Dear juliam:

You loved him and you believe (last line) that he didn’t reciprocate, or as the title of your thread reads, that he “Cannot love you back.”

Reads to me that he did love you. You felt loved by him and I trust, by how you come across to me in your thread, that what you felt was indeed love.

His problem is the childhood injuries he is carrying with him, not healed yet, not enough. So he is scared and it is the fear that made him numb. You wrote: “he would suddenly say he felt numb, felt nothing’- these words crushed you, I believe, because you misunderstood:

He couldn’t have felt numb unless he was significantly fearful. If he wasn’t fearful, he would have felt something. It is people who are very afraid who feel nothing. It wasn’t that he didn’t love you- it was that he did love you and that scared him.

Did he tell you about his childhood?

anita