Riot Nrrrd

I'm not sure there's a good answer to this, other than "when it feels right" - and that is usually made up of several things, of which some have been mentioned already by the other posters. Financial/job stability is obviously a factor. Emotional/mental stability is another - if you're feeling anxious or nervous about your future, you probably don't want to try and settle down right at that moment. In terms of the "everything seems right and one day, they'll end up breaking [up] with just a (small) problem", that type of behavior could have several causes. A Commitmentphobe, for example, will do this - over time, all this tension and claustrophobia and the feeling of being trapped will pile up, and finally something sends them over the edge and they have to Get Out at all cost - and they'll leave suddenly, maybe even disappearing ("Houdini act"), and it will seem to the partner that it was "just a (small) problem" - when in fact it wasn't small at all. Never underestimate the ability for certain people to completely bottle up all of their emotions and problems and hide them away, only to result in them initiating a break-up that makes little sense to the afflicted partner. Another take on this is usually from the women's side, i.e. that "feelings" will cause the breakup. PocoDiablo posted this excellent summary of that: In other words, people who break up "with just a (small) problem" aren't necessarily Commitmentphobes, either.

Maybe you both just have passive commitment conflicts, and they aren't that major - self-awareness is the key here, the fact that you are aware of the issue is the most important thing (and that he is aware of it as well). It would be a far bigger problem if either of you were the "active avoider"/"active runner" type of Commitmentphobe, with one foot out the door the whole time (after the "honeymoon period"). That is a recipe for disaster.

Definitely the first, because I just experienced the second. My ex-fiancée was The Perfect Woman for the first couple of months, then slowly but surely, The Scary Woman crept out of the woodwork ... and because she had pursued me in the "courtship" phase, I was head over heels in love with her, and thereforeeee primed to ignore all the red flags that started sprouting up like crazy. Eventually, it got so bad that I completely lost my sense of Self in the relationship, and was afraid to bring up my own needs (or to say "No") because of fear of abandonment, brought on by her fragile, brittle psyche and the Commitmentphobic "has one foot out the door" vibe that she constantly gave off. I became completely afraid to say anything to her for fear that it would send her spiraling into emotional shut-down and she'd leave me. (As a good friend of mine last night said "you already ``knew'' what was up, and found yourself unwilling to risk being true to yourself, because nuclear annihilation was covertly on the table".) One of the sad things about relationships is that relationship books will try and pound it into you that you attract people like these, perhaps unconsciously. There was nothing at the start to indicate that my ex-fiancée was like this, that Demons Lurked Within. As my good friend also said, "So the real learning there is you have to get fairly deep into a relationship to find out it's wrong". It's not a very fun experience - so personally I'd rather have the "know someone for a while, see them at their worst" experience than the latter. (This sounds like the kind of scenario that is only possible in a "friends" circle where you can get to know someone first before plunging in headlong.)

I hate to resurrect a dead thread that clearly got talked into the ground, but having come back to it and finished reading it, I found a posting that really resonated with me and my situation, and wanted to comment on it: On the one hand, I want to say that this is totally right-on, to the point, and expresses perfectly the problem I had in my relationship with my ex-fiancée (I do realize the latter part of this is more in reference to a guy who is a BFF! type with a woman and not in a relationship with her, but it's still apropos). But here's an interesting twist to this situation: I've just finished reading the best book I've ever read about relationships - Steven Carter & Julia Sokol's "He's Scared, She's Scared - Understanding The Hidden Fears Sabotaging Your Relationships". What it is, is a book about Commitmentphobes and Commitmentphobia. It reads like a diary of my relationship - I literally used up an entire yellow highlighter on this book. It is downright scary in places - I'm used to reading books where I go, "Yeah, I can sorta relate" to "Yup, that was true" to "No, this is irrelevant". This book was "Holy crap, how did they get into my head?!?" the whole way through. Anyway. My ex was a textbook case of a pathological Commitmentphobe - horrible relationship history, never married, engaged twice (once to me - we lasted 3 1/2 years, her longest relationship "evar"), and I discovered - much to my surprise - that I have my own issues with (small-"c") commitment - in general, not "relationship commitment". To get back on topic, what this book says about people who are "active runners"/"active avoiders" - Commitmentphobes - is that they always have one foot out the door in their relationships, once the "honeymoon phase" is over. And then it just becomes a matter of time before, finally, the forces of conflict, claustrophobia and feeling trapped take over, and they wait for their partner to make a "fatal mistake" (as other books on breakups call it) that gives them the green light to flee. Which is exactly what my ex did to me. The thing is, the partner will psychically feel this sense of "they always have one foot out the door" - and do anything to try and avoid it, because in the case of a (small-"c") passive commitment conflicted person (that's me), and especially one whose Codependant tendencies get drawn out by this kind of situation, it evokes an extreme case of fear of abandonment. I wondered why I had become the man in DiggityDoug's quote. The man who drove her everywhere. The man who bought her things, paid for dinner, listened to her problems, complimented her, hung out with her. The man who backed down and avoided arguments or disagreements with her. The man who asked for nothing in return for all that I did and who got nothing in return. (I always wanted to tell her, "Relationships are supposed to be give and take. I guess ours was - I gave and you took." Books on relationships always say "To get a totally commited relationship, it requires hard work, compromise, negotiation, and accepting the other person for who they are - faults and all.". She didn't want to do any hard work - or 'work on it' - she refused to give, compromise or negotiate, and her "scorecarding" - "Gaslighting" - at the end proved that she didn't accept me for who I was, either.) I wasn't like that in my previous relationships. My ex and I were together for 17 1/2 years - and we had our fair share of knock-down, drag-out arguments. But that didn't happen with my ex-fiancée. I backed down at every turn, and avoided all confrontation. We both ended up "actors" - being on our "best behavior" all the time, never "getting real". And it all boiled down to her extreme Commitmentphobia, and this feeling that she had one foot out the door all the time. I constantly felt like "I can't say anything, because if I do, I know that she will just go into complete emotional shut-down, and I'll wake up in the morning and find a note saying ``Bye, I can't take it anymore''." I could never figure out why I always felt like that, whenever I felt like I really needed to stand up for myself, and be the person DiggityDoug says we men should be. I completely avoided all conflict with her - even though, as relationship books will tell us, "``No'' has a very important place in every relationship." What I'm trying to say here is that there can be interesting, extenuating circumstances like this, where you behave in exactly the wrong way, and this is why that can happen. I'd like to believe that if I'd just stood up to her, she would've respected me. That's the way we'd like to think it should be, right? But the fact was, I only stood up for my real needs 3 times in the entire relationship - and the last time, after I expressed that need, she walked out on me for good the next day, totally blind-siding me. So much for that theory. I'm not trying to justify my spineless behavior - I've spent the last 8 months trying to re-grow my spine - but I think it's enlightening to see how it can come about. What're your thoughts on this? ------- Epilogue: Re-reading DiggityDoug's quote, and going back to this other excellent quote from PocoDiablo: has helped me understand just why my ex-fiancée left me (she won't tell me specifics or give me any closure herself - she refuses to speak to me, in fact). I'd like to thank both DiggityDoug and PocoDiablo for those wise words of wisdom. My ex-fiancée even used some of the same terms PocoDiablo used, as I posted previously in this thread a few months ago: "I don't feel compatible you in a way that makes a commitment possible", "I can't just ignore the Not Right feelings that evolved over time", and "the basic incompatibility". She was going on feelings alone, just as PocoDiablo said. And me? For my part, I did just what PocoDiablo says above - I did things (like sticking around) long after my gut told me something was wrong. In the Carter & Sokol book, it talks about how a truly Commitmentphobic relationship - one between an "active runner" like my ex and a "passive conflicted" type like me - is one of the worst possible relationship combinations. And at the end of their book they talk about what happens when your ex-partner cuts you off completely (as she did to me), and how incredibly devastating that is to the person who is dumped (boy, tell me about it ...) - it says, ultimately Pretty much says it all, eh? "Either way, be thankful you got away." My ex is back to living near Hollywood, hanging out with "Hollywood (rocker) types", and has a new boyfriend who looks like a former Heroin addict that she picked up at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. (You know the archetype - the sunken eyes, the hollow cheeks, and the guy is 6'3" and looks like he weighs 150 pounds, tops - and this at age 45. When you have no meat on your bones and you're that age, either you've got the world's luckiest metabolism that never slowed down, or you're an ex-Junkie.) They deserve each other.

Yup. Commitmentphobe, big time. She can't have it both ways. You deserve better, man.

[N.B. - Sorry for the repost, I didn't realize that replying to ilse's post would make mine appear right below hers. Not used to that result with PHP bulletin boards.] ilse is so right here. I am exactly one of these "Nice Guy" types, that (I discovered too late) is also afraid of abandonment. And my ex fiancée (who totally blind-sided me by dumping me almost 5 1/2 months ago - which is why I'm here on this site now) is a complete Commitmentphobe, despite the fact that we were actually engaged and had been for almost 3 years. What I found out (through therapy) is that I'm really Codependent - and my ex really brought it out in me. I had my own name for it - "Florence Nightingale Syndrome" - but they're really the same thing. The need to "help" or "rescue" your partner (which in reality is a subtle means of control, and it includes fear of abandonment). Right now I'm reading Melodie Beattie's seminal book on Codependency, entitled "Codependent No More". And while I was going to post a link to a heartless-b*tches article, slightlybent beat me to it - but that isn't the article I was going to post. I was going to post link removed one (which I heartily recommend you read, monsieur) about Nice Guys instead. It's pretty straight up and while it's a bit painful (for guys) to read, sometimes the truth hurts. The bottom line is that ultimately, Nice Guy Syndrome is about self-loathing. You have to love yourself first and be confident in yourself before you can be a true partner in a relationship. Trying to "rescue" someone only ends up hurting both of you. I'm sure my ex-fiancée dumped me in part because of this very reason. (She wouldn't tell me exactly why, other than vague hand-waving crap like "I don't feel compatible you in a way that makes a commitment possible", "I can't just ignore the Not Right feelings that evolved over time", and that she couldn't ignore "the basic incompatibility". When I asked her to explain just what she meant by these statements, her "response" was to cut off all communication - for good.)

Ilse is so right here. I am exactly one of these "Nice Guy" types, that (I discovered too late) is afraid of abandonment. And my ex fiancée (who totally blind-sided me by dumping me almost 5 1/2 months ago - which is why I'm here on this site now) is a complete Commitmentphobe, despite the fact that we were actually engaged and had been for almost 3 years. What I found out (through therapy) is that I'm really Codependent - and my ex really brought it out in me. I had my own name for it - "Florence Nightingale Syndrome" - but they're really the same thing. The need to "help" or "rescue" your partner (which in reality is a subtle means of control, and it includes fear of abandonment). Right now I'm reading Melodie Beattie's seminal book on Codependency, entitled "Codependent No More". And while I was going to post a link to a heartless-byaatches article, slightlybent beat me to it - but that isn't the article I was going to post. I was going to post link removed one (which I heartily recommend you read, monsieur) about Nice Guys instead. It's pretty straight up and while it's a bit painful (for guys) to read, sometimes the truth hurts. The bottom line is that ultimately, Nice Guy Syndrome is about self-loathing. You have to love yourself and be confident in yourself before you can be a true partner in a relationship. Trying to "rescue" someone only ends up hurting both of you. I'm sure she dumped me in part because of this very reason. (She wouldn't tell me exactly why, other than vague hand-waving crap like "I don't feel compatible you in a way that makes a commitment possible", "I can't just ignore the Not Right feelings that evolved over time", and "the basic incompatibility". When I asked her to explain just what she meant by these statements, her "response" was to cut off all communication, for good.)

Probably not likely, but just to throw it out there as a vague possibility: an umbilical hernia. I had an incarcerated umbilical hernia. I kept getting these pains a few inches to the right and below my belly-button, but they weren't always in the same exact location - pretty close, though. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Finally went to see the doctor and he diagnosed it and sent me to a specialist. (I'm supposed to get surgery for it and have some mesh put in, but it seems to have subsided for the moment.) Anyway, the specialist laid me down and said "Does it feel better when I do this?" and proceeded to take both thumbs and push down on my belly-button (not the place where I thought I had the pain!). All of a sudden I felt this sensation like something inside a tube being pushed back down and out of an enclosed space and suddenly, boom, the pain was gone! I literally felt it "pop" back into place and that's why they call it "incarcerated" (no, not because you do jail time ) - the guts (part of the small intestine) got "stuck" in a perforation around the umbilical area, where the abdominal wall has gotten weak. To this day I still press on the area self-consciously from time to time to make sure it hasn't come back. Anyway, it's probably not that, but the point is, see a doctor about it a.s.a.p.