Hi anita, good to hear from you and once again thank you for lending a listening ear 🙂

To summarize, yes my rest and recovery has indeed been spending time communicating with him. It was something we both looked forward to each day.

Last year we have only been able to meet for a week in June and it was a very fulfilling time for the both of us since meetings are rare. He has planned to visit me and my family around April this year but he recently expressed how the situation he is facing has pushed his own plans back and expressed a lot of frustration at the possibility that he will not be able to follow through with the plans. These being spend some time with his family and then travel around a bit on vacation and then visit me for around two weeks during the festival season before heading back to focus fully on university. We hoped to sit down together and figure out where we were going to go with moving our relationship forward, goals and future plans when we were able to have a sit down chat about those important topics instead of over phone.

he does drop a message once in a while when he gets a chance despite asking for a break, and so do I. I suppose the situation is more along the lines of keeping in touch when we can instead of a true break. I feel like his mentality behind requesting a break was that he believed that if we were not “officially” in an active relationship, that is, a break, it would be easier to manage feelings of hurt and sadness due to not being able to keep in touch as per our usual” I explained to him that just because we say “break”, it doesn’t mean that those feelings are going to stop or be easier to justify by thinking that we weren’t on an active relationship. At least my feelings for him don’t work that way, im not just able to shut them off and back on at will and at convenience.

Unfortunately the most recent conversation stopped short as I was quite blunt and cruel in saying that I didn’t want to speak with him much. I do regret that.

With clarifying his request to take a break, the following is part of his message relating to that:

“Maybe we should take a break. I know it hurts, but I can’t keep hurting you with my absence. Yesterday my brother cried to me about all the stress of starting a new business from nothing and how he can’t go home yet. I have to be here for him.I can’t stand the idea of hurting you too. It’s like the world is pulling me in so many different ways, I can’t do everything.”

“Please do what you need to in order to succeed. And if everything works out on my end, I’ll be back.”

“….at this moment, I can’t really maintain a personal relationship outside of the one with my brother. I don’t have the time, energy, or even cellular reliability to keep it up. I don’t want you to feel like it is because I don’t want you or that it’s because it’s something that you did. Just understand that I have to be here, right now.”

When I asked what “taking a break” would encompass, his was his response:

“Well, for me it means that I need a friend now more than I need a lover. I can’t handle certain obligations and I need to go without them for a while. And when everything is done and the feelings are still there we can pick up from where we left off. Until then I will be focusing on the more pressing things in my life as you should be too.”

My apologies for the long long essays! I’m quite terrible at explaining in short! Do you have any helpful advice?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by MonaD.