Dear Tee:

You shared about his childhood that “he never felt loved and cherished growing up.. his parents were never there for him. His parents have their own business so whenever it was business related they would see him and nothing more”-

– it is no wonder then that “in the four years we’ve been together he didn’t always talk about his feeling much”- he was trained to talk about business “and nothing more”!

In your original post you wrote: “Whenever I talked about something I’m going through in my life regarding my parents and how they made me feel he just doesn’t know how to respond”-

– no wonder he doesn’t know how to respond to your painful emotional experience with your parents: he doesn’t know how to address and respond to his own painful emotional experience with his parents.

“If anything he seemed to open up a little bit when I was tipsy”-

– maybe because when you were tipsy you were relaxed and therefore you didn’t complain to him about… him, you didn’t question him excessively, you didn’t confront him and you were not otherwise pushy. Let’s look at how you were these things with him, taken from your original post:

“He told me he’ll try harder… I confronted him again… I tried to accept all he said but I’m still feeling sad and lonely.. am I .. being pushy for him to open up”-

He told you that he will try harder after you complained to him.. about him, pushing him to try harder. You “tried to accept all he said but”- meaning, you were in the habit of not accepting what he said, questioning and confronting him about what he said.

You wrote: “Maybe I’m looking for some magical phrase or sentence to make the pain go away”- this means that whatever he told you was not good enough for you, so you questioned what he said, and complained about what he said, pushing him to say that “magical phrase or sentence”.

From what you shared about this man, he is a  good, honest man. If you weren’t combative in the ways I just mentioned, then maybe working as a Team would have been possible. A man is not likely to open up  in a combat zone. A man is likely to withdraw and choose to be alone when in combat, not to team up with the enemy.

I understand your pain, Tee, but he is in pain too. You wrote earlier: “All I ever wanted was to be loved”, and you wrote about him: “He never felt loved and cherished growing up”- see you were both unloved growing up, and on your part at the least, you failed to love and cherish him.

anita