Dear Michelle,

I don’t know, it would be very hard to end things right now. Things are good and I am happy with him, I just see a future with him and want to at least sketch a plan for that. He seems receptive to possibilities so we will see.

Yes, there’s no reason why you would end the relationship now, since things are good and you’re happy, and he’s not rejecting the possibility of living together in the future. Also, you say you’re not too eager to have children, I mean it’s not your priority to settle down and become a mother, although you see it as a possibility in the future. So from this perspective too you don’t feel pressure to go down that road right now. You have time to wait and explore this relationship further.

You say he had a bad experience with his former room mate – what exactly was the problem? If I remember well, you earlier said he was critical of your eating habits, and that you’re not orderly enough. A part of the reason why he doesn’t want to move in together might be his OCD, because you would disturb his sense of order, and order calms him down. I guess that’s one of the things he’d need to work on before moving in with you.

Sharing a life with someone is not easy, so he’d need to become much more relaxed and less guarded of his sense of peace. If he’s suffering from OCD, it’s a very fragile sense of peace, and he doesn’t want it to be disturbed by any means, no matter how much he might care for you. As I am writing this, this is what’s coming to me as perhaps the greatest practical problem and limitation for your relationship: that he needs a particular structure and order to self-regulate, and he’s afraid that you living with him might disturb that balance.

I think he’s quite afraid to have any sort of unhappiness within a relationship. He seems to rely on it to maintain a bit of equilibrium, so it’s as if he’s trying to create a situation that will instil maximum contentment and peace.

I am afraid that his “unhappiness” might be caused by very small things, like your eating habits, or you e.g. not cleaning the flat the way he’d want to. On top of that come the inevitable disagreements and tension in a relationship, which are completely normal, but for a person with a very fragile emotional balance, it may throw him over the top.

I am sorry I am mentioning this, actually when I started replying, this aspect didn’t even occur to me, but as I was writing, I started feeling it might be a pretty big obstacle. Have you thought about it and how you’d deal with it?