Thank you, Anita.

What I meant is that he has a very stable, unshakeable, unmovable spirit. He is independent and emotionally sturdy like no person I have ever met before. He is usually bright and cheery, and totally level-headed. When I am feeling anxious and extremely stressed about my demanding life and goals, this is a great comfort to me (when we’re together). He has immense patience and never seems to feel the need to rush anything, ever. It sometimes calms me and gives me confidence, sometimes causes me great distress not being able to have him somewhere on time. Examples that come to mind are showing up with eggs as planned so the cornbread could be done on time for Thanksgiving dinner, and being half an hour late to meet my older brother for the first time. When we’re not together and I can’t reach him, I feel as though he doesn’t recognize any urgency I am trying to communicate, so it serves as a source of disconnectedness. He almost never answers the phone if I call. I feel disrespected as a result, too.

We don’t live together yet, but we are supposed to move abroad together in a couple of months for my job. We see each other for 1-2 days/nights every weekend, and sometimes 1-maybe 2 times during the week. He is always delighted to see me, and everyone knows how in love he is. It’s plain to see. He is very affectionate, always paying attention to me, always playfully bragging about me to my friends and complimenting me for my intelligence, ambition, little successes, looks, whatever it is he likes. We share almost all of our interests and core values, and have the same priorities and goals for our future together. He wants to get married and have kids in the next years, we’ve talked about it several times.

But unfortunately, yes, as you said, “on his own timing, his own chosen place and time? Not when you are waiting for him, not when and where you need him?”. He works a lot (as do I) and is also dealing with some legal issues that are very time consuming (but not his fault). So what little time we spend together is doing things I planned or else sitting around watching Netflix, and for example, even though he’s close to his mother and sees her every couple of weeks, he doesn’t make an effort to bring her and me together or get her to accept me. I met her twice, and we’re supposed to move away soon. He says there’s no reason for me to worry about that but I feel rejected by her lack of interest too; another thing that I said hurts me that he hasn’t made any effort to change.

Their culture is rather cold, and I do think they’re just being how they are. It’s inconsiderate and it hurts me, and it doesn’t seem to change although he keeps saying it will, that it takes time. I love many things about him and am working on loving myself and being totally self-sufficient without having lingering sadness anyway. My plan is to see how it goes when we move abroad, how he responds to living in another country, far from his mother for example. But right now his behavior keeps making me feel panicked and unloved, and I am fairly sure that if something terrible happened and he were busy, I wouldn’t be able to reach him. I feel as though I’m being uncaring towards myself for tolerating a person who makes me feel that way. But I love him so much and I don’t want to break up over one (albeit big) issue.

Sorry for being so wordy again.

Hi Nina,

Thank you for your response.

For whatever reason, he says this has never been an issue for him in past relationships, which I suppose is an attempt to make me feel that I am the one here making it into a problem. My friends say what you say though.

He says he is indeed “working on it” — but in the meantime, there are always slip-ups and it causes me stress, interferes with my work. Then add the stress of thinking “his exes were ok with this, why can’t I just accept it?” and I feel myself sinking into a sad, lonely, self-critical mood.

To answer your question, we have talked about it and made agreements, but I am not sure if we really have that understanding, and I am not sure how to enforce those agreements.

AH

Thank you Nina, that’s helpful to hear your story. How long did it take for your anxiety to subside once you stopped trying to control it? I guess this is what I’m doing by shutting my phone off. Baby steps. It’s a useful strategy to calm myself for now.

I told him I absolutely don’t need to talk to him everyday, a text here and there is nice but if he’s too busy some days that’s okay. Still, I need to know that if I reach out, he will reach back. I will keep working on my patience.

I wish he would respect ground rules. It seems like he never will though. He wants me to just understand him, which is fine to a certain extent, but I also need to be understood and respected. I hope we can overcome this.

Hi Anita,

Thanks very much for replying again. I do believe it is number 3. I have asked him what you are asking before and he says that one of two things are happening: either (1) he is stressed and working on something, so he doesn’t check his phone at all and keeps it on silent (he is quite introverted and I guess this isn’t too unusual – his mother complains about him being unreachable too), then afterwards he is exhausted and forgets to check and/or turn the volume back on/dig it out of his bag or jacket, or (2) – rarely – he is overwhelmed because we had some fight and he doesn’t want to fight further, plus he is under some deadline and has to focus on getting xyz important task done.

He says it’s hard to try to pay attention to his phone everyday after never having done so in his life. I believe he is trying to change his behavior, but old habits die hard. He said his life would be better in general if he could get better about this and the punctuality thing.

I suppose that what I need is more patience and attention to myself and meeting my own needs. But I am the kind of person who can implement changes immediately if I know my behavior is hurting my partner, so this is very difficult for me to tolerate and still feel loved and respected. Also I keep wanting to (and often do) say “Ok let’s get back to goofing off and having fun together!” and then at some unexpected moment it happens again and hits me like a ton of bricks. Then I’m back inflicting terrible wounds on myself psychologically and desperately wanting to hear from him, while he is buzzing along happily over at his apartment, oblivious to my distress.

I mentioned that the anxiety is increasing… these instances used to just annoy me periodically but now I am starting to have persistent anxiety, fears that it’s only a matter of time till he hurts me again. It’s very distracting. Meanwhile he is asking for more time and patience. I love him and I want to give that. I am trying but I don’t know what I’m doing. It still hurts very often and I don’t know how to get through it, or how long to try.

AH