Dear natie:

You are welcome. I wrote to you: “No one is perfectly good at all times, but we should strive to improve, to become better“, and you wrote: “This sentence you wrote is everything I am struggling with. The thought in my head is that given this statement, him and I are not perfect, but he is striving to improve, should that be a game changer?“-

– no, this should not be a game changer in regard to your question of resuming-or-not a relationship with him. He is welcome to improve in his life, and he can do that. It is not your job/ role (the “mother.. teacher” role) to monitor his improvement and reward him for striving, as if giving him an A+ if he does a good job striving…  because you are not really his mother or his teacher.

Your “mother-son/ teacher-student” relationship with him has also been a sexual relationship. There is no way that a mother can be a good mother to her son, or for a teacher to be a good teacher to her student when she is having sex with him, is there.

If you want to be a good mother, or a good teacher, you will have to accomplish these things in a different context, such as in the professional setting of a classroom.  In other words: you have to take your need to mother and teach out of the context of a romantic/ sexual relationship!

More of my comments in regard to the first part of my yesterday post:

(1) It’s a good thing that he enjoys some career stability. He can afford psychotherapy so to help with his striving to improve,

(2) He’s been the feminine, emotional person in the relationship, the one “crying in the middle of the night“, etc., and you’ve been the masculine, practical person in the relationship, having tried to comfort him when he cried, etc. There is nothing wrong with this dynamic if the two people are comfortable with this unconventional dynamic. But you are not comfortable with it, telling him “to man up“. You’ve been waiting for him to grow up- in the context of a romantic/ sexual relationship- and become the masculine person that you need him to be.

(3) You shared that both he and a friend of yours “keep telling me I’m controlling in this relationship“- a mother has to reasonably control her son if she wants to do a good job mothering, and a teacher has to reasonably control her student if she wants to do a good job teaching. Control is part of either one of these jobs. In a new, future romantic relationship, where you choose the right man for you- if there is no mother-son, teacher-student dynamic, or another kind of superior-inferior dynamic- there will be no issue of control!

(4) He accused you of “not accepting him the way he is”, and he is right. But it is not your job to accept him the way he is. Your job is to choose a man who is right for a romantic/ sexual relationship with you, instead of choosing a man who is wrong, and then try to change him,

(5) When he told you: “I don’t see why you can’t make that happen even if it means to change your entire career you can always find another job“, and in regard to your internship in the UAE: “a selfish move and that I did it for my own good and not to the good of the relationship… he doubts any guy would want to be with me with my mentality (not wanting to marry right now“- that’s classic sexism (“Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one’s sex or gender. It is linked to stereotypes and gender roles and may include the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another”, Wikipedia).

He expressed the stereotypical gender role expectation that a woman should focus on getting married and having children while the man is expected to focus on his career and activities outside the home, and he aggressively pressured you in the words he used, to accommodate these sexist attitudes.

(6) Recently, he “comes begging to rekindle the relationship, telling me that.. (he) understands everything I have been trying to help him with… how he just wants to prove to me that he gets me“- hearing him say this makes it very, very tempting for you to resume a relationship with him, doesn’t it? It does, I think, because it is like the child that you were hearing your mother say the same thing, elaborated: I finally get you, natie. I finally appreciate all that you did to try to help me. I now can be the exact mother that you needed me to be all along because you helped me so much. Thank you, thank you natie!!! And please give me another chance!

Resist the temptation, natie. Remember, in the context of him and you, in real life: neither one of you is parent, neither one of you is child.

anita

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by .