Dear Lea:

He is very concerned with social status/ education/ wealth?

I am thinking: He witnessed a bad marriage between his parents, lots of stress in the home.His mother is the strict, aggressive parent, his father- the cool parent. His empathy is with his father, so he tries to be for his father what his mother was not: gentle, feminine.

He doesn’t want to ever be stuck with a woman, like his father and himself have been stuck with his strict, aggressive, unpleasant mother. He gets scared if a girl wants a second date with him, gets scared that a girl/ young woman will want to marry him.

His family life was stressful, there was tension in the air, the more he interacts with his family members, the higher his distress level, so he turns inward,  withdraws from the outside, becomes introverted- less stress that way.

He meets you, feels connected, has a date with you, sex, then he turns inward/withdraws (its his habit by now). Let’s be friends, he tells you, and reaches out to you to talk, a lot. You suggest to give a relationship a try, he agrees, then he turns inward- it’s his habit, since early childhood.

You wrote  that the two of you talked a lot: “we spent the whole week daily talking in average 6th per day.. spend that many hours talking .. about everything”-

– you talked so much, “about everything”,  and yet he is very much a mystery to you. What is that “everything” that you talked about?

(I will be away from the computer, and back in about nine hours from now).

anita