Dear Sam:

You shared that you (30) and your boyfriend (33) have been together for almost 4 years. First year you lived in Los Angeles, while he lived in New York City. Second – third year or so, you lived together (with two other friends) in an apartment in NYC. For a while, you considered moving back to LA, but your boyfriend didn’t want to. Most recently, he agreed to move to LA in a year from now. The two of you currently live with your respective parents’ houses on the two opposite coasts and get “reunited every other month in a new city for a month stay in between going back to our parents’ houses“.

In therapy, you learned that you have a “fear of abandonment, fear of intimacy, disassociating and rushing to the ‘eject’ button before dealing with those issues“. Your boyfriend has been “immensely responsive“, is willing to move to LA with you in a year, and he wants to marry you, but you partly want to “end things and move to LA on my own and feel this impulse to run and do my own thing“. You tried to break up with him but instead, you agreed to live in NYC for another month “to really work on rebuilding the intimacy to give it a real chance with this new understanding of my own issues”

“What I’m struggling with is deciding if I should just cut things off because of the dreams I’m having…  or if it’s worth putting the effort in because relationships take work, and if I don’t, I’ll just eventually end up with another person and run into the same issues when I had something good here all along that just required work” – from what you shared, it seems to me that it is most likely that if you break up with him, you will run into the same issues, or put in other words, the same issues will follow you wherever you go. Seems to me that you should continue your therapy so to get more insight and understanding of your issues before making final decisions regarding your relationship.

“I’ve felt bored…  I still have dreams… the dreams I’m having” – would you like to describe the boredom, how does it feel, what thoughts occur in your mind when you get bored…and your dreams, what are they?

anita