Dear Ashmitha:

I read your reply on the other thread and I appreciate what you wrote there. This is some of what you shared here:

You’ve been seeing a man exclusively for a year and three months, with a break of seven months. The two of you meet once every week. In between meetings it can take him hours to reply to your text messages, even though he is online. Sometimes, you wrote, “he is actively online for hours and ignores my messages, and replies to me the next day”.

You told him that you would like more communication in between meetings and he told you that “he doesn’t like talking on the phone”. You know that “he texts his friends and family a lot”, and that when he is with you, during those once a week meetings, “he can be glued to his phone at times”.

You wrote: “He is still very much sexually attracted to me but I care more that he is attracted to my personality and that we are close friends… He brings up no concerns and says he considers us to have a stable relationship… makes me question whether he likes me that much… I know he is not cheating or anything like that.. I just want to feel closer to him. Dating my best friend is important to me. I consider myself a very relaxed girlfriend so do I need to be more strict?”-

– this is my understanding: in his mind and heart, a relationship with a girlfriend is in a different category from a relationship with a friend or with a family member:

* With a girlfriend he has sex and romance/ with friends and family members- he does not.

* With friends and family members he enjoys communicating about non-sexual, non-romantic topics/ with you- he does not.

He compartmentalized you: for him, you can not be his friend because you are his girlfriend. You do not compartmentalize him: you want him to be your boyfriend and your best friend.

You asked if you should be more strict, as in insisting that he texts you more often. My answer: no, because pressuring him to communicate with you via text and online in between meetings is not going to change his lack of motivation to do so.

He is probably not cheating on you, like you believe, and he may even want to marry you, but a life with him is likely to be limited, as it is now, to the sexual/ romantic context, and later perhaps, to the cohabitating and co-parenting contexts.

You read like a nice person, a reasonable, considerate woman. I wish you had that which you want and deserve: a boyfriend who is indeed your best friend.

anita