Dear Andrea,

The conditions for a stable relationship is mostly based on communications, acceptance, responsibility, commitment and openness. But whether a person will work toward it is entirely their choice. You can have expectation for your relationship since you want it to work out, but you can’t really have heavy expectations in the way of your partner. You can predict their actions and their thoughts, but until they have taken actions of some kind, then you won’t understand their stance in your relationship. You can voice your thoughts on the matter and ask to work on it with them, but in the end, their action is dependent on whether they are willing to commit.  After all, you cannot ask more than a person is willing to give.

Now, there are several red flags for you to think about.

1. When you asked your ex if he was willing to commit to a serious relationship, he had rejected it. So you weren’t going to get the serious and intimate relationship you were hoping for. He had made his stance early on, but you still chose to pursued a relationship. Whether you were thinking he might changed his mind later on, I don’t know, but he had made his stance and people rarely change their decision so easily. Especially when he made it obvious that he is not inclined to commit to a serious relationship that will turn co-dependent in the future.

2. Your thought of “young people” using sex as a way of using people and not holding accountability is quite the prejudice against those younger than you. There are many sexual inclinations as much as there are people in the world and studies have shown that teens these days are actually having less sex these days. So is this thought a projection of what you might be thinking about yourself or your previous partners/crushes? Because projection is from personal experience.

3. You seem to find unavailable men to be attractive. From the beginning it was your obsession with someone who had rejected your confession and after it’s someone who had declined to enter a serious relationship with you. But when that casual relationship seemed to be turning serious, you begin to feel irritated. After the person that was inattentive and distance begin to be more accountable for their share of the work in your relationship, you begin to find fault in their actions. You begin to feel that the relationship might be incompatible. You felt safe, though insecure, when your ex was absence, but felt strange and anger when he began to lessen that distance.

4. It seem that you had a lot of intimacy through your bodies, but very little communications. You went to his house and slept, but didn’t really talk except through text. You want to share your interest with him, but he shows no interest. Everyone has different ways of showing support. Though I advocate that a partner should not have to attend any shows just because their partner has interest since emotional support is shown in encouragement, not attending any show to placate their partner. That just sow resentment. But I digress. Now, even before you broke off, you laid together in bliss because you thought he understood what you were trying to tell him. But the thing is, communication take time and effort. It takes a series of discussions with the parties involved willing to listen to every side and angle. It is vulnerable and messy, but it is open and honest. You can’t ever truly understand a person, but they can try to show you who they are. Even then, it is an ongoing work. So did he willingly listen to your insecurities and did you really understand what he was trying to tell you about himself?

5. Rather than think that this is a good opportunity of growth for him, something that he decides for himself, decide for yourself what you’ve learn from it.

6. You haven’t set good boundaries for yourself.

You can’t fix a relationship that wasn’t there in the first place. You had began a casual fling with someone you found attractive, but who like the physical aspect more than the emotional part of your relationship. But deep in your heart, you wish for that share emotion between two people in a serious, romantic relationship. But you’re not going to get it from your ex. He had told you from the beginning that he does not desire emotional intimacy at this point in time. And now that he is, again, unavailable, you want to pursued a relationship again because you miss him. You want to fix what you think is broken even when your intuition is telling you otherwise.

So what is it that he was filling inside of you that you want him back? Better yet, what is it that he represent that makes him so tempting that you willingly ignore your own intuition to pursue him? What kind of story are you telling yourself about your relationship and him that makes you want to go back? There’s a lot of question you need to ask yourself.