Newbie - bf suddenly left after 9 years

[Italian]

You guys are right. This is not the kind of man I want to rely on in building a life together.

I'm having a hard time re-adjusting my perspective so quickly - for a long time I thought he was a man like his father. A responsible, honest, down-to-earth man, without any odd whims, who spent his life working hard and taking care of his family. So maybe he wasn't all intellectual and worldly and full of surprises, but we come from rural Italy and I appreciate simplicity, honesty, practicality. They are both very quiet people, which is associated with wisdom and introspection.

Lol, now I realize he was quiet because he had, as we say in Italian, crickets in his head.

At least I find comfort in the fact that I'm not the only one he has fooled. Everyone was always telling me what a mature, responsible good man he was, and I was always enthusiastically agreeing. Now everyone's shocked - everyone who knows, at least, because he's going to great lengths to keep the secret. My mother can't look him in the face, my grandma is heartbroken because she'd welcomed him in the family like a son and has seen an almost exact replay of what my father did to my mother (yep, there's a big fat post on daddy issues coming up soon...). Even his own father is embarrassed and astonished and has said something like 'I don't understand, I don't know my own son after 33 years, how is that possible'.

Yup. He had us all fooled for so long. Maybe he even fooled himself, who knows. And chances are most people will keep seeing him as that excellent person because they will never know the truth.

Good thing it came out now rather than further down the line. I'm still in time to disengage and get back on the saddle career-wise. In five years I wouldn't have had that chance. I have surely learned a valuable lesson about giving up opportunities for myself in order to be with someone - won't be making that mistake again!