I have been thinking about XN in the abstract for a while. It's easier to cope with that way and I'm lucky enough to be 150 miles away from him, to not have him try to hoover after the 3rd day I went NC, and not to have any ties with him other than a friend who works with him.

There's been a fair bit of talk about N dipping lately on the board I belong to and I used to get real urges to dip by seeing what he was up to on Facebook (I can't see his page but could see his friends list and stuff he'd posted on other friends pages). Today though I thought that I'm not really interested in what he's up to.

The XN I knew really is dead to me.

The guy that has replaced him is not someone I would be attracted to. He has regressed to his early 20s, is spending a fortune on clothes (claimed he was rediscovering his "normal" self when he started therapy and hence needed a new image...), will no doubt will chasing around after lots of young women now to boost his ego, has friends who are about 10 years younger than him. He is obsessed with work and will be going out and getting his kicks from taking drugs and flirting with women he'll regard as objects.

When he was in his early 20s he lived like that but then went travelling and discarded all the friends he had then because he said they made him feel bad. Now we're not together, he's repeating exactly the same cycle of doing a job he doesn't like (because he has no direction) and falling in with a group of 'convenient' friends (in this case, people from work).

Just before I went NC, I asked him if he would like me to leave him alone and if was happy with these new friends of his. In response, he told me angrily that he wasn't happy and that these people fulfilled about 20% of what he would like in terms of genuine friendships.

The guy I fell in love with wasn't like this (which was part how he presented himself and in part a construct in my mind).

The guy I fell in love with has reinvented himself to mirror the young friends he has now. This reinvention no longer resembles the guy I fell for in the beginning - the guy who, I believed, had similar values to me. And I'm not interested in his new reinvented self - the self he claimed was him just "growing up and being normal" now that he was in therapy.

I want someone with substance and similar values to me, not a shallow fake who has so little personality or originality that he has to copy a 25 year old idiot that he works with for his style and personality.

He is dead to me now.