Dear Ishita:

I am not as refreshed this morning as I hoped to be. Nonetheless, I spent a few hours studying your thread. This is my current understanding (what I understand now may develop and change if we communicate further, as I insert new information into the old, but here is what it is now):

At some point on, and definitely by November 2020, your friendship with X progressed from friendship to a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship but without actual dating and sexual activity, and without the public use of the labels boyfriend and girlfriend (he privately addressed you as “bae”, which is a term used for a girlfriend).

The November 2020- mid January 2021 relationship included (1) an ongoing, deep emotional exchange, a “level or intensity of communication” that was not there before, when you were only friends. He spent a whole lot of his time taking with you, even when he was sleepy, he told you that “he was very much over his ex”, that you meant so much to him (“almost everyday assert it very clearly how much I meant to him”), showering you with compliments, and being there for you when you needed him, and (2) mutual flirting, including “real dirty flirting” (“We used to flirt a lot, he.. started calling me bae… we used to have some real dirty flirting”).

In mid-January this year you felt that “he started pulling hot and cold” on you, not calling you as often as he did in December, and you “felt like he wasn’t putting enough effort” into the relationship. You got angry about the change in his behavior: “I used to get upset if he forgot to or maybe just chose to not call me in two or three days”. You let him know that you were angry in ways that he considered “being ‘dramatic'”. He then told you that he was being lazy and that he “should definitely call you everyday”, but following having said that, he did not call you every day.

You were angry about this discrepancy: you “had always been there for him.. never allowed anyone to do something wrong to him in the club”, but he was there for you sometimes, “dependent on his mood”.

What happened next is that being angry at him (suggested by your use of big print letters), you let him know that you are taking a break from the relationship: “I TOLD HIM I NEEDED SOME DISTANCE… I NEED TO TAKE SOME TIME”!

He said that “he was ok with this“, but he “didn’t take it very well”, this and it being the break from the relationship. He called you, and you talked to him, restricting your talking to “what a general conversation between friends should be like”- that is, not including the previous deep emotional exchange and flirting.

He didn’t like being on a break, so he told you that “he would wait” until you were “ready to go back to being normal… He is still waiting for me to recover and end the distance clause”- he wants you to end the break and resume the unlabeled, undefined, uncommitted relationship.

“even though we were never in an actual relationship, I have trusted him throughout.. I had this idea of him that he is actually a gentleman, and he is mature enough to know the boundaries of a friendship with a female friend (which I still think he knows clearly, but behaves like he has no idea… He has indulged in gaslighting me at times”.

My concluding thoughts: clearly you are an anxious person, exhibiting what is known as anxious attachment style, but this is not The Problem here. The Problem is that X is dishonest.

You shared, and I believe you, that you don’t feel comfortable around people until you get to know them well, otherwise, your guard is up for a long time (“I used to generally have my guard on around even my good friends.. I don’t go around heavily flirting with my guy friends”).

It was because X went out of his way to behave like a caring, loving boyfriend- that you let your guard down, with him.

There is a saying: “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck”, and I add to the saying: it’s a duck even if the duck doesn’t say the words: I am a duck!

X talked like a boyfriend, behaved like a boyfriend, so you believed that he was indeed your boyfriend. Even though he didn’t say the words: I am your boyfriend.

* Do you know anything about his childhood experience?

You asked a few questions previously. Take your time, if you will, and let me know what you think of my understanding and what your questions might be, at this point.

anita

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