stockyoldfrump Posted September 4, 2012 Posted September 4, 2012 I had a longer version of this typed out but I accidentally deleted it. The forthcoming post will be a significantly abbreviated version and I can just provide extra details if people inquired. Basically, I'm a 28 year old guy who never had a girlfriend prior to the woman I dated from December 2011 until April 2012. She is 25 and it was also her first relationship. We broke up because our respective views on religion (she is a practicing catholic, I'm agnostic) resulted in a lot of questions about how compatible we would be in the future. Key issues here were marriage and children. We were both upset at the breakup and expressed that we didn't want to go through with it. After breaking up we continued to see each other with the same degree of regularity as we had before. We hung out four to five times a week for periods of 8 or 12 hours at a time. She texted me all day everyday and I returned the attention. This has persisted for the last 5 months. Throughout this period I never actively thought about how I felt about her, but was just happy with our current relationship. We are incredibly close and emotionally intimate and that has always been enough for me. A month ago I started to notice that she was starting to discourage things I normally did for her, like buying her dinner. I began to feel guilty and did a little soul searching to figure out why. What I realized was that I had never gotten over my feelings for her and, for the first time, was sensing that the feeling was no longer mutual. After processing the information I talked to her about it. She intimated that she had "trained herself" to get over the breakup and that her feelings had changed as a result. However, she said that - though she didn't have romantic feelings "right now" - she "didn't necessarily think that was the way she would always feel" and that she wasn't closed off to the idea of renewing the relationship if things were to change. Furthermore, when I expressed that I should really learn to treat her as I would other female friends she said "I wish you wouldn't do that" and "I should mean more to you than that." She also said that she liked me more and "differently" than any other of her male friends. The next day we hung out again for 14 hours. She was unusually touchy, constantly initiating play fighting and rubbing my shoulder and back on a few occasions. When I mentioned I might head home (to my parents) for a little while to get over this, she discouraged this and became sad and panicked. She said that she would hate to lose me and began devising ways to come visit. I am confused. I know I should block out everything else and focus on the fact that she has no current interest. At the same time, a lot of the other things she said have given me just enough hope of change to make that difficult. Furthermore, over the course of the past few months, my experiences in therapy have made me more open to a lot of the "future" type things she wanted. I wrote her an e-mail to tell her this which generated the same "I don't feel that way now, but this is good to know and I don't think I'll necessarily not feel differently in the future" response. What baffles me most, I guess is that - for whatever reason - she's very opposed to the idea of me feeling differently about her than I do or changing any aspect of my currently quasi-dating relationship with her. She's not a malicious person and she cares about me immensely. I know that. I don't think she's consciously using me as a source of comfort or pride, though keeping me around for those reasons subconsciously is obviously possible. Those other things could also be ways of letting me down easy or trying to comfort me while turning me down. At the same time a small part of me feels (admittedly hopes) that she still has some flicker of affection for me and is trying to reconcile what she thinks she wants (she prefers a catholic man, though this is not a dealbreaker) and whatever it is she feels. Perhaps circumstances compelled her to change her interpretation of the obvious affection she feels toward me and the currently changed circumstances will change that eventually. In any case, the whole situation is leaving me with just enough hope to resist writing the entire thing off...which isn't necessarily comfortable or healthy. What do you guys think? Am I being an idiot or is there even the remotest possibility that she might end up giving me another shot? I genuinely love this girl and am more than willing to endure the pain of uncertainty to avoid impeding even the most abstract of possibilities.
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