Thank you for you reply Anita. It really helps to have a unique insight into all of this especially because you’ve been reading about it since January and you recapped the history quite well. I feel like most of my friends and family think I will go back to him and they do think that I should’ve left the situation a long time ago. So basically they blame me for going back and think that I will continue to have zero self respect. I thought for sure you would say shame on me too.

I agree in that there are a lot of psychological undercurrents to the situation. I mean I am aware of some of my own and am working on those. With him though, there is just this extreme emotional availability and I never really thought of the extent that it could be rooted in his skewed lens from childhood and living with his parents again. It does make sense though as he says that marriage would only ever happen under basically unattainable conditions. I don’t know if you remember but he did live with a friend prior to meeting me and it went very sour very fast. He describes the friend as having been a complete slob, never paying rent etc. So he sees any kind of partnership as one where he is likely to get burned. It’s partly why he says he won’t move out right now, as single apartments are very expensive and he won’t live with anyone right now. He does have OCD and I do wonder if he has a form of ROCD.

All of these issues are not things that I can fix and it may take years of losing before he is tired of that and ready to risk. I just wonder if it’s possible if he truly just didn’t love me enough. That I just didn’t stir enough feeling in him, but at the same time I feel that he is depressed and it would take a tidal wave to really stir anything grand in him. He keeps saying that loves me, in a way, but I am not his one and only. He says it so robotically that I don’t know how to believe it but I am trying to take it at face value. I do feel like we’ve come a long way in the year that we’ve been doing this, but it still all felt false because he couldn’t concede to any of it. It’s kind of insane that he’s been calling me his gf behind my back and I didn’t even know about it until the friend did. But it makes sense what you said, that by telling me I was it would make it unsafe again for him. He did tell me he just told his friend because it was easier that way. That’s what I meant by him playing me, because I feel like he was just doing what suited him best, because he didn’t want to have to explain why he couldn’t commit.

I just didn’t have enough faith in it to continue and believe that I wasn’t throwing my own self worth completely under the bus for it. I would like to remain in each other’s lives in the future and hope that the romantic love can transcend to something platonic. I will need to stop blaming myself and things I didn’t or didn’t do before I can do that.

Do you think he will ever realize what he lost?