Dear Confusedasf:

I just want to say how much I admire the tenderness and courage in your words. You’re not just navigating heartache—you’re trying to understand it, to grow through it, and that’s something really meaningful. You’re clearly someone who feels deeply and thinks deeply, too—and that combination is powerful, even when it hurts.

It seems to me that the pain the two of you felt didn’t come from a lack of love, but from the ways you each learned to protect yourselves when things got hard. You shut down when overwhelmed. He held everything in until it eventually spilled out. You were both trying to stay safe in different ways, but those ways began to collide instead of connect.

It sounds like you need a partner who communicates clearly—no second-guessing, no emotional riddles. Someone who can be honest with warmth, who doesn’t retreat when things get heavy. Someone who says, “This is hard for me too,” instead of hiding what’s real. A warm, calm presence—especially in moments of uncertainty or conflict.

Your boyfriend, as you described him, struggled with that. When life became overwhelming, he collapsed inward, avoided sharing, and offered promises rather than presence. That doesn’t make him a bad person—it means he was doing the best he could with what he had. But it likely left you feeling unsure, anxious, and alone in your own mind.

At the same time, he may need a partner who brings patience to his emotional delays—but also gently challenges his avoidance. Someone who expresses what she actually feels and needs, instead of hoping he’ll guess. Someone who reaches out with curiosity and compassion, instead of filling the silence with worry or assumptions.

It sounds like you already see how your own silence sometimes kept your needs unspoken. And in that silence, he stayed quiet too. You mirrored each other—not in a way that felt grounding, but in a way that deepened the distance.

So I want to offer this gently: right now, it doesn’t sound like either of you were consistently able to be what the other needed most. That doesn’t mean the love wasn’t real. But patterns got in the way—patterns that both of you would need to work on to keep the pain from repeating.

If you do reach out, maybe the question isn’t just “Do we still love each other?” but “Can we grow enough to love each other differently?”

Whatever you choose, I hope you keep listening to the part of you that wants to love and be loved from a place of clarity, steadiness, and care.

With warmth, Anita

Hi Confused

I’m sorry to hear that you and your boyfriend broke up. I hear that you still love and care about him. ❤️

It seems that the difficulty is that he just doesn’t have the time and energy for a partner right now. He wasn’t able to show up for the relationship and it took a toll. It is especially hard when both parties have difficulties talking about these things.

To me, it sounds like you did the right thing by taking a break. As for getting back together, I don’t expect things to change until his situation improves. If you want to deal with that stress and support him in this difficult period, that is up to you. It sounds like you tried and it hurt you though. Perhaps you could keep in touch and see if his situation improves and give things a shot then if you’re both still interested?

Dear Confusedasf,

you are very welcome!

through our no contact time, (it’s been two weeks now) i got a lot of clarify,

I do think you have an amazing insight, and I think you understand very well why you get upset with him: when he expresses his stress and anxiety to you, it seems you feel threatened, because you don’t know how to help him, and you also feel that in those moments he sees you as a burden and doesn’t love you (“so when he does express his feeling, and not able to tell me what i can do, i feel helpless and internalize it as i’m a useless person and i can’t help him, he keeps tell me again and again how stressful he is, means he doesn’t love me and i’m essentially just a burden“).

You’re also realizing that you trying to be supportive when he was expressing stress and anxiety didn’t really come from a truly supportive place in you, but more from wanting him to get over his stress quickly, so he could cater to your needs:

my intension is wrong, it’s never come from his benefit, it’s come from me thinking that’s the right thing to do and i forced myself to do it.

i want to know if he feels better not because i want to feel less lonely, because i care him as a person.

My impression is that you yourself feel insecure and dysregulated quite a lot, and you needed him as a strong, reliable, positive presence – to be there for you. Almost like a parent figure to your inner child. So your inner child has a need for him to be emotionally stable – the same as a child has the need for the parent to be positive, strong, reliable – to be able to emotionally regulate the child. Does this ring true to you?

When he is stressed and wants to vent about his problems, he of course is the opposite of what your inner child needs. He is the needy party in those moments, and he cannot be the giver, but he is a “taker”, so to speak. And this feels scary, because the person you expect to take care of you emotionally isn’t able to do that, and is falling apart.

If what I’m saying is true, the only way you could support him is for you to seek emotional support and regulation elsewhere (e.g. therapy is an excellent place!), and not from him. When he is in distress, he cannot be the anchor for you, that you expect from him. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. It’s just that in those moments he himself is a needy child who needs comfort and soothing.

He on the other hand would need to seek therapy, because his ways of dealing with stress – drinking, getting stressed to the point of not being able to eat or sleep – aren’t healthy at all. And of course, it affects you as his partner because he disappears from the relationship into this abyss. So he definitely needs help.

You said:

he is open to therapy, he is looking at aa, he is trying to get help, again things happened and dragged him into more cycles of not able to make those plans as well.

Is he really serious about getting help? When you say “things happened and dragged him into more cycles”, do you mean there was another crisis and he resorted to drinking again?

i want to know how can i approach the conversation and if we still have a chance.

I think the main thing is to clarify with yourself that you shouldn’t to look to him to give you emotional stability, because he isn’t able to do that at the moment. You’d need to become emotionally stable within yourself, with the help of therapy.
Your support of him could be in the form of acknowledging his stress, having empathy for him, and not pressuring him to cater to your emotional needs when he is in distress.

However, I would also expect him to start therapy, because just promising isn’t enough. I wouldn’t want to stay in the relationship is he is continuing business-as-usual (resorting to drinking when under stress).

I think your relationship has a chance, but you both need to make changes on your respective sides. You yourself are doing a lot already, going to therapy and having a lot of self-awareness. So you just keep that up, you’re doing great! 🙂

And I hope he steps up to the plate too…

Dear Confusedasf,

I’m glad you’re feeling a bit better and are continuing to work on yourself and understanding yourself better. That’s the first step towards healing.

But I also understand you felt hurt by him following a new girl on Instagram. It could be a part of his bigger problem of lack of commitment to working on his issues. Instead, he is taking an easier route – to keep numbing himself with alcohol, avoiding or postponing therapy, and just refusing to take responsibility.

So I think you’re right in distancing yourself from him, because he doesn’t seem to want to get better, at least not at this point. As you say: “That’s also part of the reason I kind of give up because he seems knowing the issue but not taking it seriously enough to prioritize himself first”.

As for how to get him back, I don’t know, I don’t know when I will be ready, when he will be ready, if we both would move on, or if we both would work on ourselves. I love him and of course I wanted the latter one, but idk about him, I feel like a fool sometimes.

Knowing that he is not serious about getting better at this point, I think you should prioritize yourself and focus on your own healing. Because nudging him and waiting around for him to change his attitude does seem a bit naive at the moment. Unfortunately. He is choosing the old patterns, as it seems, while you’re choosing healing and growth. And you’re not really compatible from that point of view, even though you share a lot of common interests otherwise.

As for my reflection, I noticed that I had a pattern of abandoning my partner when they were experiencing emotional difficulties because of my insecurity. I give up on a relationship whenever I feel uncomfortable, instead of working through the problem with my people. … I also never went single for more than 2 months, which says a lot. I experience all kinds of anxiety when I’m single, and when I’m not, I can comfortably focus on work, life, etc.

That’s a great observation. It seems that being in a relationship helps you calm down your anxiety, which you feel whenever you’re single. It seems that being single triggers a sense of danger and lack of safety – a fear that you won’t be able to cope alone, emotionally. We build this basic sense of safety during our childhood, through the relationship with our parents or primary caregivers.

You don’t need to answer if you feel uncomfortable, but could it be that you didn’t get enough emotional support and soothing as a child? That you felt anxious and afraid a lot?

I myself grew up feeling anxious, because my mother was not an emotionally safe person. She criticized me a lot, but also instilled fear in me through her own fears. So I grew up with fear and anxiety deep in my bones. I wonder if you’ve experienced something similar?

If we as children didn’t get that basic sense of safety – either physical or emotional or both – we will end up with chronic anxiety, that’s like our basic state. The basic state of our nervous system. We’re constantly in fight-or-flight, always looking for danger and how to avoid it.

And one strategy to avoid that constant sense of danger is to have a partner to soothe us, to take care of our emotional needs. You did resonate with that idea. So that could be the reason why you never could stay single for more than 2 months. Because that basic anxiety becomes unbearable, and you cannot properly focus on work and just day-to-day life. (“I experience all kinds of anxiety when I’m single, and when I’m not, I can comfortably focus on work, life, etc.“)

Also very insightful, I need to learn and practice this, but idk how when I’m single, it seems each with friends, I can help my friends that way, but with partner, I see it differently.

It actually makes sense, because you need to feel okay internally before you can help others, such as your friends. But for you to feel okay internally, so far you needed a partner to emotionally regulate you. That was like your “stabilizer”. An external stabilizer.

Now, the goal would be to find your own inner “stabilizer”, i.e. the sense of safety and security that stems from within. It can be done with the help of therapy. It’s a process, it doesn’t happen over night, but it’s possible.

Let me know how this sounds?

Dear Confusedasf,

good to hear from you! And please don’t apologize if you feel confused – that’s totally okay.

I’m not sure what’s going on now. We broke up, but he misses me, I miss him, neither of us hinted at anything of moving forward or anything else. We are just stuck in the stage of missing each other. What is this?

Well, for you I think it is the realization that if something doesn’t change fundamentally, there will more of the same if you get back together. You said it here:

I don’t want to sit in the false hope thinking he might feel better, and we might get back together.

And you’re right! Just because he told you he’s currently not drinking and is feeling better doesn’t mean that he won’t relapse when things get stressful again. Because that has been his pattern:

he has a drinking problem, when stress overflows, he relapses, which makes his life even more out of control.

People with a long-standing drinking problem cannot just get sober without any therapy and any internal work. What he is telling you now:

He is sober now and it’s hard, but he believes that he got this and have the faith in himself to stay sober.

… is unfortunately wishful thinking. He cannot pull himself up by his own bootstraps. He needs external help. Sooner or later he will feel stressed out and will relapse.

If he keeps refusing therapy, it means he is not willing to face himself and his trauma just yet. He is not willing to self-reflect and do the necessary steps to get better – like you’re doing. And this isn’t really sustainable because it won’t make for a healthy relationship.

He told you he misses you more than before, and that it’s actually because he is sober:

he misses me a lot especially now he’s sober, he misses more than before.

But without any therapy, he will relapse again and then he won’t miss you. He will seek consolation in the bottle – and that’s when he doesn’t need anyone. It’s like that with alcoholism or any other addiction, unfortunately.

I don’t want to know that we both miss each other, but there’s nothing we can do about it.

You both can do something about it – you’re already doing your part (self-reflection, therapy), but he seems not to be willing to do his part. He is fooling himself that he can do it on his own.

Unless he is willing to seek help, he is not really “doing anything about it”. He’s not doing anything towards you two getting back together in a healthier way.

He didn’t even offer to get back together, maybe because a part of him knows he isn’t able to remain sober. Maybe he is leaving it to you to make the first move. But if I were you, I wouldn’t. Your response to him was perfect, actually:

I responded that knowing he is doing better makes me happy, shared a little about my life, how I reflected and learning how to deal with myself and my emotions. told him I miss him as well and hope everything goes well with him.

And you can leave it at that. The truth is that unless he seeks help, everything will not go well with him. But he needs to make that decision. Right now, he seems not willing to, since he already cancelled therapy twice and now he’s claiming he’s strong enough to push through it by himself.

With that, he basically told you his stance on therapy and facing himself, getting more self-awareness and all that. He’s not willing to go through it at this point. He’s almost like telling you “these are my conditions.” And he’s leaving it up to you whether to take it (i.e. seek reconciliation) or leave it.

That’s what I think is going on. He told you his conditions, and he’s not making the first move. He is leaving it up to you.

And my advice is not to take it… because it will be just more of the same….

Let me know your feelings about all of this…

And in the meanwhile, take care <3