Dear Julie:

I have a possibility about what it is that is off with your boyfriend (“since our first dates I’ve had the feeling that something is… off”):

You wrote, “I have shared all my doubts openly and honestly with him and it shocks me always but he is very patient and loving with my worries”- he is very patient and loving with your worries not as the man involved in the relationship you are worried about, but as a third party. In other words he removes himself emotionally from you while you talk to him about your worries (and probably as he sits with you in counseling), and is in a way, a third party, uninvolved. As a third-party he is able to be patient and loving toward you.

He is “pretty closed off about his own emotions/thoughts (while open to mine)”- as a boyfriend he is closed off, as a third party he is open.

So what happened is that you felt “entirely supported, accepted, and loved” by a third party while unloved by your boyfriend.

Again, as your boyfriend, he is “very physically restrained (i.e. does not touch me unless I ask)… he seems to avoid it/ always gets headaches”, but as a third party he wants “the old fashioned married with a kid life… wanting us to deepen our commitment and move in to a new place together in July”.

He told you, “that it’s ok for me to have these doubts and that I can continue to decide about our relationship once we move in…he feels if we don’t move in, we won’t grow together “- this is the third party talking, similar to how a psychotherapist will talk to a client, giving you advice about your relationship with … someone else.

You wrote, “I’m disappointed that while we talk a lot about things there hasn’t been much of any change in behavi0r over the year”- there hasn’t been any change, I believe, because you’ve been talking with a third party, and your boyfriend, he wasn’t really present during those talks.

“I want to believe him when he says it’s his living circumstances etc. that make him feel constrained in his current behavior, but I don’t think that’s true”- I don’t think it is true either. It is.. the third party that believes it, but the third party cannot guarantee such a thing, not knowing the boyfriend involved.

“I encouraged him to seek his own therapy but he’s very resistant to the idea”- he is not interested in getting to know your boyfriend, that is, himself. He is not interested in departing from his third-party MO.

My understanding at this point is that he deals with life and problems as a third party, handling things in theory, as if he is not personally involved in the relationship, in theory this or that will work, but practically, he is not willing to look into himself, to connect with the part of him he disassociated from long ago, not really involving that disassociated part.

When he is loving and patient with you, as this third-party person, you may get confused at times, maybe thinking there is something wrong with you, maybe you are not a loving person, but his loving behavior is possible only while he assumes the third party position. Otherwise, you will be living with a closed off man who has shut a very important part of himself long ago.

What do you think?

anita