Afterthoughts: Some Insecurities

I posted Coping With Scrapping Celibacy elsewhere, and one response posed to me there asked if part of the "jealousy" I mentioned was perhaps because I was jealous they weren't doing it with me. My response includes additional thoughts I failed to include in the essay:
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Thanks for the encouragement and feedback. As for the jealousy that it's not with me, I deliberately left that vague but yes, since you opened that can, it has been the case at least once in the past, particularly where I had believed feelings were mutual but I found out weren't reciprocated quite as I'd thought.

But after writing this, and rewriting it, and adding an addendum, there's another aspect of it I don't think I wrote: it kills me when dear friends I feel so attached to wander off into territory I won't follow them into, like I'm losing them to a world of experiences I can't fully relate to.

And maybe, just maybe, I still experience some other subtleties that I'm now remembering feeling from my younger years: I do wonder if I partially take it personally, that they would rather have X than stay "with me". As pathetic as that sounds, I think there may be something to it.

It's been especially hard when we'd identified so fully in so many ways. In some cases, we were in similar life situations, with the same dilemmas, and while I've known we'd each be making decisions and following our paths, I've tended to think those paths would be similar if we were dealing with things similarly, and when our paths started to diverge widely, maybe I've felt like I've lost a precious part of that friend to something or someone else that doesn't deserve or didn't earn their dedication like I do/did. While that may be partially true in certain cases, I think if I dealt with things better and didn't feel so alienated or "left behind", they would go on wanting to be friends, probably not as close as we'd been, but close nonetheless, just with different experiences.

The problem is that I get hurt really easily when I see someone withdrawing in any way, withdrawing attention, withdrawing time, withdrawing affection, wanting to be friends but just not as close as we were...especially when it seems to be connected with something frivolous like playing with fun body parts or getting drunk...

...add on top of that and everything else the occasional desire that if anyone had gotten to fool around with them, it was me, and you've got a recipe for messiness. Total messiness.

Interesting. Thank you, Dr.