aronf13 Posted May 1, 2011 Posted May 1, 2011 (edited) I need some serious advice. As the title says, this is a very messy situation, let me elaborate as briefly as I possibly can, keep in mind this relationship is how i've learned about boundary setting and i'll be sure to never get in another relationship like this this fast again...hopefully :/ I'm sorry if this is so long, it's jsut too difficult for me to explain the specificity of this situation any other way. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ANYONE WILLING TO READ THIS ALL AND GIVE ME ADVICE ANY WAY YOU CAN okay, so... Me and carrie met online and started going on platonic dates. I only felt a bit of a spark and a small physical attraction, but pursued anyway because i was interested in exploring friends-with-benefits/polyamory. Me and carrie didn't have much chemistry, we did have a lot of things in common, but the main reason we started having sex was because we both wanted to explore the polyamorous way of dating. It happened kinda fast, and within a month we were seeing each other and sleeping together every weekend. Pretty soon she said "i love you" which i thought was kinda pushing on our "closeness, not romance" agreement, but I went with it, thinking "well we still aren't dating." I told her i love her as a friend, love her as a person just as i love any of the other cool people in my life, but wasn't gonna say "i love you" in that way. Next step was that she got a job across the street from my house. Initiially she lived in the next town over, when we started seeing eachother, but once she got that job, we both came across the idea of her moving into my room temporarily while she looked for another place. Because i was going through disillusionment with my current job, i decided it would be a great opportunity to quit it since my rent would be cut in half with her living in my room. Well the mistakes i made with boundary setting started piling up, i started seeing all these things that annoyed me about her, the hotness of our sex was leaving because i was seeing her almost all of the time, plus the fact that she "loved" me and was sorta made those "loving" gestures that you do with anyone you love left and right kinda killed the relationship for me. I really didn't love her that much. Furthermore, she seemed to really intensely value our friendship as something profound and constantly comment on that, which sorta left me a cold because i really didn't feel that way about her, even as a friend. Furthermore, she tended to have regular panic attacks over really small things - these moments when all of a sudden she'd just freak out and start talking super fast and cursing and getting hyper-negative about everything. AND she has insomnia which was interfering with my attempts at trying to get in a sleeping schedule, as well as interfering with her desire to enter a routine with her days, which whenever she didn't, would lead to...ANOTHER panic attack. Ultimately i was gradually discovering that the person i let into my house had a lot of **** to deal with that was now right in my personal space. So gradually we started having these talks where i was explaining that i didn't like her as much as she liked me. I didn't want to have sex as often, i wanted to see eachother less, talk to eachother less...but it wasn't really quite getting through to her somehow...and it was kinda hard to enforce when we're in the same BED. I started being irritable more and more, and also started lashing out whenever she had panic attacks, because it was emotionally exhausting for me to try to calm her down and i was taking that almost personally. It was all bad. It started seeping out of me that i really didn't want to be that close of a friend with her which made her cry aLOT and get super emotional for days Finally I told her she needs to leave my room, we have a huge garage space that nobody in our house was using that we could turn into a studio/bedroom for her if she wanted to stay here, it would be cheaper rent for her too since we wouldn't charge as much for the garage as we do for the rooms. This was super hard on her, she cried a lot for days...as usual :/ So she's living downstairs now, we're still having sex regularly...but seeing eachother more than i'm comfortable with still. There are numerous occasions where she asks if she can sleep in the room, but i explain to her that i'm not comfortable with it that night and she takes it personally and cries or tries to convince me to let her sleep in my bed. I get angry, cue yet another intense conversation Finally i become exhausted from all of the emotionally exhausting exchanges we have and feel way too bad about stringing someone along who's in love with me when i'm in it just for the sex. I also finally realize at this point that it might be impossible for her to understand this "obligation-free relationship" that we set out to have with eachother and that i need to be more picky with the people i want to have this sort of relationship with. Furthermore, i've been having my eyes on other girls, and now that it's finally gotten to the point of our polyamorous pursuits where other people enter the picture, i honestly don't trust her to not get overtly jealous and emotional in those situations, just based on all the panic attacks and freak-outs i've seen her go through in our time together. I explain to her, she cries intensely because she's hurt that i don't have faith in her. I try to ignore it and break it off with her anyway... except she's still my roomate. and still trying to hang out with me. Even though she tells me she needs distance after that breakup, that very week she enters my room to talk a few times about nothing important. Just trying to hang out. in one of those instances she's acting passive aggressively and cries super intensely in the middle of our exchange. Later that week we see a movie together that we already had tickets for and she spends a large portion of the night trying to convince me with hints to have sex with her again. :/ After all this pseudo-distance stuff, i explained, "look i need distance too". We had a really good mutual talk where I assured her she doesn't need to worry, that i'll still want to be her friend after we take distance, because she's had history of being clingy with ex's after breakups which she doesn't want to do with this case. We talk about her trauma - physically abused by mom till she was 18, the extent to which and that i don't want to be her friend for a month and till after she has therapy. She's tries to tell me a month isn't realistic and tries to convince me to see her like once a week at least...um...which is weird...and clingy...immediately after she TOLD me she doesn't want to be that way. When i said no, i need a month she started crying. Now for the capper. Tonight she came home tipsy, had a really long conversation with me as i walked out in the kitchen explaining tons of personal **** about her day. Okay. So much for that important talk where we were on the same page about distance yesterday. The last thing she tells me is about an ex that she's trying to meet up with to hook up with...that was the last straw i ask her to please keep this personal stuff to herself and remind of our DISTANCE AGREEMENT. I go out. She texts me 3 or 4 times about unimportant stuff. I come back 3 hours later and she's passed out in my bed. I wake her up and she tells me that she's sorry because she's super drunk and starts crying. I tell her it's okay. I go brush my teeth come back and tell her i'm ready to go to sleep so if she could go downstairs to sleep that would be great. She rolls over to the other side. I ask her again to leave. She's hysterically crying, drags herself to the living room to cry loudly so all our other roomates can hear, doesn't get off the floor, jsut dramatically drags herself to the bathroom. My other roomate makes her tea and helps her up. While she's making her tea though she bangs on my door, comes in, apologizes and immediately starts hugging me intensely. I try to push her away but she won't let go. I tell her CARRIE DISTANCE and she says "but you're sooo warm" and then we get in a huge argument about how she's not respecting my boundaries, the whole time she's crying and i'm asking her to leave my room and it takes her 5 to 10 minutes to leave. I end up yelling at her, saying we can't live together like this. Finally i get her out and she jsut sits in the kitchen telling my roomate how i'm ****ed up. Phew. So okay, as you can tell this is a pretty ****ed up situation. I'm not sure if i'm made her sound too much like the villain but i hope i didn't. It's not all her, she's called me emotionally abusive. Things that i have told her that she is most offended by that she constantly cites when calling me this: "you need to get your **** together, i don't want to be your friend anymore, you're really intense, i can't live with you anymore" she explains how she's listened to me whenever i've had insecurities to talk about, but whenever she talks about her problems i criticize her...which isn't true, when she talks about them i'm willing to listen and help, when she's freaking out and not willing to talk about her problems is when i criticize her, which also isn't nice of me though. I also have tended to use a very hostile tone with her, an outgrowth of my frustration with her refusal to find sleeping aid for her insomnia, go to therapy, be on any meds for her panic attacks, etc. sooo...ADVICE NEEDED: Should i move out? Do i have a right to ask her to move out? This is one of the cheapest places to live in in the city and i will have trouble living anywhere else, so it's tempting to stay here but this sort of emotional drama is quite a bit for me to be dealing with in my own home at this point of my life. Should I wait this out? do you think it will get better? Note: part of breaking up with Carrie included me telling her that i can't have a sexual relationship with her while she's living in the same house as me, at which point she mentioned that she might have an opportunity to move in with some other friends. I said i'd be down to have a "once in a while" sexual relationship if that happens. Should i just wait to see if that'll happen? When i told her the sexual relationship between us would open up if it did, she seemed rather enthusiastic about it. Honestly i don't even want THAT with her now, but maybe i can tell her sure and then gradually cut it off with her completely once she's out. But then there's a chance she might not actually move out. IF i'm banking on her moving out eventually a more foolproof way would be to tell her that i am. Edited May 1, 2011 by aronf13
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