Dear Anonymous:

I would like to connect some of your previous posts in older threads with your current thread and see where that leads me.

October 2015, four years and three months ago, you were living with a  roommate you were unhappy with, in an apartment, far away from your parents, in a location you didn’t like. You had a boyfriend with whom you broke up, got back together, broke up again and got back together, “all because I don’t know what I want.

You wrote: “sometimes I still feel stuck and stagnate, and am unsure of where exactly that feeling is stemming from… the relationship? School? My job? I can’t seem to pinpoint it. The uncertainty I have felt about the relationship makes me feel anxious, and it definitely doesn’t make me feel good at all”.

January 2016, four years ago, you wanted to move back with your mother (and her boyfriend). You wrote: “If I moved home.. I KNOW after a week I’d want to get out of there. I am a very independent person and love living freely of my parents and exploring life on my own! Although I love the location my mom lives in, I just feel I’d become sad and bored and wondering why I didn’t try to make things work with my love”.

You didn’t want to move far away from your boyfriend who couldn’t or wouldn’t move location (to the area where your mother lived) and risk the relationship ending. And you considered suggesting to him that the two of you get a place together and live together in the current area.

You then came up with a solution: you evicted your roommate out of your apartment, planning on finding a new roommate,  and you felt elated for not “moving out and running away from life”, and for choosing instead to face and practice “so much confrontation and conflict and honesty”.

You wrote: “I feel this new living situation will inspire a completely new outlook and perspective on life here, and I can’t wait for my new peaceful space! I think everything in my life will only get better now that my own home is a pleasant space to be in”.

Four years later, you shared that you are living in a small town (back with your mother?), that the relationship with same boyfriend (“my ex of four years) a bit over a year ago, that it was a painful breakup, and that shortly after that breakup, you had a fancy dinner date with a man, and then hooked up with him about once a month for about a year. Two months ago you suggested that the two of you go on  a second date and you were “probing to see what he was feeling”. He then told you that he doesn’t want to date you, doesn’t want to be in a relationship, doesn’t want a girlfriend, and he told you to “not wait for him”.

My input: I don’t think he is leaving you on the hook (from the title of your thread). I think that he was very clear that what the two of you had (and may resume, if it is up to him, depending on his schedule and other hookup situations and the like) was just that, a hookup situation.

I don’t see a contradiction between the fact that he is still friendly with you and the fact that the hookup situation has been on a pause in the last two months. Another term to the situation is “friends with benefits”. The friend part means being friendly, which is what he is doing. The benefits part is on a break at this time, that is all I see.

I hope to read more from you.

anita