Dear Michelle:

Welcome back, I am sorry you are back with a broken heart though!

Here is my input based on your posts in your previous thread and your original post in this thread.

I don’t think that it is true that “He wants all the benefits of a relationship, all the good parts.. doesn’t have strong feelings.. doesn’t value what I was giving”- it is not that he was a cold hearted man who knew ahead of time that he wanted a casual relationship and led you on, suggesting that he wants a long term relationship so to take advantage of you sexually.

What I think happened is that like he said, he experienced much of this life the bad relationship between his parents, and that affected him negatively. This can very well be why at 35 his few long term relationships didn’t last more than about a year each. Recently he moved back home, he viewed it as a step back, and was somewhat depressed. So when you met him he was in a low point in his life, and therefore, not likely to be more receptive to the idea of a marriage than he was before, at better times. But reads like he did feel for you and doesn’t read to me that he intended to not have a long  term relationship with you.

In your previous thread you wrote: “I am already programmed to express the worst most of the time.. I’m always prepared”, and I wrote to you: “when we are prepared for the worst (in this case it would be the ending of this new relationship), we tend to make the worst happen sooner than later, so that we are no longer anxiously waiting for it to happen”.

I think this is exactly what you did a few weeks later, you made the ending of the relationship happen during that very visit, so to no longer be anxious about it ending sometime in the future: “He came over to my apartment and we had a normal visit like usual”, and you turned the visit to a very unusual and last visit by asking him too many questions, interrogating him and accusing him of “having no inclination of having a long term relationship with me… never intended for me to be permanent”, and throwing a fit of some sort, crying “and he felt uncomfortable eventually and left”-

-mission accomplished, relationship ended.

It is not that the situation was ideal: he has a history of witnessing and experiencing by proxy his parent’s bad marriage, a history of not having relationships longer than a year, a setback of him moving back to his parents’ home at 35- but the relationship had a chance of working out if you accepted his history and his life circumstances, and if you were okay with allowing the relationship to unfold patiently, over a longer time, and if you were capable to have that kind of patience and interest.

What he needed was acceptance, not an interrogation and more upset in his life. Not that you owed him that acceptance, not that you don’t have the right to look for what you need in another man, one with a better relationship record and mental health- what I am saying is that you ended this relationship because you were anxious, created a breakup visit and then you accuse him of what he is not guilty of, so to feel like you did the right thing.

I imagine it is not pleasant for you to read my reply, but I am going to submit it anyway because potentially it can help you.

* I suppose that with your anxiety, better meet a man who states clearly that he wants to get married and that he is ready to get married following six months of dating or so.

anita