11 months in, my boyfriend (now ex) has told me that he is ‘deficient’ and that he cannot love me in the way that I would like. He would be happy to stay with me indefinitely but thinks that it is better to let me go because of my age and because he is 'not enough' for me and that at 35 (I want kids), he should 'let me go'. This has increased the huge insecurities I already had. On the other hand, I feel like perhaps he was emotionally unavailable from the start and I should have just cut it off ages ago.
Did I expect too much, or was I right to feel worried?
I posted three posts about this man before, so I should have known really. Many people told me to dump him but I bought up my concerns with him and he responded well. Looking at it all, I feel like I maybe took crumbs in the hope that he would change and I could win him around. I’m feeling stupid and like I am seriously f*ed up and at 35 should not have fallen for this, but then I remember all of the loving actions I saw and I can't help feeling he did have feelings for me and I've driven them away with overly worrying about it.
He said while breaking up that he would have been happy to be with me forever (and we had talked about marriage, kids and living together) but that he worries he will never love me in the way that I need or want to be loved, and that my insecurity would just get worse (which it has). I’m confused as it sounded like he was ‘falling on his sword’ to ‘save me’ from himself, but also feeling angry and cheated that he could do this and at the same time say I’m his best friend, his favourite person, that I’m the only person that’s meant so much to him.
He said he felt he should feel head over heels by now and that he wasn’t, that he doesn’t know what those things feel like and doesn’t think he will ever - he has been convinced of this for a very long time. I feel very sad at the thought that he will feel those things one day, it just won’t be with me. He said that perhaps if the timing was different and he had more time for his feelings to grow things would have been fine. Which makes me feel old and I like I put him under too much pressure.
This leads me to wonder whether I just ask too much and if nothing will ever be enough - perhaps if I’d trusted him and not questioned things (I was getting pretty anxious) this would not have happened. I feel like the fear I had from the beginning - that he would find me too much and waste my time - has come to fruition, and I feel like I have pushed him away and kind of ashamed of that.
I actually have had a couple of relationships where my anxieties managed to disappear, where I felt loved, where we had a lovely closeness. So I know it is possible, although I fear my self esteem has taken such a hit since then that maybe it's not anymore.
I told him that sometimes insecurities just crop up on my side, and that I'd like to stay together, and that this wasn't all bought on by him or this 'inability' to love. I actually ended up reassuring him that I do often feel loved, which has been true. But I didn't push to stay together as it felt like after he had said that, there was no going back. I was weirdly calm (shock?) and felt sorry for him more than anything. I ended up basically reassuring that he is capable of love, that I had felt love, and that I cherished what we had.
But now, I feel sick, and sad, and I miss him a lot.
I wonder whether because of this belief that I can't have a successful relationship I subsconsciously chose someone who clearly had intimacy issues and should have backed away much sooner instead of using this as a stick to beat myself with. He was a naturally distant character who at 31 had never had a close relationship. In our eleven months of seeing each other, we probably spoke to each other on the phone every two weeks (after about 5 months of never talking on the phone), with mostly texts (several a day) between our dates (which were 1-2 a week). When we did talk on the phone, he sounded impatient and like he wanted to get off. He was weird about meeting my friends, which I put down to shyness as he had no issue with me meeting his. Put on paper, that seems fine, but it just didn’t feel like we were progressing much in intimacy and he just didn’t feel ‘in it’ enough.
I remember him confessing he’d never loved anyone earlier in our dating, and that he had never had a serious relationship. He said he thought love grew slowly, and I agreed, and felt happy to let it unfold. I thought it was, and now feel blindsided and like I either should have waited longer, or like he did love me but didn't express it very well and I have triggered some fear in him about not being able to love anyone when, actually, I did feel loved in many moments. Maybe I should have stayed quiet.
In many ways, he showed me love and he certainly gave me a lot more than he had been able to give others. I felt loved by him reasonably often, and could really see that he adored me at points. He implied we had a future together. He said he could go with my timeline when I was having a fertility panic (which I was careful not to make him feel responsible for - I'm getting my eggs frozen), he was about to take me to Switzerland to meet his entire extended family. Maybe he did love me, in his own quiet way, but I wanted too much? He was clearly very pained to break things up, and was very upset. He said he doesn't know how to be happy and he will now just be unhappy alone (his default position - he's been convinced from the start he'll end up living in a log cabin with a dog).
I feel like it's my fault for putting pressure on the situation - but I think this thinking may be flawed and that if the relationship were right, he would be able to make me feel more secure instead of like I needed to play it cool all the time.
We had just come back from a lovely holiday where things just felt really close two weeks ago. He then had a week’s intense workload and was very quiet, which piqued my insecurity- something which has been quite present through a lot of our relationship, so maybe I wasn’t as happy as I thought.
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I would like advice on how to get through this without it turning into another ‘failure’ in my head, or a reason to beat myself up with. I worry I expected too much. That it was my insecurity that led to this. I've also been recovering from several big life traumas and am worried I put him off with my generalised anxiety/sadness about multiple things (which I tried not to burden with him but which came up regularly).
I would also like to hear opinions on whether you think my insecurities actually were a pretty natural reaction to the situation? I feel pretty nauseous right now and hearing other peoples' take on this may help quell the anxiety and feeling of impending doom and loneliness/'no one will ever be enough' thoughts.