Dismissive Avoidant (I think)!!

Someone can be temporarily emotionally available due to life circumstances being unusually difficult without it being related to an insecure attachment style. For example, this might happen to even a secure person grieving a loss. That person might stop dating for a while and only resume later when they've recovered somewhat. She sounds like she's been very upfront with what's going on in her life and feeling too overwhelmed by it to be able to be a good partner to you right now.

If she's never had a good relationship and she's 52, then she probably does have issues that existed before things got rough recently. That may be a sign of avoidance. But choosing to pause or end a relationship of about a year that is serious but not living together, engaged, or married, due to difficulty balancing it against her life stress, is her prerogative. You can't do anything to convince her otherwise, it's up to her if she wants to lean on a romantic partner when stressed or if she wants to turn away and disengage during tough times. If she's the kind of person who would rather break things off than approach difficult times as a team, is that really the perfect person you're looking for?

Does she want to stay in touch as supportive friends? In doing so, are you just going to lead yourself on waiting and hoping she'll change her mind? Can you take a break yourself to mourn the romantic part of the relationship and wait to be supportive and in touch until you really can just be friends without you having an agenda? I think leaving her be until you're moving on from the relationship would be both best for you and also give you both the best opportunity to reconnect later IF it is meant to be once you're both in a better emotional place. But there's no guarantees that will happen because, unfortunately, bad timing can also be a thing, attachment issues or not.

jebkinnisonforum.com/post/34974/
How the different attatchment styles deals with loss / death

“…impending court case with a narcissistic ex who lives in another country which is very traumatic as it requires her to go through and relive all the crap that happened with him (intimate details etc) which she finds very time consuming and hugely embarrassing. On top of that her dad has been in ill in hospital for a month and needing to spend a lot of time with him and support her mum....”

The thing She is going through right now with all the trauma and stress ect. can put her in survival mode. When we are in survival mode there is No room for love, sex ect. because we are busy trying to survive.
When we are in survival mode we are not able to use our pre frontal cortex

Also women in meno pause / peri meno pause are more voulnarble to stress

Sex and menopause - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/46804/
Stress and menopause - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/46952/
Stress and menopause - jebkinnisonforum.com/post/47620/

Sometimes when one or both partners are under a lot of stress, it can be a good idea to put the relationship on pause.

You also do not have a long history together and the relationship is relatively new. Maybe you have never met her parents ?

If She is also a strong an Independent woman She might not want to or thinking about leaning on you for support.

She also has to support her mother

anne12 - I feel this is hitting the nail on the head. She has consistently said that its not me and the timing couldnt be worse.... I am just in a quandary as to how best deal with it. Like her mother, she just wants everything to be perfect and fun without having to deal with the difficult conversations or the bad events happening in her life. I do feel let down that she's prepared to let me go and not work through it together. I offered to stay in the relationship without sex until or if she ever gets the feelings back again but she said that it wasnt fair on me and that she didnt want to be in a relationship without sex...

alexandra - I've never been in this situation before so unsure as to whether I could fall back in love or not... I am very protective of my heart and this is honestly the first time (and thats including my ex wife) that I've fallen so head over heals.. I am normally a secure attacher (I think) where I'm really pretty confident in myself and don't see myself as needy.. I feel though that more she pulled away (towards the last 3 months) the harder I tried to make it work... We do have an amazing time together. Three days before she broke it off we went for a lovely walk with a great meal and had a fantastic night... I stayed over at hers and although we didnt have sex we were naked, cuddled, kissed and were really close.

Thanks for all your thoughts and help here, I'm really finding it very comforting..... I still dont know whether I'm doing the right thing by staying in the game, communicating the way we do.... On our last call on Friday she agreed to meet up for a walk and bite to eat... She was originally reluctant as she felt I was expecting us to get straight back together but I reassured her that I completely understand that she wants to be alone and I respect that. I suppose I'm hoping that she will manage to navigate through this and she will start to have the same feelings for me again.

Thanks again anne12 for posting...
She definitely said that she needs to be on her own at the moment.... She said that she was not feeling the way she thinks she needs to feel.... She went to the GP in July/Aug as she thought it was related to menopause and got patches to try and help.. The GP also mentioned that it could be related to depression with what was happening with her ex as well..
The first 4 to 5 months we were having sex all the time and then she started to lose interest... Obviously I start thinking what am I doing wrong etc..

The way I'm feeling at the moment I'm prepared to wait as long as it takes..... I am taking it a day at a time as I go through a variety of feelings of sadness/frustration/love etc....

It would be great if @introvert can give her thoughts as well...

Thanks again.

… She said that she was not feeling the way she thinks she needs to feel....
Compared to what ?

A lot of sex - lucky you 😉
When the relationship changes from the infatuation phase / the honeymoon phase we can no longer expect to feel the same / want to have the same amount of sex can we ?

Also the trauma / stress and the meno pause going on can make us change
She is 52 years old and this is the age where meno pause often kicks in for lot of women

Making these kind of decisions when under a lot of stress is imo just stupid but easy to do, expecially for those with some desorganised attatchmentstyle - the thing She is going through can push her into some desorganized behavior with some fight, flight, freeze, collapse, shut down responces

A lot of relationships ends because of the womans peri meno pause / menopause - it is often a good idea to get help and Education about the topic for both partners

The bonding hormone oxytocin doesn't work the same way in women as before menopause.

My personal dating experience in life has been to let someone go who is willing to break up with you. Someone who wants to be with you and is emotionally available enough to be with you will remove obstacles, rather than inserting them. If someone I'd been with was inserting space and obstacles, the relationship was already over, even if I needed more time to process my feelings and come to terms with that. They're telling you what they want, and even if it's someone you care about and it hurts and what they have to say isn't what you want to hear, there's something fundamentally incompatible between the two of you if you're not willing to work things out together in the same manner as the other wants. Needing to bend over backwards to accommodate the other person shows you both don't have compatible needs right now, for whatever reason (insecure attachment, menopause changes, life stress, etc). That doesn't always 100% mean you can't reconnect later, but a breakup means the way things were before isn't working and the connection is fundamentally broken. Things do need to change if you can ever get back together, and that requires time as well as personal effort. And as I said in my last post, you can't predict that if one or both of you truly change in some way that you will end up more compatible than before.

Ultimately, you're asking if you're wasting your own time because you're hyper-focused on her and on guessing what she's thinking and what the future might be while letting her decide the terms of the relationship, totally throwing your needs aside in hopes that she'll change her mind if you relinquish all your control (which is simultaneously an attempt to have some control). Take a step back while still respecting everything she said, and decide if you want to take or leave the new terms she's laid out. You can't stick around in an attempt to negotiate, and expect things to change that way.

So in this case, while disconnection feels painful, I do really recommend it. It doesn't need to be a black and white "I'm going no contact forever" decision that you need to make right now. But giving yourself space and no contact for a little while will help you get out of your own head a bit and shift your perspective so you can really figure out what you need. This isn't about wondering if you're wasting your time being there for her, it's shifting your focus off her back to what you really want. You need to figure out if hanging out emotionally invested but with things going no where is what you want, and if so, how long you want that for (if you set a time limit for yourself, you don't need to tell her how long it is, you can decide for yourself in your own mind). I think she'll be disappointed but understanding if you tell her you need some space to heal before you can be in touch this closely, going no contact for yourself doesn't need to be in a way that lacks communication or respect (what the kids today call ghosting). Nor does it need to be a big deep conversation, it should only be a couple quick sentences.

It hurts, I understand that, and I'm sorry things haven't turned out the way you'd hoped. It's okay to face and feel and process the negative feelings that come with a breakup with someone you care deeply about. While you're still in touch, those feelings will be like drug withdrawal, which is why you need some time and space to get through the withdrawal and get to the other side for your perspective to shift and for you to really understand what you want (and if it's this situation with diminished commitment). Being protective of yourself, again, is about having healthy boundaries and not abandoning yourself and squashing down all your needs to try to control and maintain the situation. It does not mean making yourself emotionally unavailable out of fear, but it does mean respecting your own needs as well as the needs the other person is communicating to you. She didn't say, "I need some space but want you to give me time, and here's what I'll be doing to work on the relationship," which would be a different situation. She said she wants to be alone to figure things out, so let her be.

Hooooooooboyyyyyy... how do I deal with stress? Well let me tell you, I'm close to her ag3 and it's rough, I'm going through perimenopause and I sometimes don't even know who I am, lol. I'm all over the place.

All of the stuff she's dealing with is so intensely personal and triggering. She's got nothing to offer, for the foreseeable future. And that's fine, it's appropriate, but it's also not anything you should risk your heart further for.

You've been downgraded, not for anything you've done wrong but because she didn't have the capacity she thought she did, and she found that out along the way. Between hormonal issues, the trauma involved with divorcing a narcissist, and caregiving for aging parents, she's drained. She doesn't have the inclination to lean into the relationship for support, and you mention she's super independent so it's possible she's avoidant, but it doesn't matter because that sliver of info changes nothing whatsoever. What I mean is, even if you label it, work to understand it, you won't impact it whatsoever because awareness and alterations can only come from the inside of her. Under stress, she isn't looking to connect she's looking to just cope. The real problem that I see is that this relationship began when she had unfinished trauma business with her ex. She will need to have that sorted and it's impacts minimized through actual healing before she is able to provide relationship stability. She realizes this, and that's why she acknowledged that the timing is wrong and that she wouldn't have dated if she knew what she was going to be facing.

Here's something I challenge in your statements. You said she just wants everything to be fun and perfect and she doesn't want to have to deal with the stuff going on in her life, or something to that effect.

Check yourself. A woman who is accomplished and successful has dealt with and will continue to deal with all the hard stuff. In fact, she's dealing with it rather than escaping into the relationship with you and avoiding it all. It has all her bandwidth. There isn't any left over for you. It's you she doesn't want to extend herself to and that isn't necessarily about you but don't get it twisted.

It may be that she doesn't want to have the tough conversations with you. What she's dealing with, all of it, is deeply personal and difficult. There is little doubt in my mind that you aren't able to have the hard conversations without a bunch of expectations tied in... and that right there could be what she'd like to avoid. A relationship comes with expectations and she knows she can't meet the needs inherent in relationship. Don't look for that to change, and here's why... she has NO idea how she's going to come out of these processes. None. Everything she's dealing with involves unpredictable outcomes. So she can't and won't make promises and that's good on her. She has no clue how she's going to land, not with the court case and associated traumas, not with her parents, not with menopause. Effectively, she is going through major transitions and will not be the same as when she went in. You began a relationship right before she got turned upside down and inside out. In a period of massive changes, anything without deep deep roots can and will be shaken and that's what has happened here.

So. What to do? You will have to decide. Ask yourself... was this whole thing premature? Based in some fantasy and while looking for relief from past pain and loss? Did you deal with your own divorce adequately? Were you both caught up in wishful thinking while avoiding facing the fallout of your broken marriages? Quite possibly. You should explore those questions as you contemplate. It's hard stuff. Things that don't withstand difficulty don't have a strong foundation, for whatever reason. Sad but true.

Sorry you're going through it. Tough stuff. You may already know the answer you're seeking and just not want to know it. The stages of grief include denial, bargaining, anger, sadness, acceptance, not necessarily in that order. All of it is a process and a response to loss that feels unbearable. Good to be aware of what's going on inside you.... when you're bargaining (I'll wait!) Or denial (maybe it will change, feelings will come back!) Or anger (the frustration you feel)... note those things as a response to grief and not things to hold on to and lean into for answers... they are just a response to loss.

I'm sorry.