Dear Michelle:

First I will summarize what you shared about this relationship in your first 3 threads: you (32) met a man (35) online sometime last year, and started a relationship September 2019. By January you considered your 4 months relationship exclusive and aimed at the long term. You wrote that he made effort to see you even though you live an hour away (he moved back with his parents in 2019 and considered it “a real step backward”), having gone on local trips, restaurants, museums, shows, etc.; he texted you often, planned dates, paid for quite a bit, helped you around your home, spent Dec 2019 Christmas with his family one day, and with your family another day, and sex with him was “easily the best sex” you’ve ever had in your life.

But he was “not vocal about declaring exactly what he wants, nor about how he feels”, and it took some probing for him to express somewhat that he is on board with an exclusive, long term relationship with you, but he remained uncomfortable with labeling the relationship and using terms like “boyfriend”. You were upset that although you had him spend New Year’s with one of your friends, he saw his friend twice around the holidays, but didnt invite you.

You shared that you are aware of your anxious attachment style, aware of your insecurities and “issues from the past that tend to hover over new relationships”, “and I question my thoughts as they arise, or try to sit with them before acting”, “so I have been less impulsive in this one”. You saw to it that you repeatedly expressed your appreciation and gratitude to him, and that he is handsome, but he is less generous or frequent with verbal compliments and expressions of appreciation and gratitude.

At the time, January this year, you were very focused on whether to tell him “I love you”, afraid that he will not reciprocate on one hand, and on the other hand, wanting to be authentic and let him know what you felt so intensely. Sometime in late January he visited you as usual and the topic of marriage came up. He told you “how he doesn’t see it for  himself”, that his parents have an unhappy marriage and bicker, that marriage “just breeds contempt”. You told him that it worried you “that he seemed so against long-term relationships, and what was he doing with me then?”. He said: “to be honest he doesn’t see it long-term”, that “he doesn’t likely see himself with anyone long-term and marriage has always just been a fantasy”, that the two of you were too different (you use plastic bags and he doesn’t, you don’t finish the food  on your plate and he does, he wakes up at 4 am, and you wake up later, you like different type of music, you don’t get his references), that “if he does find his ideal that would change”, and that the two of you “should find people that are more suited to us as individuals”.

He said he’d like to see you casually, but that’s up to you. You told him that you loved him and that he made you feel loved, and he said “that he loved me but I was not his one and only”. He told you that he would like to see you casually, that it is up to you and that “he likely wouldn’t be dating anyone soon”.

You then broke up with him but a few weeks later, February or March, you went out with him to an event. The two of you then considered being “quasi friends, with possible intimacy”, a route he admitted never having gone before with an ex, that “usually he cuts ties instantly when he doesn’t see a future”. The two of you continued to see each other while both being on dating apps “searching for other people”, you going “on many dates, while he says he hasn’t”.

You wrote in later March: “I don’t have any expectations or secret hopes.. If anything, I love him now more than ever, but I know that it doesn’t have to mean a forever.. I feel I have a lot more acceptance for who he is and who  I am”. You wrote about him: “he doesn’t just have trouble with letting me in, he won’t let himself in.. He doesn’t want to look  inward on his own”.

A few months later, Aug 10, you wrote about the same relationship that because of COVID, the two of you spent a lot of time together, “and every time I thought we were getting to a different place and that his feelings might  be changing, he would tell me he still felt the same and that he didn’t see a future and we couldn’t be together”. You threatened to end it many times but “summer came and I wanted to continue the fun until past weekend”.

This past weekend, you met one of his friends for the first time. This friend’s girlfriend told you that your unlabeled boyfriend told her boyfriend about seeing you, referring to you as “his gf”. You talked to your boyfriend about it, and “he said well we basically are a couple”. You then asked him “what he felt about us  giving us it a real go”, and he repeated what he told you earlier: that the two of you should be just friends, tha the cannot commit to you that way, that there is someone more compatible to him out there, etc.

You wrote: “this was all too hard and confusing for me. A mind *** so to speak”, and suggested that you are “the one who has kept getting played”, wondering if this is “classic emotionally unavailable behavior.. I have no perspective anymore and this relationship has taken up a year of my time which is INSANE. Any insight, questions?”

My insight, my suggested answers: he is not a player and he hasn’t been playing you. He loves you very much but he hates his parents’ marriage (and his relationships with his parents) more than he loves you. His greatest and earliest fear is to be stuck in his childhood experience: in his parents’ terrible marriage, in his troubled relationships with his bickering parents, in the pain and distress of his childhood.

He feels most comfortable with his friends, that’s why he told at least one of his friends that you are his girlfriend. He felt safe with that friend, safe from any criticism or attack, so he told him the truth: that you were his girlfriend. He didn’t tell you that you are his girlfriend because he is afraid of you, afraid that you will figuratively, throw him back into his childhood misery and throw away the key.

Unless we heal from very troubled childhoods (which would require him to attend therapy and move out of his parents’ home, as a start), we keep re-living that childhood. There was so much pain for him there, that his powerful instinct kicked in: NO! I will NEVER in this situation again!

He doesn’t perceive that a relationship with you- once labeled and declared-forever- can be any different from what he has known in his parents’ home. And he will say anything and everything to make sure that he will not end up stuck there forever. (Saying that you and him are incompatible and that there is another woman out there who is compatible with him, are two such things).

He is terrified of being forever stuck in his childhood, even though he already is stuck there and literally living there. Thing is, he detaches from this suck-ness best he can, removing it from his awareness.

What do you think?

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by .

Dear Michelle:

You are welcome.  “Do you think he will ever realize what he lost?”- first, I agree that this is his loss. I noticed throughout your writings, that you are intelligent, educated, well-read, insightful, honest, a decent person, seeing the bigger picture, understanding, empathetic.. indeed, no doubt in my mind, that it is his loss.

Second, will he ever realize that indeed it was his loss? My guess: probably not- because he has been consistently closed to any of your input/ to new awareness. He just won’t consider anything that is not convenient for him to consider. He is stuck in fear and won’t look for a way out (except to make believe that he  is out by not committing to a relationship with you, by not paying high rent, by not moving in with a roommate, etc.).

You added new information, in your most recent post, that he has OCD. OCD is fueled by fear, I know it personally because I suffered from OCD at an early age, and it came about by my scary, hostile home life.

* Did you notice him performing Compulsions (the C of the OCD)? And Obsessive thinking?

“I would like to remain in each other’s  lives in the future and hope that the romantic love can transcend to something platonic”- I don’t see that happening unless you are in a committed relationship with another man. I say so because in March you thought that you did not have any expectations from him, but soon after, all the expectations returned.

The title of your thread is “Emotionally Unavailable or is there hope?”- I’d say, definitely, extremely emotionally unavailable and no reasonable hope.

* I was wondering, you spent a bit of time with him and his family- did  you notice the interactions between him and his parents?

anita

Dear Michelle:

You are welcome and thank you for your kind words. I am not a therapist. I’ve been through good therapy for about two years, and I’ve been very active here, daily for over five years, communicating with many hundreds of people from all  over the world, from teenagers to people in their 70s, with the goal of learning about myself/ about other people, both- it is my online, self directed university, so to speak, and as a result, I am indeed wiser than I used to be.

You shared that his mother is “a sort of cold mother”. Putting aside who his father is, let’s focus on his mother because having a cold mother is powerful enough, in a child’s mind and life.

He “still seems distant and annoyed with them”- a child is  naturally close to his mother. The distance was created by her, not by him. She rejected his closeness to her, she pushed him away. As a result he was angry at her, angry that she rejected him, that she pushed him away from her.

“in his 20s, while he was travelling..they did not reach out to him much in 3 years to see how he was doing”- she pushed him away at an early age, again and again (a child doesn’t easily give up on his mother’s love, still hoping, still trying), and she never tried to undo the distance she created with him long ago.

“he feels that he has disappointed them in life, with his choice of work.. “- he looked for reason for his mother pushing him away, not understanding that his mother was cold all along, before she gave birth to him, nothing to do with him or his choices in life. (Children automatically take responsibility for how their parents treat them).

“When he stayed over and remarked that my kettle had disgusting limescale buildup and how could I be so slovenly. He found many other disgusting things wrong with my housekeeping skills”- I see his anger here, anger at you. He saw the limescale buildup and was angry enough to .. almost call you disgusting.

“Most of his life is orderly and well kept, so that he is able to feel in control”- his childhood experience was chaotic, out of his control.

“he actually put a lot of thought into our future, but mainly the reasons it wouldn’t work out, which seemed to do with shortcomings about me”- I think that his anger at his mother has been directed at you, not because you are not as clean as his mother, but because she rejected him, because she pushed him away from him repeatedly, over all the years of his childhood.

He came into the relationship with you angry at his mother and misdirecting that anger at you, so he’s been looking for things about you to attach his anger to. His anger at you pre-existed you (the music you like, the way you eat, clean.. your alleged shortcomings), just as his mother’s coldness pre-existed him.

“he might be trying to seek closeness, and he played the role of boyfriend so well”- as the social animals that we are we never really give up on seeking closeness in one way or another.

“I thought he might be opening up. Each time he had  me fooled, or he had himself fooled. I’m not quite sure”- I don’t think he cold heartedly fooled you. He wants closeness with the object of his affection and he gets angry at the object of his affection, both. He moves toward you (affection) and he pushes you away (anger).

Last evening you visited him and he “has not taking our separation well.. he looked utterly beside himself and depressed.. having terrible sleep”- his affection for you and emotional attachment to you is alive and well.

But so is his anger: “He started to walk away to go back inside and said sarcastically ‘yeah, if you’d want to see me'”- that’s his anger at his cold, rejecting mother directed at you. And he continued: “if I can’t do things the way that you want, then you don’t want any of this at all”- that’s him talking to his mother. He tried to please her, to do things her way so to get her to love him, but he failed. When he said “then you don’t want any of this at all”, by this, he meant his love for her.

You said it yourself: “It was kind of like seeing a pouty child talk”- like I wrote above (before I read the sentence I just quoted), he was talking to his mother.

When he told you repeatedly that there is another woman for him out there, an ideal woman, he was threatening to do to you what his mother did to him: she rejected him for some ideal concept of a son (so he thought, in his mind).

“He just seemed so lost and miserable today; like any colour he did have before had been sucked out of him”- you got a glimpse of how he looked as a child, living with his cold, rejecting mother.

“I feel an even greater need to tell him how loved he truly is, now more than ever”- imagine his mother felt this way, when he was a child, seeing him so “lost and miserable”, if only she needed to let him know that she loved him.

His need for love is still there, but it is heavily mixed with anger for not having received her love for too long.

“I know I give the most to people who give the least in return”- I suppose you repeat a childhood pattern as well, trying hard to reach out to a parent who did not love you in return, not enough. But you don’t have the anger mixed in, as he does.

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by .

Dear Michelle:

“I just wonder if maybe.. he was testing me to see if I would stick around and now I’ve just abandoned him.. he may never have left me for someone else, but he wanted to always have that out… Do you think that if I’d stayed that it would’ve shown him that someone would ultimately be there for him despite anything and soothed some of his inner child scabs? Or would he have kept pushing me away because a mother’s love is not a void that I can ever really fill”

My answers: no matter how loving, accepting, undemanding, enduring woman you would have been with him, he would have continued to push you away forevermore, even  when the two of you are 80 years old, unless he had some serious psychotherapy for a couple  of years or so. His mother created a void in him, and the filling of that void was time limited. After too many years of void, it is no longer possible for it to be filled without healing. Not even by his mother, if she changed her ways.

“I’m pretty sure his mother has expressed love to him at some point, it just doesn’t seem to have been a consistent thing growing up?”- no mother never expresses love for her child. No person in the world never expresses love for another. But a smile and favorite food on occasion, even daily, do not make up for repeated anger and hostility toward the child. Her being cold  means she was angry and hostile- the motivation behind her rejecting her son and bickering with her husband for years.

“If love requires pain, some self sacrifice.. because they need you?”- without him being motivated to attend and seriously work in the context of professional therapy for about two years, your sacrifice would have been for nothing. He probably would have stayed with you. He probably wouldn’t have looked for the ideal woman, a concept that was indeed “a ruse he was using to push” you away, just as you stated. But at the end of the story/ the end of your lives together, he and you would be where you are today, just older, sicker and exhausted.

In other words, what is the point in sacrificing for a relationship that will not change? You invest in a child so that he or she will grow up to be a healthy adult; you invest in a plant, so that it will grow and flourish. What is the point of investing in a man so that he can keep being the hurting child he’s been for so long, into old age?

I think that you see yourself in him, you see in him the unloved child that you were and you want to save him from the pain of being unloved. Question is, will you direct your efforts toward yourself and save yourself?

* It is way easier to try to save another than to save  ourselves.

“My mother was anxious avoidant in childhood… Now my mom shares her love with me any chance she can get”- the time limit to fill the void that she created in you is gone now. Just like I mentioned regarding his mother, it is too late now for her to fill his void.

“I have been in therapy before as well. Did I mention that both me and this man have degrees in Psychology.. he seems so entirely uncomfortable with emotions”-impersonal, academic, outside-learning is very different from personal, inside-out learning, when it comes to emotions. He can have a PhD in any subject, and yet be as uncomfortable as he is with his emotions, having no insight, so it seems, into his mind and life.

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by .

Dear Michelle:

He could very well be in the habit of disassociating himself, separating himself from his feelings. But regardless of the reason he can’t return your feelings today, better that you leave him alone and let him be. He is a bad investment for you. Just because you invested so much in him, doesn’t mean it will be a good choice to continue to invest. As a matter of fact, it will be a bad choice.

But you are hurting, aren’t you? It will take you hurting and enduring that hurt to fully understand that giving up on him is the right choice for you. It will get better, really, if you go through this hurt and see reality like it is. Put all your good intelligence and empathy and resources into helping yourself, not him.

anita

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by .