We started out as friends, but when I became single he aggressively pursued me as a romantic interest. I wanted to take things slow, but he was so attentive, charming and persistent that I decided to give him a chance.
Once we started dating, he was passionate about every aspect of our relationship. From the first day, he became possessive and wanted to monopolize my time. Creating a balance between starting the relationship and living my own life became hard, but since I was moved by his enthusiasm I decided to just go with the flow.
It takes me a while to warm up to things, which I definitely let him know. It was a few months before I became truly comfortable opening up to him. In the meantime, he was introducing me to his friends and family and trying to get to know mine.
Finally, I had time to reflect on our relationship when I took a trip out of the country. I realized that the months of courtship had endeared him to me and that his unwavering interest made me trust that he was sincere. I decided to put my heart into his hands and relinquish my emotions to the relationship.
When I came home, we were closer than ever after 6 months of dating.
But there were still a few things that needed to be ironed out, such as the possessiveness and the fact that he sometimes made me feel that my schedule and agenda were secondary to his. When we began to talk about these issues, he would lose his patience very quickly and shut down. Our arguments generally led nowhere, since he is stubborn and quick to withdraw. During arguments, he would be quick to abandon me, anywhere. It could be in the middle of the night, or in the midst of a busy city street – of I became upset about any issue, he would be gone sooner than I could think straight.
We broke up a few times and got back together. There developed a pattern where anytime I would get upset, he would just turn his phone off and stop answering my calls and texts. I did everything that I could to try to resolve the problems, and soon I felt as though the tables were turned and I was having to come up with convincing arguments for him to be with me – it had taken me a while to warm up to him, but once I did, I really did. He became busy with work and made it clear that I was not his number 1 priority, his career is – since we are young, I understood this.
I felt as though I had to balance the beginning of our relationship, when I was not sure and he was, and became more loving and atttentive. In our most private moments, he shared with me the fact that though he was under pressure with work and the tensions of our relationship, that he still loved me with a great intensity.
I tried to give him time and space to figure out what he wanted, but somehow we wound up being together during every free moment again He initiated a lot of our dates during this time. He was again monopolizing my time. As much as I tried to continue on with my own life, he wanted to be around me so much that he accompanied me everywhere.
I was thrilled by all of this effort on his part so decided to be a supportive girlfriend and be especially conscious of his work routine and pressures, smooth his life over as much as I could.
Last weekend he went out with his friends. One of his guy friends is especially possessive of him – whenever they are around each other he pulls him away for private conversations, clearly letting me know that they are talking amongst the two of them and I am not welcome. We had planned to meet in the late evening, so when I called my boyfriend I was following up on plans. He seemed distracted and annoyed when we spoke, and when I tried to find out how we were going to meet up he seemed to not want me there. I asked him if he wanted to see me, and he said that it would be too expensive to pick me up and that he didn’t have time. He never had excuses like this before and the whole situation felt shady.
I became upset, which led him to hang up on me. Infuriated, I called him back. He sent me to voice mail, so I called about four more times before informing him that that was not a very mature or intelligent way to end a conversation.
He never called back, so the next day I wrote him an angry email, describing why his actions upset me. He was very quick to respond, and said, “I guess we can agree that this is finally over then.” I haven’t heard from him since.
How could he go from being practically obsessed with me and being utterly devoted to completely shutting me out? I wonder if his friends were an influence on him – some of them are newly single and would be encouraging him to take the easy way out of a relationship. He comes from a family where his parents rarely argued, and so I have been developing the idea that when there is a disagreement or conflict, he runs away. What do you think happened?