JStar73

after my last posting just over 3 months ago I have realised I am full of bull. After deciding to walk away from this, all of sudden she came back to me. We had a sort of tolerable relationship for the last 3 months and once again she has now bolted for the door. "I love you but not "in love" with you", "I can't see us getting married" and so on and so on. She has admitted that she can point out all my flaws all day long, despite in the next breath telling me that I am the most wonderful man she has ever had in her life. I am exhausted by all this, emotionally and physically spent. I really want to end it and move on but I am finding it so damn hard to get this out of my head, I seem stuck to it like krazy glue. Grr!

Jane820- I would say not - you are only 20 yo, and I think what would define CP is if it is a pattern that recurs time after time after time, pulling way from relationships for no "real" reason, and living out a fantasy in your head. Commitment is a big thing, and it is normal to feel anxiety attached to it. It is however the proportionality of the response that would indicate dysfunctional behaviour

well you know it's funny...since I wrote that, I have gone over and over the whole thing in mind. I keep a journal and read back the last couple of months entries...it's funny what selective memory can do, how you only remember the good stuff you want to remember. Going back through the last couple of months and re-reading the amount of pain, and basically how traumatic the whole thing has been for me it's quite an easy conclusion to come to that I need to bail out and also open my eyes to the possibility that maybe I don't really love this woman at all, or at least not like I think I do. What self respecting person would after all this? It's amazing how we can deceive ourselves... Neither she nor I deserve any more of the unhappiness we seem to bring each other so basically, I am out of there. A valuable lesson I think, and I would advise anyone else in my position to keep a journal of thoughts etc so you can read it back to see what the TRUTH of the experience has been, not just what you want to remember in order to keep your fantasy going.

I take your point, but in my case I think it is as clear as she has made out - she has explicitly told me that she is afraid of making a mistake, of there being someone "better" who might take her fancy at some point in the future, of feeling trapped. Her father was a repeat adulterer who used to come and go endlessly with her mother, displaying endless CP traits and she is now playing this out herself. She either gets involved with men who treat her the same way, or if they don't she makes them come and go by engaging her push/pull dynamic herself. She has however recently come to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with her, just that she hasn't met Mr Right yet and that it will all be fine in future. Knowing this person as well as I do (I sometimes think I know her better than she knows herself) I know that whoever it is will either be in some way unavailable for her, or she will just repeat the same pattern of taking some minor flaw, magnifying it to such proportions that she will deem the relationship unworkable, and engage in the same can't live with/ can't live without you dynamic. I am meeting her tomorrow. I am going to very calmly lay out to her that it really is now time to say goodbye. She wants to remain "friends" but I know only too well that going from lovers to friends never works, and only leads to more hurt for one or both parties in the end. If she calls me up at some point in the future saying she has had some moment of revelation that it is me she wants, she is sure, double, triple, quadruple sure and provide me with guarantees, not promises, that she has got to the bottom of whatever it was that was governing her behaviour, I will of course listen to her. But I won't hold my breath, nor will I make the mistake of leaping into bed with her the next time she tells me she loves me and flutters her eyelids at me. Down that road much pain lies, as I know only too well.

usual story...met a girl 6 months ago, whirlwind romance, told each other everything about ourselves, lots of love, sex, intimacy and then BAM! freakout. For the last 2 months I have been living in what now appears to be false hope that I could "love" her back to me. We have repeated cycles of her thawing towards me, coming back only to freakout again 3 or 4 days later, pull the shutters down and say that she just doesn't feel the way she needs to. I know everything about her past, her upbringing, her past relationships and she has more of less all of the traits in her background that will produce a fully functioning emotionally unhealthy CP - messy parental divorce, elements of abuse and so on and so on. She has refused to take any responsibility for the hurt she has caused me through her behaviour, saying its my fault for believing her when I clearly know what she is like. All of her demands for space to "be who she is" but not allowing me to expect anything in return - it all just goes on and on. I still find myself in love with this woman - objectively she does have many good qualities, but now she has decided that we can only be friends as she does not want to keep repeating the cycles - come close, pull away, freakout I freakout (which she then uses as justification for keeping me away). Until next time that is. She will always say "we can't have a relationship. Right now" It's the "right now" added on the end that is the killer. I don't know what I am doing. Why am I still clinging onto this? I am starting to question my own sanity.