Hi Yanmei,

I apologize for my late reply, but I could not read your post earlier.

Both you and your boyfriend have a need to belong, to feel cared and loved, to express care and love, to nurture a friendship, to create a family, to have someone close in the night. Your boyfriend had and have part of these needs already met thanks to the presence of his sister, they have a great bound of friendship they learned to trust through ages. That’s an automatic response from their heart to look for the other in a moment of need and an automatic response to comply.
On the converse you never had such needs ever met and expected that one day that you would find a person you would completely trust, a person that loved you above all else and that you could love as much without fear to be left out or be spoken at the back.

I’m sure your boyfriend considers you a very great friend, but his best friend is his sister now. You cannot possibly beat everything they have been through together, the bound of blood they share, the care they showed one for the other. Imagine for a second that during those times you had to fight hard alone to be part of the popular group you actually had someone that supported you, wouldn’t you feel tempted to go back to him for advices and consider your boyfriend later? In the present, your boyfriend and his sister will remain best friends even if they not talk to each other, they will still have that feeling.
In the future, as you and you boyfriend walk the path of life side by side, your bound will become stronger. It may match or even pass the bound he has with his sister, but my advice is to not rely on it or make it the quest of your life. If you leave it to fate, it may never happen. If you try to break the bound, it will be like trying to break him.

There are three things you may do.

Your first way is to expand the concept of your boyfriend. A boyfriend is not only a single person but also the set of all the relationships he carries with him. Bend your boyfriend’s boundary of existence so that they include his sister as well. In other terms, he won’t be him if he did not have a sister, he won’t be him if he didn’t care for her. Consider his sister like a second mind of his you have to relate to. Consider them to be emotionally one. When you ask him for something, think that you are asking THEM for something. When you offer him something, think that you are offering THEM something. Even if he is the one actually acting or receiving, it’s because they somehow agreed to that. Talk with them both, define expectations with them both. In further other terms, you should love both of them and felt loved by them both. You are not his best friend, you are their best friend. You are one big large family.

Your second way is to expand the concept of happiness and relationship. Take example from him: you do not have to put everything onto one person to be happy, your needs of love and care do not need to be met by only one person. Talk with your boyfriend and define what you expect one from the other, give him time to think and to even agree with his sister if that is important to him. For example, try to define how much time a week he is going to dedicate to you without thinking to his sister, how much time you are going to spend together, what you are going to do together. Once you set your rules, find something good and relaxing to do in your spare time. Consider looking for a person you can call best friend indeed.

If the two above solutions make your stomach turn. You should start thinking that he is not the boyfriend you were looking for after all. Part of him exists in the interdependence with someone else. Even thinking to break it, it is like thinking to break him. You are looking for someone who does not have already a deep connection with anybody else. So, why do you hope to find it in a person that has a best friend who’s going to stay for a very long time? It’s because you have him and maybe he is your best friend (even if you do not feel you are his best friend). Is this enough for you? Please, be sure to consider that most people may already have some degree of connection with someone else, be it a sibling, a parent, a teacher, a friend or a priest. So, take into account that finding someone who has absolutely no connection with anybody is going to be very difficult (and you may not even like him). Try to define a reasonable level of existing connection you are going to accept. How much should depend on your age (the longer we live, the more bounds we make). Who knows, you may find out that your boyfriend’s bounds are reasonable. Unfortunately I cannot give you any accurate statistics on the matter, but maybe you can look by yourself, if you decide to look for some new friends.

• This reply was modified 10 years, 1 month ago by Vhanon.