Dear Yours:

I re-read all your posts this morning. This is how I see your situation:

It has been and will be tough for you to break up with him because

1. You live with him, sharing a place, furniture and whatnot.

2. You are emotionally attached to him: “sometimes all I want is to be alone and other moments I just want to lie in his arms on the couch.. I love my boyfriend.. I am terrified of not having him in my life, he is such a big part of it”, and as you try to break up with him, you are likely to again want to lie in his arms on the couch.

3. You believe that he loves you and will be hurt once you break up with him: “I cannot seem to break up with him tho, he is so sweet and loves me…he is so sweet and loves me.. mostly I feel like a horrible person for hurting him”

4. You have a history of being “a total people pleaser and have a tough time standing my ground… I keep going through a cycle of indecision… In the past whenever I have prepared arguments he seems to always have an answer to counter them. This confuses me and makes me feel I have not been trying hard enough to fix things”.  History tends to repeat.

–these are the four items that make breaking up with him difficult on your part.

The following is what makes it difficult to break up with him on his part:

— “he is just being himself”, which means him being selfish and self serving. He told you that he “is how he is and that is never going to change”. Whatever you want to do that he doesn’t want to do, he will not do (“take walks, eat together, have friends in common, have more sex…”).

In his mind and heart a good relationship is one where he gets to do only that which “comes natural to him”, where you don’t get to do what you want, where what you value doesn’t matter to him (“any values of mine.. have largely been rejected”), where every time you assert yourself, you give up your assertion (“we fight, make up and forget about it”).

If you try once again to break up with him, he expects business as usual: “we fight, make up and forget about  it”.

You wrote earlier that you discussed breaking up with him before “and he is very sad, but because he loves me he is ready to let me go if that is what I need“- I would like to think that he meant that but I doubt it. I doubt it because his brand of love is not congruent with him considering what I italicized. His love is nothing about what you need and all about what he needs.

-Except that he does know that every time you assert yourself with him, your need to “lie in his arms on the couch” takes over and what is  next is the “make up and forget about it” routine.

“By me agreeing so often  to giving up things I find important in a relationship, I have given him the impression that he has a lot of control to make the decisions”- well, he likes his control. Being in control of you and the relationship is the part that “isn’t broken” in the relationship, for him. (He doesn’t find it necessary to “fix something that isn’t broken”).

Let me know your thoughts and we’ll continue. I have more thoughts. A question: if you break up with him, who moves out, and what does it take to  practically separate?

anita

Hi Yours

I feel exactly how you feel. It is like you put in words what I couldn’t for so long. I guess I am one step further along, I broke up with my ex partner in the beginning of the year, yet this relationship and the breakup is still something I think about a lot. The break up was very painful for both of us. I have been with my ex for 6 years, am a people pleaser too and I feel shame and resentment of not having made my values and wishes clearer to him. But I now know that I have told him things I wanted to change in the relationship but he was to stubborn to even consider them. Only when I said I wanted to break up because I was not happy he started to think about things.

Before the breakup I fell into depression due to a lot of reasons but I think a contributing factor was that I felt not important and loved enough by him to even consider changing his ways. Or doing it very slowly after years of me repeatedly asking for it (Which I took as a sign to keep going and keep trying to be with him). I again and again neglegted my own needs and wants and put his over mine. As you said this is something I now know I tend to do and which stems from childhood learnings which I am now working on to change.

I don’t want to sugar coat it, it has been hard since the break up. I am 34 now and I really wanted to start a family, I feel like time is running away. However, having kids with this man who was not ready to compromise and who has a different understanding when it comes to what it means to love somebody…I wouldn’t want to have married him or had kids with him. Things certainly do not get easier when you care for children.

So, I can only say, you will find somebody else. You have already decided to break up. There is never a good time for this, don’t wait for it. When you do it, take the breakup one step at a time. My ex did not understand why I wanted this, why I didn’t want to try again. For him everything was fine. I felt like I was just an unhappy person, blamed myself for not feeling it was enough and got worn down by his arguing why we are meant to be together. For when this happens, leave the situation, remind yourself why you are doing this. Write it down if you have not already done so and re-read it. You will not regret it! Even if it feels like the pain is unbearable at times. But it gets better and soon enough you will feel like you can make a fresh start. And the good thing is: you learn from this experience. You now know what is important to you in a relationship and can look out for it, and do it better next time.

Dear Yours:

It was the first time you saw him cry. I  suppose that before he displayed other expressions of sadness and suffering (“he is very sad… I see him suffering”). Maybe it was his facial expressions, corners of the mouth turned downward, maybe. Each two cycles of indecisions are not identical, of course, there are always some  differences in people’s behaviors, but patterns and cycles are quite consistent regardless of minor variables.

Here is my point: for how many months and years did he know that it will please you if he sat at the dinning table with you once in a while? And he never bothered, not yet, because he said, he will not enjoy himself sitting at the dining table. When one person loves another, the loving person is motivated to please the supposed loved one. It brings the loving person pleasure to see his loved one pleased. At least once in a while. So  why wasn’t he motivated to see you pleased, to sit with you at the dinning table?

Maybe what motivates him is comfort: it feels more comfortable to sit on the sofa and eat because he can watch TV that way and the sofa is soft and comfy. If indeed comfort is his primary motivation, then he will be very upset when you take his comfort away by seeing to  it that he leaves his comfort, that is, your place, having to look for another, having less time to play computer games and watch TV because he may have to work more hours to pay rent.

Facing this great discomfort, he is likely to be motivated to make himself somewhat uncomfortable so to avoid the greater discomfort of moving out. He has already done that before, page 1: “He has been acting very sweet, took me  out for dinner, doing things around the house”. Next, he may sit with you at the dining table, and if he fears losing his major comfort even more.. he might try to have more sex with you.

Problem is, what is his motivation? Seems to me that his motivation is his comfort, not a love for you.

anita