@Suprima
He doesn’t want to live with you
Don’t worry about him initially saying he wants to settle down, look at what he has done. You have been together a year, doing a domestic thing for half the week and he has made no effort in moving things forward.
Now is the time to step back- don’t say ‘I want to live with someone and you aren’t ready’, a breezy ‘This relationship isn’t going where I want it to’ will require him to think and prioritise what you want. He might do a complete 180 when he realises what a dealbreaker this is for you. He also might not.
If not- I’m sorry he has wasted your time. You have a lot of PPs excusing this man because it’s ‘only been a year’ and they like their own spaces- but as you are mid thirties and the idea has been to settle down- he is being very cruel.
This, I think. What you say about him reminds me of an old friend whose relationship history looked very different to your boyfriend’s superficially, in that he’d had two longterm 8 year plus relationships. But these were LDRs and didn’t really require him to alter anything about his very ‘set’ ways, despite him saying he wanted marriage and children. In theory. In practice, he would freak out at the idea of going somewhere new for dinner, far less moving in with someone.
The first LDR partner left him (for a famous politician!) when it became belatedly clear to her he was never going to marry her, and he did this massive melodramatic rush to London to beg her to change her mind but was, I think, secretly relieved when she made it very clear she’d moved on.
He then replaced her with a second LDR and resisted all suggestions they move closer together, after which she left him too, seven or eight years in.
Finally, another longterm LDR girlfriend (he was now late 30s) who was an active, decisive type, proposed to him, found him a job closer to her home, bought them a joint house, organised the wedding etc — because absolutely none of this would have happened otherwise — and even then, he refused to live with her till they got back from honeymoon.
They’re now divorced. She got sick of his passivity, and he belatedly —after causing a lot of misery to their children — realised he’d never really wanted to be married with children, he just thought he was supposed to want it.
The whole thing is a horrible, cautionary tale about male passivity and going along with someone’s narrative for your life, and then blaming g them for ‘making you go it’.