hi, i just found this website, im desperate for help. since i first started dating in high school i have always went after guys with the same background, they have all come from a broken home, they all have had very little or no experience with guys/dating, and they all have low self esteem. every one of these guys have fallen in love with me, and i thought that i loved them too. then for some reason, i get bored and i don’t enjoy their company, and i don’t want to kiss them or do anything else with them. my current boyfriend, fits the description above to a perfect T. i am his first girlfriend, and the love of his life. i see him everyday, and he always wants to be right by my side. i try to go out with my friends without him, but i have very little, so i rarely go out without him. i do love him but i don’t want to have a physical relationship with him anymore. i want to be his friend, i don’t want him out of my life completely. he is a great guy, but in the course of our relationship, hes changed alot, and hes not the man i fell i love with. and he is no longer a person i could see spending the rest of my life with. every time i think i am ready to settle down, i realize im not, but i am already too deep into a relationship to salvage a friendship. im not good at expressing my feelings out loud, and thats why i let relationships drag out until i cant take it anymore. i don’t want this to happen but i don’t know what to do. i honestly am lost. i cant lose him from my life. there has to be something wrong with me. and i don’t know how to explain it to him without hurting him. and losing him completely. he gets hurt so easily and i don’t want to turn him away from all girls. please give me your advice. i have no where else to turn.
You say that there is a pattern to your dating: that you choose men who come from broken homes, have low-self esteems and little or no experience with girls/dating. Soon, you become bored and break-off the relationship.First we need to understand why the pattern is occurring. Ask yourself why you choose this type of guy. Does he remind you of your mother or father? If so, you may be choosing someone who resembles your parent in an attempt to heal a childhood wound.Here’s how it goes: First we choose a person whose personality resembles one or both of our parents. Soon we find ourselves feeling the way we did as kids. We are feeling hurt, angry, betrayed, let-down, abused, etc. The hope is that this time around, we can rewrite history, fix our parent and finally receive the love and respect we lacked in childhood. See my advice archives under unfinished business, repetition compulsion and happy ending to figure out what wound from your childhood you are trying to heal.What intrigues me in the story is that your repetition always consists of thinking you have found Mr. Right and then being bored and ending it. The scripted, highly predictable nature of your relationships makes me wonder what part of your childhood is being replayed.Did one of your parents seem wonderful and then flake out or disappear on you? If so, you may be replaying your childhood wound, and this time, instead of your being left, you do the leaving. This may be an attempt to rewrite your history so that you are the victor instead of the victim. You do the walking out, rather than end up being the one who is left behind–again.I think we also need to discuss your high hopes for each relationship. What you don’t talk about is how you become disappointed. Before you become bored and end the relationship, you need to understand what goes wrong. Do your high hopes get disappointed just like you were disappointed as a kid? Do you end the relationship in order to protect yourself from further disappointments? What would happen if you chose to stay in the relationship and talked to your partner about how to make the relationship more satisfying?You can keep breaking up and starting over, but as you now see, all relationships are disappointing. They seem perfect and full of possibilities in the beginning, but soon afterward the difficulty begins. You can either stay with one relationship and work it out or keep searching for perfection, which you will never find.Reflect on your childhood and the most painful aspects of it, see how your choice of partner and break-up pattern relates to your past. When you figure this out, you will have your answer as to why you find yourself in this trap. When you fully understand yourself, you can explain to your boyfriend all about your problem.Putting the problem on your shoulders will help him to not blame himself for the failure of the relationship. This is the only hope of saving the friendship.