This might be long-winded because that’s the way I write, just a warning.

I started to date this girl I work with last year in November. I had JUST gotten out of a 7 year relationship a few weeks prior and it was very much related to this new girl. My 7 year relationship was emotionally abusive and my self esteem was shot, and the attention and interest this new girl was showing me was enough to get me out from under the thumb of my abusive relationship and into something new with another girl. A sort of rebound. Except this rebound girl was awesome and amazing and showed me a lot of positive things that I want in a relationship. There were some red flags, but I chose to ignore them like we always do because I thought I could fix them. Basically all of them were situated around her being really immature for her age. I am 28, she is 24. She had never been in a relationship for longer then 4 months, I’d been in one for 7 years. She had never not lived at home, never really took care of her finances or anything of that sort. Things that are obviously problematic but things I ignored because I loved everything else about her. Except we had a really big fight in the middle of July (9 months into our relationship) because she was texting her ex and being secretive about it and lieing to be about it even after I caught her and she just ran away. She was like “I don’t love you anymore” and that was that.

She was always open about her confusion with emotions, her inability to talk and interact with overwhelming feeling because it would cause her to shut down and not be able to interact. We worked on this a bit but she would always get too overwhelmed and stop the conversation. Then the fight happened and it got too big and she just ran away.

After the break up we didn’t talk for a few weeks until we needed to exchange some stuff that we had of each others. Some clothes and stuff she had left at my house. We got together and talked and had a good conversation but again she got up part way through saying something and said that she had “had enough” and was “overwhelmed” and needed to leave. Starting to see that she is really immature and can’t handle adult stuff in any capacity. We talk a bit more that night and the same thing happens. She accuses me of pushing her too hard and too far and I accuse her of playing games and “opening up a little only to slam the door in the face when she feels like I am getting too close” We agree to not talk for a few months, if not longer.

Fast forward again a few weeks and she contacts me because she sees on my work schedule that I am going on vacation. She says have fun and I ignore her because I don’t want to talk to her. Yesterday, I get off the plane and turn my phone back on and she has sent me another text, asking me how it went. I respond this time, saying that it was really good and was really helpful for me (I did a cross country road trip with a friend who was moving to the other side of the country and we camped along the way; getting into nature is always helpful for me and this time was no different). Anyway, she asks why and I explain that it helped me to recognize that her and I don’t work because we don’t have the same idea of what friendship is or what love is. That she doesn’t understand boundaries when it comes to a break up and that I have specific criteria when it comes to my friends. I don’t have superficial relationships with people. I have and want and need depth but she can’t provide that right now for me and so I’m not sure that we can talk. Cue her saying that she “wants to change that and is working on that aspect of herself because she knows she needs to fix that in order to be happy, she needs to be willing to have more depth with people, etc” so I try to help. I talk about it with her and after a bit, she again accuses me of pushing and digging and trying to analyze her and says “goodbye maybe we shouldn’t talk” and I basically lose it. I don’t swear or anything but I say something along the lines of “don’t accuse the way that I interact with you as being why you close down. You doing that is a choice that you make and has nothing to do with me. I don’t appreciate being blamed for your inability to communicate. I have and always have had an open door policy with you, and you are the one who is jeopardizing that, not me. If you want to do your work on your own, that’s fine, do so, but don’t randomly talk to me and start to open up and then when I start to engage you slam the door in my face because I don’t want to play your stupid games.”

She didn’t respond. Part of me is okay with this, because I feel like I can let go and just not interact with her anymore unless I randomly see her at work (we work in a hospital, so it will happen, but very rarely. When we were dating it would only happen maybe once a month.) But then the other part of me still wants her to be in my life as a friend at some point but I don’t know how possible that is because I don’t expect her to make any changes to the way she is. I feel like she just says she wants to but won’t actually do anything about it. I don’t know.