How did the withdrawal go during high-school go?

I worried that I was too late and that the woman I love would not be able to forget me. LUCKILY I am not that unforgettable. She moved on and I was soon hearing stories of her making out with a hockey player from a classmate who always spread the most horrible rumors about she and everyone else. He had gone out with her previously and decried her as stupid and arrogant, which made me wonder if he was being truthful from his perspective, he knew that I liked her and was after her still (or now me) or merely had the desire to be tied to a tree and fed to the local carnivorous wildlife. I was a bit destroyed senior year, every time my friend NP or anyone else mentioned her I became wracked with despair.

Physiologists denote three stages to love and I was VERY aware of the research on all of this, and had noted that through the late days of high school a fluctuation sometimes occurred where instead of feeling constantly reminded of her I had spells of stark lucidity... except periodically it would feel like my heart was being torn out with a metal claw fashioned from farming implements tied together with barbed wire and fiberglass whenever I thought about losing her or her being hurt, but the body was never designed to continue on in stage two, because the body can't handle being constantly soaked with adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin, so this third stage must have been attachment.

Attachment stages didn't last that long, I got into the habit of falling to my knees whenever I was out walking in the wild if the pain began. I didn't want to push my friends away suddenly as though something obviously were wrong so instead I tried to subtly decrease the quality and amount of time we spent together, some of them began hanging out with her more (perhaps because she was still trying to get to me), so I said goodbye to them in my own way in the time before graduation knowing it would be many years before I would ever be able to speak to them again.

It was bothering to think that likewise their friendship might be better spent on someone with higher attributes than myself, especially during the critical period of initial career-finding and mate-bonding our species undergoes. By being alone all of the time to stay under the radar and disappear that my love might find HER soulmate I was going to set a very bad example, and likewise because I would certainly now NEVER drink in case secrets began spilling out of me as many of my friends had drunkenly confessed their love for girl A or B to me, I wasn't going to be much fun and might make the others feel bad for being a downer or sobrietous loon.

There was also the chance that some other girl was going to fall in love with me and seek revenge on this woman, or my domineering family would attack her in an attempt to preserve 'the sacred lineage of kings', and thus there might have been anonymous tips to the police that she was stealing money, cyber-bullying, work complaints, dead kittens mailed to her in unmarked packages and calls to her from payphones in the early hours of the morning. ALSO people just generally seem to hate unrequited love in our culture of immediate gratification

even though maybe 98% of the population has loved someone this way, one is considered weak for 'not winning the day', look at how this woman is attacked in the comments after confessing something similar!
　
I was confident that it was still possible to live a fun and exciting life without having another person there. We watched a film in health class in seventh grade on relationships and near the middle they interviewed an old woman in an enormous safari helmet twice the size of her head discussing how she had had a great life never being married. One day I will find a similar helm for myself. It was decided that I would become a merry recluse.

My problem came back to how I was going to live without her, was I seriously going to be able to spend the rest of my life never seeing her again? Guides for widows or widowers generally counsel a grieving period and then readmittance into dating life. I thought it more likely that I would begin talking to myself as if she were there, like the old woman in the play "White Elephant", Qays ibn al-Mulawwah or how Dante Alighieri spoke to Beatrice through his work.
　
She hugged me when we said goodbye for the last time, although I saw her once after that standing in line for a movie with a boy.

So then college began and I had a few choices to make. Should I lie and claim to have had hundreds of past girlfriends? Should I tell a few new friends any of my story, and strangest of all as a dilemma of our new century: what was life going to be like with the internet? I have never wanted to be "A Creeper". In the entire time I have loved her I have never snuck around her house as a peeping Tom, stolen her things, spied on her, or any action of that sort because the boundary between "total romantic obsession" and "total crazy freak" is a very thin one, and once again I don't think as someone with her best interests at heart I would want to cause her the discomfort of AN INSANE STALKER DUDE.

I resolved after high school to only look her up on the internet once every two months, just to make sure that she was OK. Still, I can take a little bit of information and learn a lot from it, like the inferences I was able to draw about her dreams just from knowing one of her favorite movies, there would have to be some rules. The months went by and the basic information available changed very little between check-ins, (I resolved absolutely not to get on Facebook, even with an inaccessible profile the risk would be too great, especially with many of my friends interacting with her regularly) so as I tried to learn just a bit more in the limited timeframe I allowed myself I began reading some stuff of her father's online, summaries of places her mother was visiting, looking at where she worked on Google Street View imagining nearby restaurants she might have visited and stores she may have gone inside. (None of this with insane or nefarious intent, I just wanted to feel close to her and better understand how she was doing) BUT firstly I worried that Google might accidentally release search histories again and secondly that I was taking things too far even just a few hours a year.

Women began throwing themselves at me. I was automatically nominated for "The Ten Most Eligible Bachelors" of my school in the first week by the college newspaper, to which my mental response was 'uh oh'. This was not because I was so wonderful a person but because I project a confident disinterest predicated on not wanting to sleep with anyone that women find intriguing- because if I was not interested in them it meant that I might be better than them (when in fact the reality was that I considered myself much worse and therefore ineligible). It wasn't that none of the women after me were unattractive or non-fascinating, some outside observer might objectively rate several of them higher than my love in those categories, but to me it was not, and is not the same thing at all. After traveling around the world meeting many, many desirable women to me she still seems the best, not the most compassionate, talented, vibrant, or appealing on any measurable scale, but within my heart. When you are deeply in love with someone being approached by another person is like hearing your favorite song being covered by a band in a different genre with too much enthusiasm.

Still, was not fair to reject these women with lame or disingenuous excuses so mainly I tried to stall my way through a semester or seem as oblivious or non-committal as possible, or just make myself unhealthy or crude again for a while, then I would move to a new dorm or class or city and try not to be noticed. I met some really cool friends who were either pretty settled in their life or not really worrying about such things, and also kept speaking to people on isolated web forums closed off from the rest of the internet when I could. I varied details of my past as an experiment to see which relationships would be best served by which information, to which I apologize to everyone. It was my assumption that had you known everything you would be OK with me making up stuff to cover the information I didn't want to get out for the best interest of the girl I cared about, myself, those other women who would be hurt by news of my past since this meant a rather devastating rejection, and also the cast of several soap operas who would suddenly be fired to make room produce all of this for daytime television.