Here’s one more “seeking advice from the future” post…
Dear Today Me,
For about a year, I’ve been in a relationship with someone who has often confused me about his level of commitment. He alternates between being excited, loving, and full of plans about our future versus disappearing emotionally and withdrawing physically. Several days ago, I expressed this confusion to him. While he assured me he was committed to our relationship, he asked for some space to “digest” all the emotions I had shared before continuing the conversation.
My questions are:
- How long is it reasonable to wait, pushing through the hurt, impatience, and some anger for the delay, before approaching him again?
- Am I being unfair to myself by allowing him to unilaterally set the boundaries for this conversation?
Past Me
Dear Past Me,
I do understand the pain of not having your need for a conversation met. Unfortunately, the path you eventually chose to take didn’t work out well. You pushed for more talking and, yes, he did give you a positive response re his feelings for you. But a few seeds of distrust about how you might accept and respect his future needs and boundaries may have tainted things moving forward. You ended up winning the battle, but losing the war.
The thing is, everyone’s way of “digesting” things is different. I won’t elaborate on an analogy involving bathroom habits, but I imagine you get the point and understand the perils of trying to rush that process. I do understand your impatience. I still struggle, even now, with waiting for the phone to ring or ping with a text. But just a few days isn’t really an unreasonable time to wait.
If you had waited a bit more, and the conversation “can” still got kicked down the road indefinitely, that would have been a helpful red flag for you to see sooner rather than later. Your follow-up pressure did elicit some caring feedback from him, but that “he loves me, he loves me not” dynamic kept repeating, over and over (and over again). A little more patience, early in your relationship, may have made the difference in terms of helping to strengthen the bonds of acceptance, respect, and trust between the two of you. On the other (less positive) hand, it may have given you a clearer window into a future of avoidance and mixed messages. Either way, it probably would have been for the best in the long run.
Today Me
