I'm one of those good girls, and he knows it, he was just dumped, and I ended up being his rebound. Do men ever regret hurting us like this?

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In general, no. They don’t.

Most people are entirely too selfish to spare some thought towards what their actions are doing to others. They have an emotional void that was created when they were young that can’t be filled, that could perhaps be identified and shaken loose with years of therapy, but most won’t ever get to the point where they feel they need it.

You need to learn how to recognize these people and stop getting involved with them.

I’m going to be blunt. It’s your own needs and wishes that cause you to be willfully blind to other people’s issues. You don’t see the emotional void in yourself, so you can’t see it operating in others. This dynamic directly leads to the kind of rationale you’re selling to yourself and us here, that you’re one of the good girls.

I’m not saying you’re not a good girl, but being a good girl is not going to stop men from unconsciously taking advantage of you. There is nothing you can change about yourself that will stop this from happening. It has absolutely nothing to do with you.

He never had a relationship with you, he was just filling a void that was created by the failure of his last relationship. The failure of his last relationship was probably caused by the same emotional void that caused him to use you.

You need to get better at recognizing this. Both in yourself and others. If you’re not making an emotional connection with a person, if he doesn’t seem to ever invoke that part of the brain where he’s sensitive and caring, with you, if you never find yourself needing to invoke that part of your brain when you’re dealing with him, then your interaction is one sided and someone is getting used.

Being that you’re the one that got hurt here, you didn’t recognize that he wasn’t interested in building a real relationship with you. You should have figured that out. You should have sensed it, something should have felt off about it.

If someone is all flash, if they say all the right things, if someone is super-smooth, that is a practiced thing. Nobody grows up just knowing how to do it. It’s a kind of manipulation that people like that start learning as teenagers. It allows them to easily find people like yourself to want to fall in love with them. But they can’t maintain relationships for the same reason they felt the need to learn how to manipulate people.

If you can’t start seeing this in others, if you can’t start seeing the tendency in yourself to rely on obvious markers, on flash and surface, then you’ll never find a relationship that has any kind of substance. And if you do by chance luck into one, the chances of you throwing it away over something that would have otherwise been inconsequential is high.