When I was a little girl I had the dream that when I was old enough to go to college, I would meet the perfect guy.

He would be tall, ambitious and outgoing. He'd be interested in my passions, and in return, I would be in his. We would support each other, guide and encourage one another. We would have a picture-perfect college romance and then one day he would ask my father for my hand in marriage.

That was how I imagined it in my head.

If you would have told me four years later as I prepared for college graduation that I would be where I am now, I would have laughed.

A few semesters into my college career, everything seemed to be going perfectly. I had gotten into the perfect dream school, had perfect roommates, but despite my efforts, I had yet to find my imaginary prince charming.

That was until I met him.

He was seemingly perfect. We met at a food event in the city when through the crowd of hundreds, he approached me for a conversation. He was charming and likable and everything I could have ever hoped for. He said he had noticed me earlier as I stood with my friends and thought I was beautiful. We talked for what seemed like hours about where we went to school, our families and plans for the future.

That night he asked me on a date and met my parents. He said he was a hopeless romantic and that I deserved to be treated like a queen.

Several months after our first date at a bowling alley, everything was falling into place. I was dating my dream man. This is it, I thought to myself. This is the man who you might spend the rest of your life with. He was funny and smart and knew exactly what to say to make me fall more in love with him every day. People who knew us said that there was no doubt in their minds that he was going to be my husband. We seemed to fit. We worked. With him everything was easy and neither of us had to try to impress the other. His presence was a quiet comfort like we had known each other for years.

Little did I know, he was hiding a secret from me that I would have never imagined.

A year after we met our relationship started to get rocky. There would be some days that he would talk to me all day, and others he would fall off the face of the earth. We had never officially called it quits, and had never even discussed ending everything. I assumed it was just a stage, everybody went through this. Every relationship had a rough patch.

But this was different.

He seemed less interested in our conversations. He started to shut me out with no explanation. He became angry and verbally abusive when I didn't respond to his phone calls. One day I noticed I could no longer Snapchat message him, and would soon discover he had deleted me on every form of social media available.

When I confronted him about why he had deleted and even blocked me on most social media platforms, he had no explanation. When I continued to press him, he admitted he had found someone else.

I was then greeted by a text from a woman claiming to be his fiancee. She explained to me that she was sorry he had been a jerk, but that they were happy.

My heart was broken.

The man I had given everything to in college had a fiancee. For how long, I don't know. There was no single moment I could pinpoint to where things changed. All I knew was that I felt betrayed. I felt like I didn't matter to him or anyone. The worst part was, his fiancee either knew about me or didn't care when she found out.

Soon after this, I realized that there was no good reason for me to feel bad about the situation. I could either sit around and feel sorry for myself or I could use it as fuel. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was the best thing that could have happened to me. I had a long history of relying on men to make me feel better about myself.

Being in a relationship somehow proved I was worthy of being loved. After I learned that my boyfriend had chosen another woman over me, I discovered that the only person to make me happy is me. I am responsible for my own happiness and can use this to feel even stronger now than ever.

This heartbreak has made me more independent and sure of what I want in my life and in a relationship, and for that, I could not thank him enough.