This is making me crazy. I probably shouldn't be writing this here, but I've got to get this all out of my head, and I want some third party to come along and tell me how I'm supposed to deal with this crap.

I'm in this sort of emotional situation that I didn't even know could exist. At least, I'd never thought of it before or seen or heard of it, but its tearing me up. I feel stupid writing about it, but this has got to end so I'm going to write about it for a minute because sometimes writing about problems helps me to solve them.

So, close friends and anonymous third parties, here's what I'm feeling:

I'm dating an incredible guy. I love him. He's funny and considerate, smart, good looking, witty, sociable, understanding...a dream come true...really. But he's so incredible, so amazing and wonderful, that sometimes it hurts a little bit to be around him...

Imagine dating someone who is better than you at everything. Even the things you maybe thought you were pretty good at. And, while you admire him and care about him, you also feel a little bit like dirt just being around him because you never feel like you really measure up to anything that he does or has done.

And so, while you love this person so much you'd probably take a bullet for him, there's a small part of you that is in constant pain around him, and you just want to just go hide somewhere or find some people who aren't so amazing so you can feel like you have some sort of value again, because around him you just feel like a waste of a human being.

Its not that he doesn't treat you well, or doesn't seem to care about you. Quite the opposite. You've maybe never been treated so well in your life. But again, that just makes you feel like you're way out of your league somehow... and then you just feel like shit again... and when he's around sometimes its bearable because he's there grinning or holding your hand or doing something adorable and you're just thinking about him (literally, almost nothing except for him the whole time...so much so that maybe you're not paying attention to anything around you, like how you're driving, or that you're dropping things, or that you sound like an idiot when you try to talk) and you're not thinking as much about how your own life is going and how its really not amounting to a whole heck of a lot right now.

But then you go home and it all comes flooding back to you and it sticks with you the rest of the week and just hurts again when he's around even though its numbed a bit by how great he is?

Thats all cyclical and doesnt make any sense, but thats kinda how I've been feeling.

If this was someone I knew and not me, this is what I would tell that person:

(This is also what I've been trying to tell myself the last few weeks)

"Well, he obviously likes you for some reason. He sees something in you, so just accept that and be happy about it."

I can't accept that. First of all, there's nothing I have that he doesn't have or can't get. Secondly, I think his sense of judgement is a little bit skewed right now.

I didn't mention that my boyfriend was in a long term abusive, sheltered relationship a year before he met me, so maybe all the day-to-day normal courteous, nice, stuff that I do seems really great to him, even when its just what any enamored guy would do for the person he fell in love with.

I just worry that maybe he'll realize later on that I'm not so great after all, or worse, that I'll just stay caught up in all these feelings and I really won't be great after all because I can't be myself when I'm always worrying about crap like this.

The bottom line is, I can get through a lot of letdowns, but I'm not sure if I could get through ever being let down by this guy. It would be an awfully long and hard fall. So, I either need to figure out how to fix the way I feel somehow, or find a way to gently let myself down now and deal with it somehow so as to avoid more and deeper pain.

I prefer to change how I feel...I just don't know how I'm supposed to do that.