Prognosti-gator
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You’re discounting the potential that she was put off by scary behavior of yours.
Surely you must understand that someone who is potentially unnerved/frightened by behavior isn’t necessarily going to just come out and say “I’m frightened by your behavior.” All that does is risk an elevation of the behavior.
Not saying you WOULD be abusive, but abusive people aren’t abusive 100% of the time. So, treating her well sometimes (“how well I treated her in many other ways”) isn’t going to erase red flag behavior at other times. So, you have to understand why someone wouldn’t want to take chances at the first hint of those red flags.
- Being an “emergency contact”.
- Putting in a lot of effort to rescue a dysfunctional relationship.
You’re expecting an awful lot out of a couple month old long-distance relationship.
Things didn’t work out. It sucks. Of course you feel bad. But take the time to figure out how to be a better relationship partner next time, rather than try to litigate your way through a “it must be her fault” rationalization.
Well, I finally understand the “mixed signals”
She said she “can’t be in a healthy relationship right now” … but you clearly weren’t offering a healthy relationship, so it should have been perfect … right?
Yeah, it’s over, but I’d counter with telling you that this wasn’t a good relationship to begin with.
You were 3-4 months in, and your “relationship always had some struggles” caused by her “communication problems” and your “poor responses”? This is dysfunctional. Relationships that early on are supposed to be easy, because you haven’t faced any real challenging things (money, kids, etc.) yet. It’s the honeymoon phase, and already you’re having problems.
Work on yourself (no more “poor responses” – whatever that means) in the future, and think about why you are so desperate to hold onto what is clearly not working. If you can’t be happy with yourself, you’re not going to be happy with someone else.
This isn’t about cake. It was never about cake. It’s about being heard. LW doesn’t feel like BF listens to her.
Which brings me back to my original comment “I’m kind of curious why after 10 years you don’t feel comfortable enough having the conversation with him.”
Are there other problems with the relationship that make you feel like you can’t have this (seemingly low stakes) conversation about your needs? I feel like that’s the bigger question.
I’m kind of curious why after 10 years you don’t feel comfortable enough having the conversation with him.
Sometime other than when you’ve just been given the cake (so that it doesn’t appear to be a direct criticism in the moment) say “Just curious. Every year I ask for a red velvet cake, but you get a different flavor. Is there some reason you don’t want me to have red velvet?”
Maybe he hates red velvet (though, I would still get my SO the cake they want, even if it meant I got something different for me) and just wants to enjoy it with you. Maybe he’s clueless and doesn’t know red velvet is a flavor and doesn’t know how to parse your request. Maybe he’s just passive aggressive and purposefully buys you the cake HE wants because he doesn’t care. I have no way of knowing, but after 10 years it seems like you should be able to ask.
Wow. Your (hopefully ex) girlfriend is truly awful.
The “I’m only hurting you because YOU’RE making me” is directly from the abusers’ playbook. Blaming you for their own terrible behavior is a second abuse, because (as we see in this thread) it is causing a wave of self-doubt to get you to the point where you wonder if you actually DO deserve the abuse.
You don’t.
Open relationships are a non-sequitur. That’s not what this conversation is even about. The time for that conversation would have been before. Now, it’s just an easy rationalization as to why you should feel off-guard so that you continue to blame yourself when (not if) she acts terribly again in the future.
Run (don’t walk) away!
Feelings aren’t a finite resource that are divvied out across people. (eg. You don’t need to love your first child any less when your second child is born.)
Actions ARE finite, however. When she acted with her ex, it’s possible she was in love with BOTH of you. Or, maybe more in love with you, but caught up in lingering emotion she hadn’t fully processed yet about her ex. Her feelings weren’t really the issue here.
She chose to ACT on her feelings in a way that hurt you. She could have chosen otherwise even if she “felt” she was in love with both of you. For you both to come back from this, you’d need to know why she acted that way and how to know she wouldn’t act that way again, even if she loves you now. It should be her responsibility to be falling over herself to assure you it won’t happen and offer transparency into her actions so you can believe her, and it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening.
It’s been a looong time since I’ve dated … but there were a variety of ways they could go: no kiss, a kiss, *more* than a kiss, or even kissing BEFORE we’d gone on an “official” date. I wouldn’t even say the amount of kissing directly related to how close I felt to the person. Sometimes, yes, but other times it was just a moment thing. People enjoying each other’s company, in however that unfolded for the moment. The physical and emotional aren’t always in lock-step with each other so that increasing one by “one unit” also increases the other by the same.
The problem you have is that you don’t handle ambiguity.
You’re looking for The Formula® – the exact sequence of variables to explain The Womens®. But it just doesn’t exist. Some women are going to want to take things slowly, others are going to be bored with you long before the hand-holding activity you have planned for your three month anniversary. Why? Because they’re just like men, in that there isn’t a single “this is how THEY think” algorithm that describes them. Every person is unique in what they want.
BUT, there is a bell curve.
So, while “all women” may not want a specific single thing, there are some trends that cover large portions of a population. Being creepily un-flexible is probably at the lower end of that curve. A guy who is more interested in dates following a script than in just being in the moment is probably going to appeal to VERY FEW women. In general, people aren’t dating to fill a scavenger hunt … where they just need this list of exact things to win. They are looking for someone they can enjoy their time with and can mentally project a future of continuing to enjoy their time with. In your quest to check all the boxes, you’re taking any enjoyment out of the process at all.
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(PS: Don’t interpret any of the responses as “You should have kissed those women on the first date.” as I’m definitely not advocating running headlong at someone all puckered up if you can’t “read the room” and determine whether it is wanted or not.)
[Riyo] started posting a new thread as Gracia, and then as “Kylie,” whose boyfriend isn’t into the sex.
Can you blame him?
With those multiple personalities to contend with, it’s like all of the WORK of polyamory, but with none of the physical variety to make up for it.
Riyo, if you aren’t actually also Garcia (which I suspected from the sycophantic first response even without the IP confirmation from Kate) then it means that someone in your house is seriously messing with you. Computers behind the same NAT router (like a typical home wifi router) will all share the same external IP address. So, in the 1 out of 1000 chance that you ARE being sincere, here’s my actual advice – dump the guy. (My advice for the 999 of 1000 other chances – stop playing stupid games on the internet.)
Robert, when I floated the “demi” term it wasn’t an ending, as if that’s the end of your story. It’s to help you realize what you’re working with and figure a best course of action from there. (No map helps if you don’t know where you’re starting from.) This is the same as why I said you should work with a therapist familiar with people on the spectrum. Your lack of picking up social cues isn’t the end of who you are either … but what you need is to learn how to build coping mechanisms to work around them.
I have a friend who is color blind. That doesn’t stop him from driving. He just needs to develop alternate ways of deriving information – like knowing WHICH light on a stoplight is on top, and which one is on the bottom, since he can’t discern the stop/go from the red/green difference alone. This is the kind of thing you need to learn to develop. You don’t seem to have a good sense of when you’re being “intense” so working with someone familiar will help you build the “rule sets” to moderate your behavior.
If you ARE demisexual, the value in KNOWING is that it may mean you’re better off trying to date in specific ace/demi communities rather than the general dating pool. That way you’re much more likely to meet like-minded individuals and spend less time on frustrating first dates. Developing social cue coping mechanisms will help you there to foster more relaxed relationships when you DO go on first dates, and may increase your chances of second and third ones.
The dating profile work was good, but it only gets people to your door. You need to be able to take it from there, and I’m pretty sure someone who works with you personally is going to have a much better ability to assist you than a bunch of web strangers who have only your second-hand retellings to base our guesses on.
