Dear Lealea,

my impression is that you don’t want to be hurt by him. That’s why you are “playing it casual”, even though you might want something more serious? But his initial comment (“women always seem to want to have relationships”) was pretty alarming and potentially revealed someone who doesn’t want a committed relationship. That’s why you’ve put up your guard and are pretending to be casual too. At least this is my impression.

So maybe I’m giving him mixed msgs. I just feel like I’m not sure what he wants. No doubt I should ask to clarify but I’m pretty reserved.

It seems you’re both sending each other mixed messages… Neither of you wants to be hurt by the other, it seems, or wants to appear too vulnerable or needy. He told you he’d like to be exclusive and he wants to spend a lot of time with you. You were like “yah, do whatever you feel you need”. As a reaction, he maybe says something which sounds like objectifying women (“his talk towards me is pretty sexual“), perhaps to appear tough and not needy? And then you conclude that he’s just after sex. Even though he also says other stuff that reveal different intentions (but then he will say something that confuses me).

It seems like neither of you is really admitting what you feel for the other, or what you want from the relationship. His every expression of vulnerability – when met with your feigned “indifference” – is probably followed by a feigned sexism. Which then is a proof to you that he might be superficial, when in reality, he is probably not. And so it goes, round and round….

I’m thinking if I want a more serious relationship then I should cut things off with him

Well, I think you’d need to clarify it with yourself first if you want a more serious relationship. Because it could be that you’ve been hurt in the past (I took the liberty of taking a look at your previous threads, although maybe I drew some false conclusions from it), and you’re afraid to be hurt again. And so you play it “safe”, by playing it casual. But it’s not really fulfilling…

This guy perhaps has the potential to have a deeper relationship, so I am not sure you’d need to cut things off with him. But you’d need to clarify it with yourself first…

Dear Lealea,

you’re very welcome!

I play it cool because I have been pretty damaged in the past…

if you want to talk about it, please do. If I understood it right from your previous thread, you were in a serious relationship 3 years ago, and you were planning to get married (you even bought the ring). But I guess something happened and it didn’t work out? If you want to talk about it, I am here…

I know this prob comes down to my ability to know ill be OK regardless of others.

Yeah, we don’t want to get hurt, because we feel it will take us down and we’ll never recover. I guess we lack emotional resilience, which is exactly what you said: being OK, feeling good about ourselves, regardless of others. So even if he turns out to be a j*rk, we won’t be destroyed, we can bounce back pretty easily. Also, we recognize red flags on time and don’t allow to be abused or manipulated for long.