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Yes. Thank you for your help! I think we’ve milked this topic for all it’s worth, at least in the forum context 🙂 I appreciate all your insights.
Thanks for your insights!
There is something much deeper going on here. What happens in our adult life, the choices we make and how we design our life, is shaped from our childhood and role models growing up. I imagine your therapist would have helped you connect to your childhood experiences that would shape your romantic experiences…yes? no?
Yes, I have explored this with my therapist. Generally, I feel that my relationships with boys/men from middle school age onwards influence my choices today more than my childhood. My parents were very attentive and loving during my childhood. But what we uncovered with my therapist is that anxious attachment doesn’t only come from inconsistent parenting. In my case, my parents were so consistent and immediate that I sometimes expect if someone cares deeply about me, they will meet my needs. Of course in adult relationships, the other person is never able to meet your needs right away. So since my paernts really let me figure out how to self-regulate, I didn’t quite develop this skill early on. But I feel this last break-up has shaken things up to the point that I will really work on this in future romantic relationships and I am already working on it in my friendships.
The only last questions I have for you:
– I just wanted to circle back to my question on choosing to be exclusive as a stepping stone to choosing to be in a relationship. If a man suggests this again in the future, what are ways you would suggest to handle that situation?
– Would love the contact of your coach to explore that option!This mindset I am talking about requires work and being in a deeper relationship with yourself – not a path that many will take.
Yes, this is something I am working on and is an example of what gets discussed in therapy. Identifying my need in the moment that I feel reactive and figuring how to give it to myself. Taking a moment to think about the other person’s situation and perspective before putting a request or message out. But I appreciate the way you described it. That’s helpful.
I’m a little confused here. If there is an agreed upon exclusivity, that’s both people agreeing to be in a relationship. Did you guys agree to be exclusive, but then he wouldn’t call it a relationship?? I’m not sure I understand.
Yes. His thought process was that he doesn’t like to date more than one person at a time. If his emotions are involved with one person, he wants to focus on figuring things out with that one person. But at the same time, I think he felt that each time we started things up again, within one month he felt like I was expecting things from him when he wasn’t invested yet and wanted to just “date me for a straight month” without me traveling. Even though we knew each other for a year, I think he felt like we needed to have time exploring in the dating context before he could call it a relationship. When I asked him what he needed to see that he hadn’t seen yet to feel comfortable entering a relationship, he said, “I don’t know. You tend to lead with your thoughts. I tend to lead with my feelings, and I need a couple of days to understand the thought behind the feeling. Let’s talk about this again on X day.” But then as I mentioned before, we never got to have that conversation before I left for India because he got sick, so I never knew what he needed in order to call it a relationship.
So…who taught you that? Where in your life were you left wanting and needing love and attention and connection? Many dating situations that start off strong but quickly fizzle out before they become committed relationships. I have never been in a committed relationship, and I am 35, so I have a lot of pain associated with that thought. It’s something I have worked on with coaches and therapists over the years. I understand that when I think that way, it puts so much pressure on something new with someone — that if it doesn’t work out, I’m making it mean something big about my ability to have a committed relationship. I know logically that my past history is no indication of my ability to have a solid relationship in the future. But that insecurity never totally goes away. And I guess I also feel like I am losing time if I want to have kids, so I really want things to work out.
That is how you should feel about your therapist and if you don’t, maybe it’s time to consider a new one. I’m happy to send you the info. of my coach and you can try just 1 session with her and see the difference. Just something to think about.
Thanks, yes I’d be open to learning more about your coach. I find my therapist to be helpful in making choices for myself in the present. But what I meant by comment before is that the dialogue with you has been helpful for me to let go so much of trying to understand what I could have done better and trying so hard to figure out what I can do moving forward for the same issue to not occur. Even though my therapist does consistently tell me that the way I talk, I’m self-critical, and we work on self-compassion. I just didn’t process in the same way for coming to terms with and truly believing that my ex and I were just incompatible.I appreciate all your insight here. I will reflect more on potential fear and beliefs about love. I will mention it to my therapist next week!
Do YOU feel things moved fast with this guy?
Yes. We met on a trip with a bunch of other MBA studens and we met up almost every day on that trip and spent nights together. We slept together on that trip (it was my birthday, and I wanted to have fun!) Once we went back and started our lives on campus, we coincidentally found out we were going to live in the same building, so we would see each other several days a week and study together. This makes us sound young, but it was a full-time masters program so we were 27/28 at the time.What EXACTLY do you do that would make them feel like you move fast?
I actually don’t really start thinking about marriage, but I perhaps start acting like we are in a relationship when are not. I reach out often and initiate, instead of meeting the other person’s pace. I think about them when I am not with them and often would rather be hanging out with them when I am with my friends or other people. I feel disappointed when they don’t meet my needs and make it mean that they don’t care. For example, with the MBA student, when there was the first party for all students (900 people) and he was spending the night meeting other people, I was upset that he hadn’t texted me or come find me to talk, the way he did when we were on our trip. I got upset and went home and texted him. He wrote me that we should talk, and at the end of the night he said that we had just gotten to campus and he was looking to get himself established in meeting people, making friends and get focused on his goals before having a girlfriend (“Maybe down the road, but not now”). But I think it was really just that I was pushing him, when I should have been doing the exact same thing — focusing on establishing myself, and letting my connection with him happen organically.I don’t have “tests” they need to pass before they can earn my heart. What are some examples, if you don’t mind sharing?
I am also curious if you have thoughts on a man’s desire to first be exclusive and then decide to be in a relationship, and how that should affect my mentality/choices in each stage. Or to just not agree to be exclusive without the title of relationship knowing that I get attached quickly. (I will work on the getting attached quickly part, but it doesn’t hurt to know my tendency).
Thanks for all of your help! Please feel free to let me know if we are just going into too much detail or different stories here 🙂 But I am finding it all quite helpful. It’s been the most processing I’ve been able to complete in the last 6 months.
When I listen to dating advice and they say that when a man hasn’t locked you down in a relationship, he may be spending time with you until someone that he likes more comes a long. The thing with my ex was that it was very clear that neither one of us were seeing someone else and that we were exclusive. He had said that when he has his emotions involved in someone, he doesn’t want to be dating more than one person. He just wants to see how things can progress with that one person. But by virtue of being exclusive it also felt like we were basically in a relationship and again, that kept me reminding myself that I have other options and that if he’s not showing up, I should divert my attention else where.
So I wonder if in the future I shouldn’t agree to be exclusive. It’s either that we are single or in a relationship, and that way I protect my heart a little better. Or else I need to have the mindset and remember that I can always step back from being exclusive if he’s not stepping it up and have other things in my life to put the energy into (not necessarily having to go on other dates) to remember that this person is just an addition to my life and I don’t “need” him. Because if I’m honest with myself, even if we hadn’t agreed to be exclusive at that point and I decided to go on dates with other people, I wouldn’t have been enjoying those dates with other people; it would have felt uncomfortable.
I guess I am just seeking ways to learn to hold back and not give myself fully if the man has not fully invested in me yet. And know how to ebb and flow with this and not lose myself even once he has invested but there are changes in what he’s putting into the relationship over time.
Because, heck even 6 months later after things ended, I date someone new for a month and I am not emotionally available to him so it fizzles out. It’s happened several times now. I want to learn how for the future to date in a way that I know a relationship may end at any point in time, but it doesn’t hurt me so much the way this one did. Or I don’t feel so attached that even 6 months down the line, I am not over him and trying to make sense of why things ended.
Yes, I think everything that you’re saying makes sense! The only thing that lingers for me after I read your response is when you say, “he was never fully invested in you,” it’s still hard for me to not make that something about how I let things unfold over one year. Like, perhaps I made myself too available to him even as a friend that he could gain so much closeness without ever having to earn my time and attention, and therefore never felt invested. It’s not that I have low self-worth or think that if he spent 1 year with me and wasn’t invested that it means something about me as a person, but that perhaps that it’s my “form”. I had another ex say something along those lines to me years ago. “Things moved very fast. I didn’t feel like I had the space to get deeper in the relationship and then progressively test things out, to fall in love. Not blowing smokes – you have the goods. It’s a form over substance issue.” I know you’ll say that was his perception and his experience, but I feel this is a pattern in my life that things get off the ground and end abruptly, so I can’t help but wonder how do I learn from this.
I try to remind myself that perhaps my latest ex is just in a different place and still not emotionally available, so if he wasn’t able to invest, that has nothing to do with my approach… but again, somehow I feel like it was a combination of both things (his emotional availability and my approach). Because why would he talk to me about my desires for marriage or being able to do long distance in one year if he decided to do a masters if he wasn’t thinking about a longer term trajectory? I feel he was open the idea of something serious. I recognize that he wasn’t there yet and his communication was trying to clarify longer term goals before making a decision to get deeper, but I feel that if he ended things within a few months of that conversation, it was because there was a change in what he felt towards me and he wasn’t seeing me as compatible with him before he got a chance to get deeper. That if I had given the space for him to invest in me, he would have been more tolerant of my “messiness.”
Yes, and thank you for responding in detail over a forum. I know much of this is hard to get into in written form.
From what it sounds like with your current situation, you were pushing him to talk from a place of fear. You were afraid of losing him, so if you could just talk to him and get some answers, you could fix something…whatever that may be.
When I was pushing to talk after he ended things, I don’t think I was trying to fix things in my relationship with him, but I was trying to understand what I could do better in general moving forward for future relationships. In that sense, I suppose I would say the “push” was coming from a place of confusion. I was confused about what I had said that made him feel like “we operate differently.” I felt like if I could understand better, it would help me make sense of the abrupt ending and feel more at peace.
Once he said no and I had to keep seeing him at social gatherings, and we had a few negative interactions, it just felt unresolved. I probably also attributed meaning to the fact that he said no, which was that he didn’t care about me even as a friend/person to help me move forward if I was asking for a last conversation, especially given that we have to keep interacting in the same friends group. I found it so awkward to be interacting when I knew deep down that there was something unresolved for me. So perhaps the energy there was discomfort with the lack of clarity and hurt that he would choose not to meet me halfway.
What do I want this other person to do for me, that I am not doing for myself? So with your guy, you were wanting him to connect to you so you could feel secure in your relationship. It’s THAT energy that caused you to push more and more to get answers and then resulted in him feeling pressured.
When I was in India and I messaged him, “Should I assume we aren’t dating anymore?” That wasn’t coming from a fear of security in our relationship. I actually at that time wasn’t worried that I was losing him. However, I was excited about him and wanted to talk to him while I was there. So, when he wasn’t making it a priority to talk, I was frustrated. I can’t quite put my finger on what the energy or need was. I suppose you’re right — the desire to stay connected still does give a feeling of security. I am trying to think how I could have given myself security in the moment. I suppose to just orient myself back to my family around me and realize I was secure with them? And to remind myself that there was nothing wrong in his and my relationship, because I knew he wanted to talk but he was just much more casual about it. But that begs the question — if I had made a request from a different, positive energy and he still wasn’t making it a priority, what would have been a helpful mindset? To tell myself that, “Hey he’s not prioritizing this right now and you deserve someone who does. That doesn’t mean you have to walk away right now, but prioritize yourself, stop initiating communication, and see what he does.” And then I could have had a bit of a longer time horizon to see how the dynamic evolved and then see if what you said happened — if this was an important enough need not being met and hadn’t “fallen” away, then I could make a choice if this person was a good match for me or not.
I just have a feeling that he wouldn’t have super communicative during the time I was in India, but as soon as I was back, he would have made the effort. Because right before I left for India, he was making the effort to spend time with me 2-3x a week and initiating. So, I guess I would have had had to decide how important it is to me to stay in touch when we are not apart versus be okay with the quality time when we were together.
I am just thinking allowed, because I was so emotionally attached that I don’t think I had the true space to say that I would walk away if I wasn’t getting what I wanted. And I just wonder that if I’m one year into a relationship, how I can take a step back to evaluate if I’m getting what I want and be able to walk away if I’m not. I guess after this experience, I’m so afraid that I won’t able to have a “walk away” power once I’ve entered a relationship.
Everything else you shared is super helpful, and I agree. I think that I had been able to show up from a positive energy and make my requests, and then he still didn’t step up, it would feel so much easier to just say — okay he wasn’t compatible with me, and I feel at peace with it. But because I know that I could have showed up better, it’s hard not to wonder if it could have worked out if I had the security within myself to take care of my own emotions and give him grace. The night before he ended things with me, we got into an argument over the phone. He said something like, “The thing is that you think you’re asking me a question from a place of curiosity, but it comes across as if you think I did something wrong.” A week later, my brother said something very similar to me, so I think it’s something for me to work on.
During the conversation when my ex ended things, he said, “See when we had brunch right before this, it was nice. We need more of that.” Essentially alluding to the fact that each of the three times we have started something, within a couple of months, I say something that indicates that there is a problem, so it makes it feel to him like there’s not enough positivity to cancel out the negativity. I feel overall that in our one year of on and off and periods of time as just friends, we experienced way more positivity than negativity, but I can maybe see his point of view that as soon the dynamic was entering, “Hey let’s try this dating thing,” within a few months I would snap at him and that made him feel inadequate and like he couldn’t explore a deeper relationship with me. I feel bad about that. And I don’t know if that’s a me issue, or this person isn’t compatible with me otherwise he wouldn’t have brought that side out of me. Probably it’s both.
One thing I know is that I became passive aggressive once I felt like he we were playing phone tag and didn’t feel like he was making it a priority to respond to me via text at least. I wrote, “Umm should I assume we aren’t dating anymore?” and then pretty quickly deleted it because I realized that was so not going to get a good reaction. I wrote something else an hour later and deleted. But I don’t know if he saw any of these messages before I deleted them. I then wrote a nicer one a day later but that still talked about our communication, like “Hey I was trying to think what’s the best path forward and maybe let’s just wait to talk more until I get back in the US.” “And then when we’re in person we can talk about how we can better communicate in these situations for next time.” I know that it’s this series of messages that led him to ultimately feel pressure. It could even be just opening a phone to several deleted messages, which shows that I was trying to figure out what to say out of frustration.
Maybe it’s not that I needed to pull back completely, but I wonder if I simply said, “Hey why don’t we try to schedule a day/time to talk this week? Would that work for you?” would have been better in lieu of the other texts. I sometimes struggle with finding the balance between letting something go versus communicating in a nice yet assertive way when it’s something that’s important to me.
Yes it all makes sense and is helpful, thank you!
These painful experiences, teach us to move differently in the dating world, so we better care and protect our hearts.
I agree there is something I need to do differently moving forward, but I’m not quite sure what it is. In fact, the first time I was asking my ex to talk it was to better understand what I said that created pressure for him so I could decide what to take away from the experience for future relationships — how I could improve my communication or take care of my own emotional needs in the moment that I was reaching out or responding to him out of frustration, or perhaps hearing a little more from him would have led me to decide that there isn’t much I would do differently.Obviously at this point I’ve just given myself closure without his clarification. The best I can think is that I could have pulled back my energy. If he wasn’t answering my call or text within a day or two while I was India, I could have just let it be and see what he did. After all, it was more important to continue building our relationship once I was back in the US. We had left things off in the US at a point where we needed to talk through some things. He had said to me, “I feel like you want to get married in a year, and I want to apply to grad school which means it will take me a few years before I would feel ready to settle down. I feel like we won’t have any issues doing long distance during that time period, but I want to know how that impacts your thought process.” I told him that I wasn’t looking to get married in a year but also probably didn’t want to wait 3 years before thinking about it. I also said that if we were going to start something up again, this time I needed us to be in a relationship from the start because at that point he knew me well enough over the course of one year to at least know if he wanted to commit. His response was, “I don’t know, in the past I have just dated and within a few months it organically turns into a relationship.” He was always someone who needed to feel his way through things. I said, “Okay. There are obviously so many more experiences with you I’d want to have to know if I want to something more serious like engagement. But I’d like to know what you still need to experience just to decide we are in a relationship.” He said he needed a few days to think about it to be able to articulate what he still needed to experience in order to feel comfortable entering into a relationship. We were supposed to meet the Sunday before I left for India to discuss it, and he unfortunately got quite sick with a bug and we didn’t get a chance to talk (wasn’t a lie, I saw it with my eyes lol).
So I felt like those convos were intentional enough to have the expectation that he stay in touch me over the two months that I was gone. And we did okay for a month. For example, my mom had an accident in the second week and I had to take her to the ER, and he got on the phone with me while I was at the hospital. But after one month, I think he was super overwhelmed with work (and possibly his parents. His mom came to stay with him for two months not too long after, so I have a feeling that was occupying his mind and he just didn’t tell me. He said when I got back that having these kind of conversations on the phone is hard for him. He was able to articulate himself well in person).
So that second month in India, he kind of communicated that he was busy, but I didn’t get a sense of the intensity from his messages. Communication started deteriorating. Given where the conversations were left off, how could I have moved differently?
The only thing I can think is to have taken a step back, recognized we weren’t in an official relationship, and taken his contact points or lack there of as data to observe before coming back to the US and figuring things out from there in person.
But it sounds so much easier said than done when you’re excited about someone and have seen them showing up for you for a few months (at first in the US and then that first month in india), when suddenly their communication decreases.
Thanks for the thoughtful response Heidi. I think I know that the approach you are sharing is the best one for my own mental health and for my ability to create the life I want. It is painful though to accept.
I’m curious if your suggestion here is to let go of the friendship completely (definitive black and white and deciding that we will never have a 1:1 connection again) or let our relationships (and I use the word relationship here just to mean the connection between two people – any type of relationship, not just romantic) build up, or not build up if it’s not flowing, in the friends group setting. The distinction here is that the latter requires a bit of living in the ambiguity of what that new relationship may look like and not making choices that are driving towards some kind of outcome. The latter gives me a little bit more hope while the former probably feels healthier for my mental health in the sense that all of my thoughts related to him even in group settings would probably not be wondering what might happen. Instead I would just be focused on me and other relationships in the room.
Part of me feels like if we can repair the friendship, it will overall improve my experience in the friends group. Since he is so central to it, other people will feel a little more comfortable inviting me to things if they know that he and I are good and he will also probably invite me to things. Right now, it’s been a little hard to make my own things happen within the group with all of the negative energy over the last six months and because I don’t have as strong relationships with others as he does. I also feel like this group used to feel like home and now that is changing, so if I could look at my ex and think pure, warm thoughts towards him in social gatherings, it would make my own experience of the group better. Right now, without having had the ability to talk through things or just have our own positive conversations (i.e. start creating new memories that are positive), sometimes it’s hard for me to keep positive thoughts of him. I have this resentment that I was willing to put in the effort to repair and he just prioritized himself and his capacity, while indirectly asking me figure out my own mental health and emotions myself.
