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The Relationship Roundabout
🕑 Added 2024-06-23 08:54:52 +0000 UTCH was a jack in the box: in, out, here, gone, here. He wanted me infinitely … until he didn’t. We had magic and fairy dust and every other enchantment you can wish for in a relationship. If our connection was perfect, surely more would be better, so we got engaged. What else are you supposed to do when you find your own personal fairy tale?
Within weeks, he said, “If I ever want to get married, it will be to you…
… but I don’t want to get married anymore.”
He didn’t want our relationship, either. It had become tainted with his fears, and all our magic got lost in the process. We stayed friends, of course. Isn’t that what you do when you connect with someone that powerfully?
We made that mistake several times, but sex was always our undoing. We always tumbled into bed. This time we would keep things cool and disconnected. This time we would stop being so damned serious about our relationship. This time we wouldn’t start talking about marriage again.
Yah, right. And The Brothers Grimm wrote Disney movies.
And so turned the roundabout that was our five-year relationship: engaged, over, back together, engaged, and over because what he really wanted was what he didn't have. When he had me, he wanted single life. When he was single, he wanted romance.
I blamed myself for the entire mess for over a decade, until I found out nothing about his life had changed. He’d found a new woman. He’d connected. He’d proposed. He’d left her. He’d gotten involved with her again.
H is not a narcissist. He’s not an abuser. He’s not even an asshole. He’s just a boy who finds the present untenable. He’s as much a victim of his perpetual malcontent as his women were. The only difference is that we got to climb off the roundabout.
Comments
accidental sub
He didn't have any trauma in his childhood. He was an addict, though. He says he's still using and unwilling to quit.
KaarN
This kind of behavior is often called (dismissive) avoidant attachment. It originates, like narcissism, from youth trauma and can cause loads of trauma in the recipient in the other end. And no, this is not just “boys being boys”. It is “harmed plp, harming plp”. I don’t like labels to much, but if this is a lifelong pattern for you, harming partners like this, and you don’t fix it? Well, that is abusive in my book.
