play partner had an incomplete and inaccurate idea of who the other was, those same circumstances make it difficult to know just what happened. Yeah, you’ve got a mutual who’s told you about your partner’s behavior – her IRL behavior, presumably… but it’s still third hand information. It’s difficult to know just how accurate this story is, how much it may have morphed over the telling – tell any story enough times and bits will change, just as memories will change the more you recall them – how much of it is exaggeration for effect  and how much of it is legit concern.

In other words, you could be sitting on a “Ferris passed out at the 31 flavors last night” situation. There might be the germ of truth there – she could very well be dealing with a depressive episode – but there’s a lot of detail in this that sounds like it got sweetened up a bit to make a better, more dramatic story.

There’s also the question of how much of this is first hand knowledge – that she told your mutual these things – or your mutual is drawing these conclusions for themselves. Or, for that matter, the possibility that this person is who they say they are too.

(That’s one thing I have to say that made a difference with some of those afforementioned friends who I haven’t met yet; we were all part of a community small enough that the folks I did know in person also met and knew them in person.)

Now, let’s assume that things are more or less on the up and up here: your mutual acquaintance is who they say they are, does know your ex in person and has seen them since you left things hanging. If we leave the editorializing out for a second, it sounds like she’s depressed at the very least. That’s not unreasonable, seeing as she got summarily dumped out of the blue after having shown herself – something she was explicitly worried about. So in this case, her worst fear came true; she was vulnerable and real with someone and it drove them away. That’s gonna fucking hurt. A lot. If one gets a junk-punch to the soul, it’s going to knock ’em to the floor, possibly for a while.

Did it trigger a literal nervous breakdown? I can’t say. My gut would say that I think it’s unlikely, that this is an exaggeration for dramatic effect… but hey, I’m not there and also Dr. NerdLove is not a doctor, so don’t rely on my bullshit diagnosis. And if it did… well, there’s not really anything you can do here that’s going to hit the cosmic rewind button and make everything she’s felt un-happen.

So what can you do? Well… that’s a difficult question to answer, if I’m being honest. One of the things that is important about trying to make amends is to not inadvertently cause more harm in the process. Similarly, your ex play partner may not want to hear from you, considering that this triggered such an intense reaction in her. Hearing directly from you again at all may make things worse – either in her immediate reaction to hearing from you or from the reveal that you lied.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t at least apologize or send word. It may well be worth sending word via the mutual friend that you’re sorry and that you reacted badly and fucked up by blurting that bit out. Or, it may be worth telling the mutual that there wasn’t a 14 year old, it was someone playing games. It may be worth lobbing it past your mutual; do they think it might help if she knew there was no 14 year old? If they have actual on-the-ground insight, then they might be in a better place to say, one way or another.

Will that fix things? It’s impossible to say. Even if it does at least relieve the fear that the cops are about to break her door down – they aren’t, it’s hard enough to get people to acknowledge that boys can be sexually abused, especially by women – it’s not going to Thanos-snap the pain and fear out of existence. But it may provide at least a little relief and give her a place to direct that anger – at the person who tricked her, instead of turning it inward.

I wish I had a definitive answer for you here, but I have to be honest: I don’t. There’re no great choices, just a question of which ones are going to be least bad and do good while not adding to the harm that’s already happened. You’re going to have to decide for yourself how you’re going to try to make this right – either directly to your friend or in a more indirect way. And honestly, which to choose will have to be a decision between you and your conscience. You’ll want to ask yourself: are you hoping this is going to make things better, or are you more hoping that it’ll assuage your sense of guilt? Yes, it could be both… but understanding which of these is currently the main reason will make a difference.

Good luck.