Anita, thank you for your continued insight. Your latest post about my OCD tendencies and compulsions is very true, and I check myself often to ask myself why I am needing something, and whether I need to ask for it right away. I usually try to sit with my anxious thoughts for a few days before bringing them out into the light.

TeaK, you are new to my topic here but I really appreciate your insight, and I have been thinking a lot about my wounded girl and how to keep feeding her on my own, so that I am not looking for him or someone else to do that. It is so true, when you are full you become a fountain, overflowing and the love does not become something you are seeking, it becomes something that you already own, that you are at home with. I also agree that I cannot tip toe around him forever and his issues and there needs to be open and honest communication. We have since started this discussion and I will address this below.

Luz (Rosalina), lovely to meet you and have you share your unique experience. I appreciate the overlaps that you see in our stories and I am happy for you having found the love that you did not in the past, embracing it fully now. I do agree with a lot of what you shared, the importance of expressing what I want, and continuing to ask for what it is I believe I need. This is where I feel there is a lack of understanding on Chickadee33’s part. She says that I am hung up on psychoanalyzing him and needing to create excuses for why he will not fully commit to me or for why he is not in love with me. You also addressed this as a pattern of yours with your past twin flame. I have no desire to get him to fall in love with me. Being in love would not be the goal of my continued relationship with him. There have been many men before him that expressed a lack of a desire to continue a relationship and I did not spend time psychoanalyzing them. I could’ve taken a few guesses for sure, but I did not feel like there was a need for a continued relationship and we parted ways. I don’t feel that I have a need to make someone love me. I am not simply chasing or psychoanalyzing this man out of a desperate attempt to hold out for a sliver of love. I don’t think he will realize one day that he is in love with me. What I am looking for is what we currently have. A relationship where there is undisputed love (whether we are in love or not is beside the point for me), affection, care, support, honesty, trust and an agreed upon level of commitment.

I do not wish to be his therapist and have told him this. I recently suggested that he might want to consider therapy in the future as his lifelong sadness and numbness (as he puts it) has plagued him from early childhood, and I feel that it might keep him from feeling the depth of his emotions fully. That may or may not apply to our relationship. That is for him to discern and attempt at his leisure. Do I believe from my very intimate view of him that it does keep him from experiencing love fully, and has him holding out for an ideal that doesn’t exist? Yes I do. He admits this also.  Is this because I hope we will one day have a fairy tale romance and that I need for him to be the one? No. I don’t believe in fairy tales, I just believe in what we have shared up until this point which has grown to be a consistent expression of love and support and a slow and steady submission to greater awareness of each other and ourselves. Growth in a relationship? What an absurd thing to strive for, haha.

Chickadee33 while I respect the “he’s just not that into you” approach to dating and relationships, it will forever be far too black and white for me, and my deal breakers are completely subjective and unique to my experience. I would never want there to be blanket deal breaker, except that I am not physically or mentally abused, and treated with respect and kindness. That’s the basis for all relationships. As far as, this man or woman should do this, within this amount of days, in this exact way, or else the relationship is worthless and the love isn’t real…. Well those are expectations I do not want to be wrapped up in. I come from a background of psychology, and I know how multi-dimensional people are, it’s too hard to ignore that. Should we make excuses for people, and not consider our own needs first? No. I made it clear that I was not accepting of him still being on the apps and it was not behaviour I would accept if it continued. But he needed to make that choice himself.

Chickadee33, I might even have agreed with you if this was a few years ago. That he’s just an object of my obsession and all of my hopes and dreams are wrapped up in him. In other relationships I pushed for the advancement of things, just out of a need for security and love that was false. But I also left men in those relationships when my needs weren’t being met, including an alcoholic, another depressed man and a man who was lying about not dating his ex when he was. I have moved on from men who don’t meet my needs, and have since learned a lot about what my needs are. Now it’s more about balancing my needs with my compulsions for security. I deserve love and commitment and all of the things I’ve mentioned, as we all do, as I am trying to balance those desires with a healthy dose of reality and understanding of the other person in the relationship. I am trying to be aware of myself, while also not being too demanding. No one is going to be able to give me everything instantaneously and I do not wish to leave someone who is giving me a lot, due to a lack of acceptance of where he comes from. I feel the need to at least try to reconcile that with my own experience and see if we can find a happy medium. You cannot have a relationship of growth without fully accounting for the other persons’ experience. Do I need to ask for basic things that I feel that I deserve? Yes.

Most recently we had a very open and honest conversation and I laid my cards out on the table. I said I would like to be in a fully committed relationship where I am his girlfriend and we do not see other people. I said at this point that is where I felt we stood. He said he calls me his gf and has not been on the apps and will not be going back to them since we had a convo about that about a month ago. He says he loves me and values me in his life, even though it is not the romeo and juliet ideal he had in his head. He admits that he does not believe that that is real and that we have a lot of good between us and he wants a future with me. He does not want to move in together at this time (since we had been discussing that more recently), as he wants to be on his own with his own space for a while and his early schedule for work (middle of the night wakeup) would either disrupt me, or he would be disrupted by me. He says we can definitely revisit the idea in the future. He looks forward to having me stay over with him on weekends and bringing my dog. He seemed very anxious that I would be upset by this, but I just said that it’s fine for now, and it’s something we could always try down the road.

Are we madly in love? No. Would I want that? Not really, as the rush and the height of that eventually comes tumbling down, and I feel that being “in love” is impermanent and ultimately just a state of intense infatuation. I want something consistent and real and supportive and that has depth. I am still wildly attracted to him, more sexually satisfied with him than I have even been, and really enjoy spending time with him. I was with a guy before him that I was definitely highly infatuated with and it just burned out so quickly. There was so much that was unmet in that relationship.  He has been a very slow simmer, but such a wonderful one at that. Had there not been any progress up until now, I would be feeling very despondent about our relationship. Even just last summer I was told he did not want to be exclusive and this resulted in my many posts on this forum. If anything when we agreed that we would date other people, I did and he did not. Not one date. I had a few almost other relationships. I know what lies out there for me, and I am not giving it up just for the chance to psychoanalyze and get what I want from someone who won’t give it. I just don’t see love as something to attain and hold onto desperately. I just feel that it is something fluid that slips in and out of our grasp, dancing around us, reflecting back what is already there.