Dear Michelle:

First I will summarize what you shared about this relationship in your first 3 threads: you (32) met a man (35) online sometime last year, and started a relationship September 2019. By January you considered your 4 months relationship exclusive and aimed at the long term. You wrote that he made effort to see you even though you live an hour away (he moved back with his parents in 2019 and considered it “a real step backward”), having gone on local trips, restaurants, museums, shows, etc.; he texted you often, planned dates, paid for quite a bit, helped you around your home, spent Dec 2019 Christmas with his family one day, and with your family another day, and sex with him was “easily the best sex” you’ve ever had in your life.

But he was “not vocal about declaring exactly what he wants, nor about how he feels”, and it took some probing for him to express somewhat that he is on board with an exclusive, long term relationship with you, but he remained uncomfortable with labeling the relationship and using terms like “boyfriend”. You were upset that although you had him spend New Year’s with one of your friends, he saw his friend twice around the holidays, but didnt invite you.

You shared that you are aware of your anxious attachment style, aware of your insecurities and “issues from the past that tend to hover over new relationships”, “and I question my thoughts as they arise, or try to sit with them before acting”, “so I have been less impulsive in this one”. You saw to it that you repeatedly expressed your appreciation and gratitude to him, and that he is handsome, but he is less generous or frequent with verbal compliments and expressions of appreciation and gratitude.

At the time, January this year, you were very focused on whether to tell him “I love you”, afraid that he will not reciprocate on one hand, and on the other hand, wanting to be authentic and let him know what you felt so intensely. Sometime in late January he visited you as usual and the topic of marriage came up. He told you “how he doesn’t see it for  himself”, that his parents have an unhappy marriage and bicker, that marriage “just breeds contempt”. You told him that it worried you “that he seemed so against long-term relationships, and what was he doing with me then?”. He said: “to be honest he doesn’t see it long-term”, that “he doesn’t likely see himself with anyone long-term and marriage has always just been a fantasy”, that the two of you were too different (you use plastic bags and he doesn’t, you don’t finish the food  on your plate and he does, he wakes up at 4 am, and you wake up later, you like different type of music, you don’t get his references), that “if he does find his ideal that would change”, and that the two of you “should find people that are more suited to us as individuals”.

He said he’d like to see you casually, but that’s up to you. You told him that you loved him and that he made you feel loved, and he said “that he loved me but I was not his one and only”. He told you that he would like to see you casually, that it is up to you and that “he likely wouldn’t be dating anyone soon”.

You then broke up with him but a few weeks later, February or March, you went out with him to an event. The two of you then considered being “quasi friends, with possible intimacy”, a route he admitted never having gone before with an ex, that “usually he cuts ties instantly when he doesn’t see a future”. The two of you continued to see each other while both being on dating apps “searching for other people”, you going “on many dates, while he says he hasn’t”.

You wrote in later March: “I don’t have any expectations or secret hopes.. If anything, I love him now more than ever, but I know that it doesn’t have to mean a forever.. I feel I have a lot more acceptance for who he is and who  I am”. You wrote about him: “he doesn’t just have trouble with letting me in, he won’t let himself in.. He doesn’t want to look  inward on his own”.

A few months later, Aug 10, you wrote about the same relationship that because of COVID, the two of you spent a lot of time together, “and every time I thought we were getting to a different place and that his feelings might  be changing, he would tell me he still felt the same and that he didn’t see a future and we couldn’t be together”. You threatened to end it many times but “summer came and I wanted to continue the fun until past weekend”.

This past weekend, you met one of his friends for the first time. This friend’s girlfriend told you that your unlabeled boyfriend told her boyfriend about seeing you, referring to you as “his gf”. You talked to your boyfriend about it, and “he said well we basically are a couple”. You then asked him “what he felt about us  giving us it a real go”, and he repeated what he told you earlier: that the two of you should be just friends, tha the cannot commit to you that way, that there is someone more compatible to him out there, etc.

You wrote: “this was all too hard and confusing for me. A mind *** so to speak”, and suggested that you are “the one who has kept getting played”, wondering if this is “classic emotionally unavailable behavior.. I have no perspective anymore and this relationship has taken up a year of my time which is INSANE. Any insight, questions?”

My insight, my suggested answers: he is not a player and he hasn’t been playing you. He loves you very much but he hates his parents’ marriage (and his relationships with his parents) more than he loves you. His greatest and earliest fear is to be stuck in his childhood experience: in his parents’ terrible marriage, in his troubled relationships with his bickering parents, in the pain and distress of his childhood.

He feels most comfortable with his friends, that’s why he told at least one of his friends that you are his girlfriend. He felt safe with that friend, safe from any criticism or attack, so he told him the truth: that you were his girlfriend. He didn’t tell you that you are his girlfriend because he is afraid of you, afraid that you will figuratively, throw him back into his childhood misery and throw away the key.

Unless we heal from very troubled childhoods (which would require him to attend therapy and move out of his parents’ home, as a start), we keep re-living that childhood. There was so much pain for him there, that his powerful instinct kicked in: NO! I will NEVER in this situation again!

He doesn’t perceive that a relationship with you- once labeled and declared-forever- can be any different from what he has known in his parents’ home. And he will say anything and everything to make sure that he will not end up stuck there forever. (Saying that you and him are incompatible and that there is another woman out there who is compatible with him, are two such things).

He is terrified of being forever stuck in his childhood, even though he already is stuck there and literally living there. Thing is, he detaches from this suck-ness best he can, removing it from his awareness.

What do you think?

anita

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