I’m a 37 year old man, went through a tough divorce, no kids and finally opened myself up to dating again. Met the love of my life a month ago. We both mutually fell in love instantly. We’ve both expressed it and our connection is unreal. We’ve talked about future, marriage, kids, all the possibilities. We’re on the same page on most things. We agreed we want to spend the rest of our lives together. We felt like soulmates. We didn’t worry about the “how”, we just knew this was a lifelong connection.
However, she has 3 major concerns about the future. I have 1.
The 1 concern I have is a mutual concern we both have, which is our families accepting our relationship due to their own beliefs about certain things, so we’re on the same page with it and are willing to give each other time and space to date, go with the flow, and manifest what we want.
The extra 2 concerns she has I didn’t see coming. She voiced them after a month of us dating and went from “I’m going to marry you and spend my whole life with you” to, “because I visited my family recently and know what they expect of me” and the below 2 reasons:
1) I can’t move in with you as I agreed I would in August, but I can after graduation in May 2023.
2) I can’t give you the assurance that I’ll be with you forever like I told you earlier, because if at any point my family doesn’t want me to be with you, I can’t break their heart and have them take it upon their own health because they’ve done too much for me, so I would have to flip my decision and possibly leave you for them.
I was heart broken and shocked. I felt abandoned again and kind of betrayed. Even though I know her love is pure and real. I also appreciate her honesty in telling me everything up front. She was afraid I would break up with her when she told me everything, but she was willing to go through the pain of the break up now because she didn’t want me to live in false hopes and be dishonest with me in the relationship. For that, I do respect her a lot and although I didn’t like what I heard and it hurt my feelings, at least she was honest with me from the beginning.
For the other 2 concerns she has, they’re based off an international trip she had to take to see her family for 3 weeks only 1 week after we met and started dating. During these 3 weeks we were in different time zones, she had bad internet connection and she was always around family so we could barely connect or talk. It caused some miscommunication and we had a couple of misunderstandings, but we quickly resolved both and happily made up. We considered them wins and a victory, but when she came she told me what I mentioned above, and these additional 2 concerns based on her 3 week trip away from me and what she noticed then:
The 1st one is about her possibly not wanting to move in with me in August (as she agreed to 3 weeks ago) because she doesn’t want to feel restricted if she chooses to live with me because she’s come from a very restrictive family so she wants her freedom to do what she wants, see her friends and still live an independent life with her college friends this last year of college. She’s open to moving in at any point, but doesn’t want to agree to August right now.
The 2nd concern is that we may have some different needs and wants based on the communication misunderstandings and triggers we had, and so although the love is there and we appreciate each other a lot, she’s concerned that maybe we’re going too fast and we should get to know each others wants, personality styles more and go slower so we don’t run into more problems in the future or over commit.
I could totally understand her fears and I was very receptive and loving about them. I reassured her we would work everything out. She was super relieved and happy. She told me she does not want to break up with me. I asked her if she still loves me and she said yes. She wants to be together. Since then, she has shown it, but I have noticed a major difference in her behavior from when we first met to post-family trip. It seems as if I want her more than she wants me. They may just be thoughts in my head. She’s also starting a new internship right now and has been traveling a lot so it’s been a very overwhelming and exciting few months for her. I have tried to be patient and give her space to catch up with her own life, let alone our new relationship. She is now in another city for 2 months so we will be long distance again until August. But this time she’ll be in the US like me with good internet connection so we can chat every night or facetime. It won’t be like the 3 weeks she was overseas to see her family, thank God.
My concern is that I’m kind of scared to lose her. After my divorce, I did fall in love with one other person. It was long distance and complicated. I felt like I was not treated right and betrayed in the end. We are still friends, but not romantic partners anymore. We occasionally chat once a month as a we have an old professional relationship as coach-client. I noticed a lot of triggers come up for me when my new gf would do certain things – I would immediately freak out and think this relationship will not work either like the rest of them and I would try to self-sabotage in that moment. But I have worked hard to coach myself on my triggers and accept that they might be there and it’s okay. It’s not my gfs job to manage my triggers, its my job.
The things that make feel bad now are:
1. Do I want her more than she wants me?
2. Is it worth it for me to continue dating someone who has already told me she can’t guarantee a future with me, and for me, my intention for now is to build a life with her?
3. Am I settling for someone who I had an amazing initial connection with instead of accepting the facts and opening my mind up to dating more people?
The questions I have now are:
1. Should I tell her how I still feel negative and concerned about some of the things she said? She is much younger, not into coaching and already has a lot going on in her life. She’s overall a very happy go lucky person. But I don’t want to manifest more negativity into our relationship by bringing up a past convo we had 2 weeks ago that she may think is behind us.
2. Should I think of this relationship as a “let’s take it day-by-day and have fun” versus “let’s try to build something for life and see how we can make it happen”? I do believe our thoughts create our results so I do believe with enough focus, positive feelings and focusing on keeping myself happy in general, I can manifest us spending a life together. But sometimes I get terrified and feel bad that I might be putting time and energy into something that might not work out, especially because she has clearly told me from her end she cannot give me a long-term guarantee.
3. I want to understand why I feel so bad about losing her and where the need for longevity is a relationship is coming from. Is it wrong for me to want to one person to bond with and build a life and family with? Am I always supposed to be okay with jumping from one love or relationship to another my whole life and just having “fun”? I’m open to having “fun”, but I also crave deep love and connection with one person. Please help.
