A
female
age
36-40,
anonymous
writes:I've been with my boyfriend for 2 years. We are both in our mid 20s. He has never had another girlfriend because he was living with his family until he finished college, who are very religious and didn't allow him to date. I knew all this going in and I thought there might be some issues due to this all being new to him. Anyway, very early in our relationship he began pressuring me to say 'I love you.' I did feel comfortable saying that early on, but I thought it was odd that he felt he needed to elicit it from me. Later in our relationship, he stopped telling me he loved me. It took a long time for me to figure out why (I kept asking and couldn't get a straight answer) but finally he admitted that he has some hangups about my previous ex. My ex and my current boyfriend knew each other, and I was still a part of my ex's friend group. When a big group of us had dinner in a cafeteria setting, my boyfriend refused to sit with us if my ex was there. At that time I was unwilling to stop hanging out with that group of friends and my ex, and I told my boyfriend as much. At the time, I thought it was no big deal, but months later my boyfriend told me he felt that I was choosing my ex over him, and that I still loved my ex. This was why he felt he needed to pressure me to tell him I loved him. He was very hurt that I didn't realize he was hurt so deeply over my ex, and that it took me so long to realize and address the situation. All this didn't come to the surface until after we'd been dating for a year. He told me he doesn't love me because he is afraid I'll hurt him again; that we will have some problem that I'll ignore instead of addressing. But he still treats me like he loves me; he is very affectionate in other ways and goes out of his way to do little nice things for me. I've always been a follower of the adage, 'Actions speak louder than words.' So I'm still with him even though he says he doesn't love me, because he still acts like he does. We've talked about it, and he doesn't want to break up with me, he wants us to be able to solve the problem so things can go back to how they were before any of these problems arose. I want to make it work too, but he is unable to articulate what we need to do to fix our relationship. To make matters more complicated, we are in a long distance relationship and see each other anywhere from 1 to 4 times a month over the weekends. So we end up avoiding talking about all this, because when you're apart miscommunication is somewhat inevitable, and when we're together we don't want to spoil a good weekend by bringing up all these issues.So bottom line, I'm not really sure what to make of all this. We both want to fix it but we don't know what to do or when to do it. Any advice is welcome.
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female
reader, So_Very_Confused +, writes (9 January 2012):
 I'm going to be blatently honest here... I often don't feel like I love my current partner... but he has no clue. I do all the right things... I cuddle him, I have sex with him, I do his laundry, I cook for him (we live together) and I'm going to marry him this year... I used to say I love you a lot... till I realized he didn't say it to me... when I would say it he would say "Thank you"
OUCH that hurts... now he's the one getting the "thank you" and the "i know you do" when he manages to say "I love you"
what are you wanting from him?
do you want him to say "I LOVE YOU" when he doesn't? or do you want him to love you?
because maybe he can't any more. or he doesn't. or he never did.
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