This one’s kinda complicated. In July 2019, I broke up with my serious girlfriend, “X”, (23F) with whom I was living at the time. It was an extremely messy breakup where we continued to see each other and stay serious and she ended up sleeping with an ex and I cut her off. After a few weeks, we began to see each other (without any labels per my request) and things got serious again, this was around September to December. I was a pretty broken and bitter person after that break up so I started looking to date other girls during this time, knowing that they probably wouldn’t go anywhere.

I ended up seeing three different girls, and all of them I had great times with but because I was so involved with X and we were practically boyfriend/girlfriend without the label, I wasn’t really able to keep up consistent contact with any of the other girls and they all faded away. One of the girls, “J”, felt perfect for me. We clicked during our date, had a ton of fun, and she even asked me to kiss her when we said goodbye. Because I actually saw potential with her, I tried hard to end things with X and set up a second date with J. Things unfortunately didn’t end with X and because of J’s school break schedule, we had to wait a few weeks before seeing each other again and by that point we were barely texting but she gleefully accepted a very romantic date idea but cancelled due to a family emergency (which was true as per her snapchat stories :P) She told me she’d hit me up to reschedule but she never texted again and I never followed up. That was that.

Things never ended with X until a few days ago but I’ve been mentally checked out of that relationship since August 2019. I stayed with her because we had an extremely codependent/abusive/toxic/insert synonym for unhealthy relationship and to put it best, we were addicts to each other much like a junkie would be addicted to a drug that is destroying his life. Both of us have tried to break things off several times, and both of us end up crawling back. When 2020 hit, the relationship practically became totally loveless and we were just extremely close best friends who slept with each other like once a week. We pretty much outwardly hated each other yet somehow were addicted to one another. Relationships are a weird thing.

A few days ago I put my foot down and ended things for good, blocking her on every social media. It’s going to take me time to adjust to not having a 24/7 partner and it’s also probably going to take time for her to stop harassing me. That’s another thing – X is an emotionally unstable individual. I’ve had to spend a night in the hospital because of her repeated claims that she would kill herself after we argued. There’s much more where that came from, but let’s just say the abuse doesn’t end when I block her. She will create accounts, emails, find me on dating apps, have friends stalk me and attack me, all the while trying to get back together with me. It’s an emotionally traumatizing experience going through a breakup with this girl and it’s why it’s taken this long and this many attempts. This time has been no exception and the abuse has rained down on me the past few days but I guess this time I’ve grown enough to be able to ignore it and block most of it out, albeit while shouldering massive anxiety and fear due to being under attack 24/7 from various different social media.

Now that the context is out of the way… I want to reach back out to J. I’m pretty sure she’s still single, and now that I’m ‘officially’ single, I want to see if there’s anything actually there. That being said, how do I explain the past 5 months? Do I tell her the truth – that I was in a relationship with my ex purely out of fear and codependency? Do I omit all of it and tell her later on (assuming there is a later on)? Obviously that’s more of a second date topic of conversation, but I want to be fair to this girl and fair to myself. I want to give it a real chance and not fuck it up by reaching out too early or too late, even though it’s clearly pretty late in the game.

Follow up question: If/when I reach out, how do I even initiate that conversation?