Anybody else feel like they're obsessed with the idea of love?

It's funny because the one I'm referring to here had never dated anybody when we were still friends, he was the one talking about love as this beautiful thing while I was the one knowing it was definitely not all rainbows and unicorns. As someone who'd never experienced it, it was like he idealised everything about it, one day we even discussed cheating and I made it clear I thought it was shameful and that the person cheated on shouldn't go back to their cheating partner and he was more on the "if they love each other they'll move past it" side, which is rather ironic considering there's a history of cheating between his parents...

Also, I know he liked love songs and romantic films, he wrote poems, which was a real contrast with the tough exterior he wanted to keep on, even though I knew he wasn't like that (I'd even tell him he was a romantic and also dark on the outside and colourful on the inside, LMAO little did I know).

When we were friends he told me he wasn't really into dating apps (which didn't keep him from creating a profile with a friend, claiming it was for fun) because he wanted to be able to say he had a beautiful story about how he met his girlfriend. He'd also tell me what nicknames he would call her, what type of hair or height he preferred in girls... It came across as light-hearted but I don't know what to think about it now. Post discard he sent me a reel about "people who haven't been loved much" and I didn't know how to feel about it. He's the kind of person who claims to like solitude but is always surrounded, the kind of person everybody likes, how could they not with that charming image he's created? Even those who know what happened between us? 😊 And then there's that thing I've mentioned before about how he'd tell me he didn't deserve to be loved.

I feel like he wants to be able to say someone is interested in him (but not in my way, since I wasn't okay with how he treated me 🙃), that he got to experience love. Does he even know love is about empathy, being genuine? There's still this fear that he'll be good to someone else, I mean he was good to me until I had something to say about his behaviour, if I didn't like something he did or how he handled a situation with me, or even if I didn't do exactly what he wanted me to do, the good guy was gone. Like I said, it was like dealing with two different people...

He had a crush when we met but it was someone he couldn't have so all he could do was spend as much time as he could with her, make little things for her, hell he even wrote poems inspired by her, I knew he was affected by her being gone when she left due to external factors. I asked him if he was in love or if it was just a crush, at the beginning of our friendship and he told me it wasn't a crush. That he loved her. He gave me a bunch of adjectives to describe her... he wasn't even subtle in public and I never knew if she figured it out but I wouldn't be surprised. It's funny how he told me he wasn't thinking about her months later but then just a week before I would last hang out with him (and I didn't know it yet) he suddenly told me he was still thinking about her, that he'd seen things that reminded him of her?

Honestly if it was real, it was even more shitty of him to discard me the way he did when he knew about my own feelings for him, considering that he should know EXACTLY how it feels to have feelings for someone you can't have. His behaviour when it came to her wasn't so different from mine towards him, the only difference was that we could actually hang out because we were friends and they weren't, there was an actual "relationship" between us that they didn't have. He also told me he wouldn't use someone to get over somebody else, bit of a headscratch when you know a former mutual friend came into the picture this summer and he told me about it, not knowing if he had feelings for her, not knowing what to do about it. The way he talked about it when he got mad at me for being sad about it... he was like "I thought I could finally have something but no!", also when he told me about the situation he made it clear that he thought she was out of his league, and why would she be interested in him?

I'm kinda the only one who paid for having feelings for him, which I wish he'd never known about but oh well ✌🏼 I don't know, it's just weird. I don't know if he's really capable of love, REAL love, or if it will always be idealisation and projection. I feel like he just wants to experience something he's never had, I don't even know what I'm expecting from this post, I guess I'm mainly venting but I can't lie, it would speak volumes about him if he was suddenly caring towards someone but he couldn't show actual care with the one he called his best friend . The fact my feelings weren't mutual should NOT have changed anything about how he treated me . And he was always speaking as if he was broken, as if there was something inside him that wasn't right, I don't know what to think. Before he discarded me I only ever saw good things in him, even when we argued and I was begging him to communicate, I never would've seen him as an evil guy but hey, this is the guy who ended up telling me he had no emotions and that he used to hurt people mentally because it was more painful than physical pain, something I never thought I would hear from him, regardless of whether it was true or not, so...??

And he knows full well I won't know the people he might get involved with, which means they won't know how he treated me. They won't know how dark he really is, hell even our former mutual friends refused to see flaws in his behaviour?? It was always my fault?? And even when they didn't put it this way they made it clear by choosing to stop talking to me?? And on the flip side... what if he's so blinded by his idealisation he chooses to do whatever the other person wants, as long as she's not me? What if he wants to make her happy because he thinks she's worth it, while me asking for the bare minimum was clearly too much for him? Lmao he even told me he had to do more with me, that I was too sensitive, that I didn't see what he did for me, that it wasn't the bare minimum for him. The bar is in hell if he thinks what he did for me was worth a medal?? What, are you used to giving so little you think actually showing that you care is considered hassle?

Anyway, I don't know how to end this so... cheers to whoever takes enough time to read it all.