To be hurt and want some female support

[Cleo4leo]

I've been seeing a man for several months and the last few weeks it's been mainly the phone as we are not allowed to do much.

Everything was going really well between us. He said to me just two days ago it's taken him all his life to find me and he just knows I'm the one. He said that's it for him now. He knows what he wants. There's lots of details but it would take me all day.

Last night I asked him why he didn't like Christmas. It's our first Christmas that we've known eachother. He told me it was a long story for when we next meet up. So I said ok and that it was his choice whether to tell me. He then went funny with me. Said it felt like a very strange convo we were having. So I said I didn't know why he felt that way and i was just asking a normal question. He went for a bath and stuff then messaged me to ask if I was ok. I said I was but wanted to know why I had made him so I comfortable. Then he sent me one last message saying he didn't know what to say and be was really sorry if he had upset me. He put kisses on the end. Then he completely disappeared. I tried to call him half an hour later and he didn't answer. I thought maybe he was asleep.

I've not been able to sleep all night. But what's hurt the most is he's been on Facebook this morning and not opened my message from last night.

So I don't know now if we are over? But my mind's telling me actions speak louder than words and he's being rude and flaky?

This is completely out of character and it's honestly put me off him. But I find it so hard to switch off. I get anxious when things are like this. I've not sent him anymore stuff. I've left him alone so I don't look like a crazy pest. But how do I get through today.

We've been so close since June. Any advice.

Please me kind to me.

This has massively put me off. He starts work at 8am. I know he's up. he knows I tried to call him. He has not opened my message.

I thought you were going to wait for him to contact you?

@AlwaysLatte Same thought occurred to me, and now he has the perfect excuse to not see OP over Christmas and not explain why.

OP, I read your other post, so you have at least met him. But how much time do you spend together? Are you absolutely sure that you're not the other woman?

This relationship is making you feel shit. That is a good enough reason to end it. Life is too short

Agree with this. A relationship in its early stages shouldn't involve this much angst and hard work.

If you throw in the fact that this man is a recovering addict its just not worth the grief.

If you're not able to relax sufficiently to enjoy it now imagine what it will be like down the road if he has a relapse.

I'm not intense. He's gone from telling me I'm his world and he's going to spend the rest of his life making me happy

I was going to change my whole life to be with him properly

I’m going to say this fairly bluntly because you appear to have blinkers on. You are being an absolute selfish idiot. Where are your kids in all of this? Or are you working on the basis that because you think he’s lovely and want to be with him, this will obviously be fine for them and they’ll just fit in around you and what you want? You’re a parent. You have to put their well-being first. You’re with a man who is declaring his undying love after only a few months, a proportion of which has been a phone based relationship only. You don’t even know each other. You might have talked for hours, but you have no idea how he deals with conflict, what his temper is like, can he cope with noisy kids first thing on a Sunday morning? Does he do his fair share of housework? What’s his attitude towards money? You’re planning on uprooting your life, and by extension, your children’s lives, to venture off into the unknown. I really hope you haven’t introduced him to your children yet and, even if you had, they won’t have built any sort of relationship with him after such a short period of time. What if they don’t like him? What if he doesn’t like them?

Of course it’s lovely to feel loved and wanted. But this is not real love. It’s an illusion of what life would be like with a man who, up until now, has been on his best behaviour. All I’m hearing is ‘me,me,me’. You’re so caught up in the romance of it that you haven’t stopped to think about the practicalities of it. And I haven’t read your other thread, but if you’re seriously considering letting a recovering addict within a million miles of life with your children until he has several years of sobriety under his belt then you should be bloody ashamed of yourself.

Hang on, I read the OP’s other post under this user name, but it bears a remarkable resemblance to a post by someone under a different user name, about whether she wasn’t ‘cool enough’ for her apparently reformed bad boy boyfriend, who had scars from his fighting days, had been in trouble with the police when younger, was a newly-recovering addict, and had not seen his children for a decade until his suicide attempt landed him in hospital. Lots of fairly specific details match.

If this is the same person posting about the same relationship — and I would normally not point this out if the poster had name changed, but it’s pretty outing and concerning — then this man is not in the right place to have a relationship. The OP should run a mile, which was what virtually everyone on the other thread said.

@PigsInHeaven I thought exactly that

OP If I had been seeing a man for several months and I also had children I would not be considering a future together especially in these dodgy times when people can't meet spontaneously as we used to. I would be taking it as it comes, and treat it like a loving friendship which might develop over time into something sustainable and dependable.
Christmas is not always the happy time it is supposed to be (according to the happy ending fairy stories).. sometimes it is horrific .

Give the man some space and I am sure you will get the measure of him soon anyway

[quote hadesinahalfahell]@PigsInHeaven I thought exactly that[/quote]
As I said, I wouldn't normally 'out' someone who'd namechanged, but the details of this were so specific I remembered them, and had commented on that thread, and assuming this is the same poster, this man is a far more troubled individual than emerges from either this thread or the other one under the same username.

Personally, I'm genuinely pleased she seems to planning to step away from it, even if it seems crazy to me that she was in full on 'denial and rescue' mode about his troubled past, longterm abandonment of his children, addiction etc, and is now saying she's been put off him by the fact that he hasn't opened her text message.

I suppose it wrecks her 'He's different when he's with me' narrative?

Regardless, good call if you're dropping him, OP.

@Cleo4leo

Hardly. I said it was fine when he said he'd talk to me about it when we met.

I am not going to reply anymore on here because I'm being accused of being intense and hard work.

I'm sure you don't give a hoot when you suddenly get ignored by someone who has promised you everything. Wouldn't make you doubt anything.

He said it was a story for another time, you’ve pushed the question. What if he’s Christmas as a kid was awful, what if someone died near Christmas? What if it’s bad memories? If it was the other way you’d feel the same.

If the other posters are right then I change my answer. Too much drama,hassle and potential for heartbreak or worse for you and your kids. End it with him, and do some work on yourself. You deserve better and so do your kids. At the very least...someone stable

(Standard MN answer)

Red flag, red flag. He's cheating on you. Leave him now.

I think if you are not normally an intense person, but you are coming across as intense now you need to look at why that is. It seems as if you are matching him to a certain extent (the saying that "this is it" for him is pretty intense), but also possibly destabilised by his actions. If you find yourself over analysing what someone means, whther they are upset with you, what their problems are etc etc then it is highly likely you are not in a healthy relationship. Otherwise you will end up getting repeatedly wound up and looking "crazy", "intense" or "insecure" when you try to explain the situation to others.

The fact that you keep posting about this man and changing the narrative each time (e.g. talking about his history of substance abuse in one thread, ignoring it completely in the next) suggests that you know this relationship is no good. You have to twist it and leave stuff out to make it sound acceptable. You know full well that - provided with all the information - posters are going to advise you this relationship is too unstable to involve your children in. So you hold some information back each time you post, change the story, in the hope that folk will tell you that the relationship will be fine.

Having to twist the narrative like this is a really bad sign. I think you've posted more about this man under other names too. There's a lot more to the story and he might even be drinking and using again, which would definitely explain the sudden change in his attitude. Point is that you don't know. You haven't got a clue because you don't really know this man in such a short space of time. You have no idea how secure his sobriety is. No way should you be changing your life around and involving this man in your children's lives with this much instability going on.

...

You sound like really hard work.
Maybe he has a past trauma he's not ready to share just yet, and that is his right. You decided to push it unnecessarily when he was clearly uncomfortable.
To then "give it til lunch" before you dump him as you're miffed, is so childish. He's been asleep most of the time - chill out!!

Your kids deserve better than this

I'd got suspicions that the OP had other threads on this relationship. There were too many coincidences over points mentioned.
There's obviously a lot more going on here.
OP for your childrens sake knock this on the head.