Post by yasmin on Jan 27, 2018 13:16:56 GMT
Hi all. My head is just all over the place on this and I'd be so grateful if you can give me your thoughts on how I can get a handle on things with this.
As a brief recap, my FA hasn't had a relationship for 5 years and before that it was only one (with someone I think swings towards DA from what he's told me). He's never been good at intimacy, he's very insecure and he's the kind of person who thinks all relationships are forever.
When we met 18 months ago his pattern was to date 2 - 4 women at the same time, very casually, not getting intimate emotionally with any of them but basically enjoying physical intimacy, affection and romantic activities with each of them a bit like a drug but also feeling very lonely. We met around this time, and when we dated I called him out on this pattern right away and he was convinced completely there was nothing wrong with it. He saw it as meeting people and taking it slow, rather than avoiding intimacy.
His pattern when I was dating him was quite typically avoidant: chasing and then pulling away, going quiet after a particularly good date, being evasive, introducing insecurity to the relationship by telling me he was seeing others, setting a timetable that was all about him and made it hard to see him, only communicating by brief texts. He was really impossible to get close to, so I didn't see any point dating him. If I tried to address anything with him, he'd just ignore /go silent or change the subject.
We didn't date for long (because his pattern didn't work for me) but after we stopped dating, he seemed to keep reaching out to me all the time and we very slowly got close to each other emotionally which was never there when we were actually dating. Over that period he started to see / acknowledge that his pattern was to avoid real intimacy and relationships by seeing more than one woman at once and not getting close to any of them and started to want to change.
We got closer and closer over a year (and I started to really like him) and started "dating" in the sense that we'd basically go on dates, kiss, be all romantic and spend hours talking. He called it "just friends" though, but for certain this relationship was much more like a relationship than it was when we were officially dating. He just couldn't call it that and to be honest I think in his head if he called it a relationship he'd see it as forever. We continued to get closer and closer and a lot of things changed for the positive; no more pulling away, no more going quiet after fun times together, he was totally willing and able to have tough talks with me, no more evasiveness and then he announced that he'd stopped seeing other people and didn't want to anymore and just wanted to invest in our "friendship". He was basically opening up and being completely vulnerable with me and there was a definite power shift where it felt like he was now the one who was open to me and needed me more.
As a lot of you have been following this story, this all was great but also made me pretty uncomfortable, because he obviously wasn't committing to a relationship while expecting me to just flex myself into being his unofficial girlfriend. As Jaeger mentioned on another thread, he was trying to redefine what friendship is to fit with what he could handle and ultimately it wasn't fair on me, and also every time I saw him he was trying to get physically intimate and very romantic with me. Kristyrose's posts about her ex FA have really highlighted what actually happens when someone wants to basically act like your boyfriend and say they're not...it's painful and difficult and I don't think fair on the other person and I didn't want to go through this pain.
So I stopped seeing him, explaining that it was messy to be in a situation where he was calling it "just friends" but not acting like it, and he accepted it but he was obviously really, really upset by this. I have never seen or heard him so upset as he was when I said I wouldn't see him anymore and it made me feel really bad because I don't want him to be sad. I don't think he wanted to lose me so he was trying to adapt or think of ways to find a solution. So he came back to me and said he just wanted to be my friend and he would stop "trying it on" if we could be friends. I caved in on this and we started being "friends" again and in fairness to him he's stopped trying to get sexual with me (although he is still extremely physically prone to touching me, hair kissing, hand holding etc)
So we have been friends again for a week now, and just to give you a little insight into how this relationship dynamic works; we basically talk every day. Most days if he's not with me, he's talking to me and we do stuff together one-on-one a lot. It was his birthday last week and I went over to his place and we cooked dinner together over wine together; then we did the crossword together, then we cuddled up and watched TV together and the entire time he's kissing and stroking my hair and holding my hand. He also wanted to talk about going on a vacation together and he'd made all these plans he wanted to show me on his computer because he wants to take me on a trip to where his ancestors are from. He also dropped the shocking bombshell on me that he's told his family and children about me and wants me to meet them (he's never done this with any woman) and basically everything he is doing / saying is inviting me openly into his life and saying he wants me to stay there and be a big part of it.
There's a TV series going on that we're both following together and the other night he texted me while I was in the supermarket to tell me it was on TV and to ask if I was watching it too. I was out and said I'd watch it later and he said he wanted to pause it on his TV until I got home so we could watch it together. So he basically sat there for 54 minutes with his TV on pause and then restarted the TV show and watched the first 24 minutes all over again just so he could watch it in perfect timing together with me. He said stuff wasn't as much fun without me.
So I guess what I am saying is that it's a very sweet, very affectionate relationship where I feel very loved, I feel like he is making huge effort, I feel like he's being much less avoidant with me but also one where I still think it is way more than "just friends" and I can't shake how hard that is to cope with or all the possibilities for pain from me.
So last night I asked him about sex and other women because I sensed something had shifted, and here's the bombshell. He says that when I wasn't talking to him he "took a lover" (basically he started having sex with someone on a no strings basis) and that he thinks he's going to continue with it because he said it was "less messy this way" . So what he's saying really here is that he's evaluated the problem and the solution he's come up with is that he is "friends" with me (ie: getting basically all emotional needs of a relationship met by me) and he is lovers with her (ie: getting physical needs met by her) and he's somehow decided this is the best solution.
Like somehow it's easier for him to do it this way and his denial is so deep on this that he just can't see how illogical it is to have a woman you really like and want to spend all your time with and want to have sex with, but just to avoid calling it dating, you'd rather take the sex somewhere else. It feels like it makes sense to me in the way his logic works, but it's also so dysfunctional! He also said to me he'd "made adjustments" because he felt worried I would leave him. Not sure what that means, but maybe it means this woman is a backup and he's not putting all his eggs in one basket.
Since we got very close, he's not been with anyone else physically, and now he has I don't feel jealous (I know in my gut I am the one he has feelings for) but there is a change in the dynamic of the relationship with me (it's distanced us as he is now intimate with someone else also even if it's just physical) and so I guess this is probably what the aim is from him - to have me, but with this distance. It's not possible for him to just have ONE person he has sex, emotional intimacy and everything with so he kind of has to spread it over more than one person; and while this is progress because he now actually has a loving bond with me - is it really that different from when we met? He's still not engaging in just the basic normalcy of sharing these things with ONE person and in doing so he kind of diminishes the beautiful parts of it.
I just don't know how to feel or what to think.
If I am honest with myself; I think he's taken one crappy pattern (having sex with lots of women with no emotional connection) and replaced it with another crappy pattern (having sex with a random woman while having an emotional relationship with me) and that both these patterns are avoidant.
I am weighing up various courses of action here...
1. To pull back a lot and maybe date other people myself.
2. To just continue as "friends" and spend time together hoping he continues making progress and eventually feels like he can be in a relationship
3. To tell him how I feel, that I think we're in love, and that him bringing this woman into the picture really diminishes what we have.
I normally know what to do, but right now I really don't and I haven't been feeling good. I'm not anxious, but more just sad because we're so great together and so, so happy with each other and the way he is doing this is just so sabotaging.
As a brief recap, my FA hasn't had a relationship for 5 years and before that it was only one (with someone I think swings towards DA from what he's told me). He's never been good at intimacy, he's very insecure and he's the kind of person who thinks all relationships are forever.
When we met 18 months ago his pattern was to date 2 - 4 women at the same time, very casually, not getting intimate emotionally with any of them but basically enjoying physical intimacy, affection and romantic activities with each of them a bit like a drug but also feeling very lonely. We met around this time, and when we dated I called him out on this pattern right away and he was convinced completely there was nothing wrong with it. He saw it as meeting people and taking it slow, rather than avoiding intimacy.
His pattern when I was dating him was quite typically avoidant: chasing and then pulling away, going quiet after a particularly good date, being evasive, introducing insecurity to the relationship by telling me he was seeing others, setting a timetable that was all about him and made it hard to see him, only communicating by brief texts. He was really impossible to get close to, so I didn't see any point dating him. If I tried to address anything with him, he'd just ignore /go silent or change the subject.
We didn't date for long (because his pattern didn't work for me) but after we stopped dating, he seemed to keep reaching out to me all the time and we very slowly got close to each other emotionally which was never there when we were actually dating. Over that period he started to see / acknowledge that his pattern was to avoid real intimacy and relationships by seeing more than one woman at once and not getting close to any of them and started to want to change.
We got closer and closer over a year (and I started to really like him) and started "dating" in the sense that we'd basically go on dates, kiss, be all romantic and spend hours talking. He called it "just friends" though, but for certain this relationship was much more like a relationship than it was when we were officially dating. He just couldn't call it that and to be honest I think in his head if he called it a relationship he'd see it as forever. We continued to get closer and closer and a lot of things changed for the positive; no more pulling away, no more going quiet after fun times together, he was totally willing and able to have tough talks with me, no more evasiveness and then he announced that he'd stopped seeing other people and didn't want to anymore and just wanted to invest in our "friendship". He was basically opening up and being completely vulnerable with me and there was a definite power shift where it felt like he was now the one who was open to me and needed me more.
As a lot of you have been following this story, this all was great but also made me pretty uncomfortable, because he obviously wasn't committing to a relationship while expecting me to just flex myself into being his unofficial girlfriend. As Jaeger mentioned on another thread, he was trying to redefine what friendship is to fit with what he could handle and ultimately it wasn't fair on me, and also every time I saw him he was trying to get physically intimate and very romantic with me. Kristyrose's posts about her ex FA have really highlighted what actually happens when someone wants to basically act like your boyfriend and say they're not...it's painful and difficult and I don't think fair on the other person and I didn't want to go through this pain.
So I stopped seeing him, explaining that it was messy to be in a situation where he was calling it "just friends" but not acting like it, and he accepted it but he was obviously really, really upset by this. I have never seen or heard him so upset as he was when I said I wouldn't see him anymore and it made me feel really bad because I don't want him to be sad. I don't think he wanted to lose me so he was trying to adapt or think of ways to find a solution. So he came back to me and said he just wanted to be my friend and he would stop "trying it on" if we could be friends. I caved in on this and we started being "friends" again and in fairness to him he's stopped trying to get sexual with me (although he is still extremely physically prone to touching me, hair kissing, hand holding etc)
So we have been friends again for a week now, and just to give you a little insight into how this relationship dynamic works; we basically talk every day. Most days if he's not with me, he's talking to me and we do stuff together one-on-one a lot. It was his birthday last week and I went over to his place and we cooked dinner together over wine together; then we did the crossword together, then we cuddled up and watched TV together and the entire time he's kissing and stroking my hair and holding my hand. He also wanted to talk about going on a vacation together and he'd made all these plans he wanted to show me on his computer because he wants to take me on a trip to where his ancestors are from. He also dropped the shocking bombshell on me that he's told his family and children about me and wants me to meet them (he's never done this with any woman) and basically everything he is doing / saying is inviting me openly into his life and saying he wants me to stay there and be a big part of it.
There's a TV series going on that we're both following together and the other night he texted me while I was in the supermarket to tell me it was on TV and to ask if I was watching it too. I was out and said I'd watch it later and he said he wanted to pause it on his TV until I got home so we could watch it together. So he basically sat there for 54 minutes with his TV on pause and then restarted the TV show and watched the first 24 minutes all over again just so he could watch it in perfect timing together with me. He said stuff wasn't as much fun without me.
So I guess what I am saying is that it's a very sweet, very affectionate relationship where I feel very loved, I feel like he is making huge effort, I feel like he's being much less avoidant with me but also one where I still think it is way more than "just friends" and I can't shake how hard that is to cope with or all the possibilities for pain from me.
So last night I asked him about sex and other women because I sensed something had shifted, and here's the bombshell. He says that when I wasn't talking to him he "took a lover" (basically he started having sex with someone on a no strings basis) and that he thinks he's going to continue with it because he said it was "less messy this way" . So what he's saying really here is that he's evaluated the problem and the solution he's come up with is that he is "friends" with me (ie: getting basically all emotional needs of a relationship met by me) and he is lovers with her (ie: getting physical needs met by her) and he's somehow decided this is the best solution.
Like somehow it's easier for him to do it this way and his denial is so deep on this that he just can't see how illogical it is to have a woman you really like and want to spend all your time with and want to have sex with, but just to avoid calling it dating, you'd rather take the sex somewhere else. It feels like it makes sense to me in the way his logic works, but it's also so dysfunctional! He also said to me he'd "made adjustments" because he felt worried I would leave him. Not sure what that means, but maybe it means this woman is a backup and he's not putting all his eggs in one basket.
Since we got very close, he's not been with anyone else physically, and now he has I don't feel jealous (I know in my gut I am the one he has feelings for) but there is a change in the dynamic of the relationship with me (it's distanced us as he is now intimate with someone else also even if it's just physical) and so I guess this is probably what the aim is from him - to have me, but with this distance. It's not possible for him to just have ONE person he has sex, emotional intimacy and everything with so he kind of has to spread it over more than one person; and while this is progress because he now actually has a loving bond with me - is it really that different from when we met? He's still not engaging in just the basic normalcy of sharing these things with ONE person and in doing so he kind of diminishes the beautiful parts of it.
I just don't know how to feel or what to think.
If I am honest with myself; I think he's taken one crappy pattern (having sex with lots of women with no emotional connection) and replaced it with another crappy pattern (having sex with a random woman while having an emotional relationship with me) and that both these patterns are avoidant.
I am weighing up various courses of action here...
1. To pull back a lot and maybe date other people myself.
2. To just continue as "friends" and spend time together hoping he continues making progress and eventually feels like he can be in a relationship
3. To tell him how I feel, that I think we're in love, and that him bringing this woman into the picture really diminishes what we have.
I normally know what to do, but right now I really don't and I haven't been feeling good. I'm not anxious, but more just sad because we're so great together and so, so happy with each other and the way he is doing this is just so sabotaging.