I feel so hurt as I really believed this man loved me and that he really believed I was special, now I feel it was all false and just a way to get his needs met... .it makes me feel that I am not worth loving and recently being divorced has made me feel unlovable anyway... .I am not sure how to recover from it all.
You recover from it all by processing all the emotions you're going through, looking at your beliefs and rules for them, taking very good care of yourself, talking to people who understand, and taking it one day at a time.
You were special to him, in fact you were perfect, until you weren't, and then you were discardable. Those are the actions of someone with a personality disorder, a mental illness, that makes his relationships unstable, his version of "love" a fantasy, his thinking black and white, and his focus on his needs only because they are extreme.
And I invite you to not make the connection that that makes you unlovable; all it says is you were in a relationship with someone who can't love, who is incapable of it, on a sustainable basis because he has a personality disorder. Do you see the connection you made? Is it possible to believe something else?
He said if I loved him I wouldn't throw in the towel and give up on him.
Love is not enough to make a relationship work, especially when "love" means different things to each partner.
He then compared me to former girlfriends when he had told me I was nothing like them.
Of course, you have to be thrown in the discard pile and his opinion of you has to change so he can live with himself.
He does not have a Bpd diagnosis but all the signs are there and I have felt for a long time things were not right.
That's all you need to know really, things were not right, and they weren't going to get right, so as painful as it is, time to grieve the loss, learn the lessons, take value from the experience, on your way to creating the life of your dreams, one day at a time. It's early for that I realize, but that is in you future. Take care of you!
