I'm confused...

[Sharon Q]

It may not even last two months last time we went on brake that was going to be a week and it was only like three days

---------- Post added at 03:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:22 PM ----------

But being on a break means he's with other persons and that's okay with you? I hope I understood it right....

I do understand that, the thought of it pains me but its better than never being with him again. We are taking time apart to work on things. He isn't going to sleep around, we've already covered this and he isnt one for just sleeping with people. If he chooses to flirt with someone to give himself a confidence boost than so be it.

Yes I would get upset if he was with someone else I would be hurt. But right now we both need time away to figure things out.

[Haley53]

It may not even last two months last time we went on brake that was going to be a week and it was only like three days

---------- Post added at 03:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:22 PM ----------



I do understand that, the thought of it pains me but its better than never being with him again. We are taking time apart to work on things. He isn't going to sleep around, we've already covered this and he isnt one for just sleeping with people. If he chooses to flirt with someone to give himself a confidence boost than so be it.

Yes I would get upset if he was with someone else I would be hurt. But right now we both need time away to figure things out.

My question is, if he's not going to sleep with other people, and he only wants to "flirt," then why did he frame it as he wants to be in a normal relationship?

A relationship, in my opinion, should not be about continually needing space from one another when the going gets tough. The last time he wanted a break was down to when you had that male friend, yes? And had been uncomfortable with what he was saying? And your boyfriend decided he needed some space/time, and I believe mentioned somebody else then too, yes?

I simply don't see how you can be so confident you want to be with someone "in the end" and not do everything you can to keep them. I don't see how you can want to be with someone "in the end" and deliberately hurt them by seeing someone else. If you took the break because of stress and you both need some time apart, fine, okay, I still don't agree with breaks, but to each their own, but he's taking a break to see other people/to make seeing other people okay. And honestly if any man gave me the excuses he has given you in this thread, he'd be history for his bullshit.

I simply think you deserve better than being with a man who takes a break from you either passive aggressively or because he can't man up and handle situations. If the stress is getting to you, like I said on your other thread, you should find a way to communicate and work around it. Both my partner and I have been under mass amounts of stress lately and it has effected our relationship in ways, but we've dealt with it by talking and improving our communication and by coming to solutions and compromises that work for the both of us. Maybe you need to do something similar to this with your SO? Honestly, the way I see it is he's either running for a problem or wanting to sleep with other people because he can/"wants a normal relationship" until he can have you for the same purpose, and that drives me up the wall crazy because I think you deserve better than that.

[Sharon Q]

Thank you and I understand how you can see it that way. Last time we went on break wasnt because he wanted someone else. It was because of how I was acting, ie pushing him away hanging around people that didnt respect my relationship, And it was just hard. We've discussed it and it has gotten a little better, I was just scared because things were going so fast. We've talked, and either way its going to be like we are on break because we wont have ways to communicate as much...

[Jezah]

Its not an open relationship unless BOTH of you want it. To me it seems he would just be sleeping around and you would be at home missing and loving him and having eyes for nobody else. That is unfair and its frankly a load of BS. If he cannot handle a LDR than yes a break is better, give him a chance to realize he cannot have his cake and eat it to. He wants you, he has to commit to you and only you. Love is more than physical and so many of us on here make it work with the absence of the physical. I know you love him, but one saying I believe in is "Let it go and if it comes back its yours, if it doesn't then it never was to start with". He needs to figure out what matters more to him, love or his perception of a 'normal' relationship

[SDPersona]

The thing with breaks is once you do a break it's suddenly possible or ok to take a break anytime shit hits the fan. Of course, it doesn't mean it has to be that way but it's a large possibility. That way it can become a bad cycle or habit and in my opinion that's not good. In any way. In my experience, it isn't easy to get the relationship to be stable again after such a cycle.

And I agree with Eclaire. I really don't or can't understand why you let him hurt you that way. That's no way to treat a woman.

[Forever&ever.K.L.]

If he can't wait for you for two more months than you guys really need to discuss your relationship. It sounds like he is manipulating you by sugar coating what he really wants..which is to sleep with other people. What happens if after those two months or after you guys can be together if he doesn't want to commit to just you? Are you going to settle for that? Long distance relationships are extremely hard and I have been doing this for six years now. I get lonely sometimes, yes, but I could never think about being with anyone besides my guy. I wish you luck, I really do. Think about what you want and not so much about what he wants. Your happiness is important too.

[Brieasaurus]

I can see where everyone is coming from here but I can definitely understand where you're coming from. Things get hard, and instead of running your relationship down to the ground and ultimately destroying it, you decide to take a break and save it. I think a lot of you guys are just jumping to conclusions by saying that he's going to be with other women. He might've said that he was going to try something but chances are you two are going to take a week long break, relieve your stress and realize that you two are meant for each other and resume your relationship. Even if he does try something, I feel like he'll be thinking of you the entire time. Ultimately, I give you a lot of props for trying this. You know what you want for the future, and you are willing to risk time in between now and then to get to that goal. I wish you all the best.

[Haley53]

I can see where everyone is coming from here but I can definitely understand where you're coming from. Things get hard, and instead of running your relationship down to the ground and ultimately destroying it, you decide to take a break and save it. I think a lot of you guys are just jumping to conclusions by saying that he's going to be with other women. He might've said that he was going to try something but chances are you two are going to take a week long break, relieve your stress and realize that you two are meant for each other and resume your relationship. Even if he does try something, I feel like he'll be thinking of you the entire time. Ultimately, I give you a lot of props for trying this. You know what you want for the future, and you are willing to risk time in between now and then to get to that goal. I wish you all the best.

But see, this, to me, is not about space. When my SO called for a break, or a "break" (as nothing really changed save for the titles), it was after his mother's funeral. His entire world had been turned upside down in 2.7 seconds to the point he could hardly function. When other people, on LFAD, have called for a break, it's because they've needed time to think and sort things through. Though I still don't agree with breaks, in certain situations, they're understandable. But in this situation, he wants to take a break to see other people, be in a "normal" relationship until he can have a "normal" relationship with the OP. It's not about clearing his head or sorting things through; it's about the fact he can't handle the distance and wants the right to be with someone else, as he stated to the OP, and that, in my opinion, is the wrong reason to take a break. So is being in a situation where they're too stressed to handle each other. What happens when they move in together and face stressors there? Or face the stressors of parenthood, if they decide to become parents? What happens if they break up for a week and then come back together? Will the stressors have automatically disappeared? Will they have automatically become better people and better able to cope with their stress? And this isn't the first break they've taken, even if the breaks have never lasted as long as they're set for. It simply seems as if it's become a pattern for him to call for a break everytime he can't handle something, and to me, that's the mark of someone who's not yet fully matured into being able to have a serious relationship. Same goes for when his reason for taking the break to begin with is because he wants to see other people. Though I agree it can and may turn out the way you also framed it, I think there's also the fact that both the OP and her boyfriend need to work on bettering their communication and ways of coping/handling stressful times and situations. This isn't the first one they're going to face. As opposed to taking a complete break with him frolicking with other women, perhaps they could consider taking more "me-time" or challenging each other to find viable outlets. To me, not having as solid communication as you do normally isn't an excuse either. My boyfriend and I did a month or a month and a half of a handful of text messages a day, if that; some days we went without saying much at all. This is two months. That's not a huge amount of time. That is why I question his level of commitment.

[floridaellen]

I have taken a break with my SO. Actually, it was more of a breakup but we did still talk and tell each other we loved each other.... it was weird. It actually worked out really well for us. We'd lost the spark, the connection. We took each other for granted. Now, we don't. We take every problem as a challenge to overcome now, not something to fight about for hours and bitch about to our friends. It worked for us.

In this situation though, I don't think it's the best option.

[Sharon Q]

Eclaire - to answer your questions breaks have always helped us. Time away gives us time to think and decide if he wants to be with me. When we take breaks its not so we can go screw someone else. Its so we can have time. hell I'm still sitting beside him, we've technically been on break for two hours and already we are feeling less stressed, and we both feel okay, We may not even take a break that long, Its just a way of letting up some of the pressure we both have been feeling.

He even mentioned earlier " We don't have to go on break I just think it would help " <----- this was after things calmed down.

I told him how I viewed it, as just time away to think about things, not really be single. After the storm cooled and we were okay he agreed with me. That the break was a way for us to cool down.

Its not that he wants to leave me for someone else. If everything was fine and dandy than we would have never even had this conversation, but its not, truth is we've been fighting for months and we are both worn out. We need time away and thats all it is. We don't want to call it quits because we still care and love one another.

and believe me I told him to leave me, I said he'd be better without me, and he said " lets talk about this first "

So he is trying.


And please don't go all " you'd be better with out him not him without you "

I've been the one starting the fights, Over very little things to, As I said in my other post I was testing him and fighting with him, on a subconscious level. I didnt mean to fight with him...

Things were moving too fast even for me, I want everything we planned someday it was just the rush of him finally being serious that scared me... and I know that makes no sense.... thats why I was so confused.

I pushed him away a lot and I've been acting stupid.
I know its not all my fault. but most of it is because I did not communicate with him to begin with.
If I had told him how I felt, that I was scared, than all of this could have been avoided.

[Zapookie]

I just have to second what most people have already stated in this thread.

His first proposition to you was pretty much asking you for permission to cheat. Did you ask him if he would be okay with you doing the same? Because an open relationship is something that both parties agree upon and both parties act out under their own set of guidelines that they have laid out for each other. It's tricky, but some couples are able to make it work.

If my SO brought up the idea of being with other people while I was away from him, just because he couldn't deal with the distance and I told him NO, I'd lose some trust in him. I would be worried that he would cheat, because he sees his physical needs as more of a priority than me or our relationship, and because that's his top priority, I would feel like me saying NO wouldn't be much of a deterrent.

And also this isn't the first time he has asked for a break. This says so much about his character. In life, we can't just always take breaks whenever we feel like it. We need to learn to deal with the problems at hand and sort them out until we come to a resolution. This is what needs to be done in your relationship. If there are problems or issues that are stressing both you out, it needs to be dealt with. You can't just take a break from your husband/wife when you're married and leave them for a while and think that will make the problem disappear. It won't. It will still be there when you get back. The whole idea of being together is that you work through the tough times standing by each others side. They are meant to be your partner in life.

[chef.rae]

I could not do an open relationship wih my SO. There would be no way that I could relax, or think that he's going to come back to me because he would be sleeping around with someone else. I could not stand it. It would come down to him staying in the relationship or him leaving me if he needed someone else.

[Haley53]

I simply feel it's unhealthy to use a break from your relationship as a way of coping and dealing with being in that relationship.

I can appreciate that you accept the responsibility of provoking arguments, but it takes two to tango. Quite frankly, I think it's great that you've recognised you've been pushing him away/testing him, but I think now that you've recognised it, you need to do something about it. Have you, or the both of you, ever considered counselling? Support groups? Accepting responsibility for what you could be doing better is great, but I think you now need to work on how to correct that behaviour, and do it on your own. Relying on your boyfriend and/or his reassurance to make those problems go away can be detrimental. You need to do some introspective work and start getting at the root of the problem and working your way up. No one's going to love or respect you in the way you need until you can love and respect yourself, and I think that's coming in to play here in the sense some of your baggage is putting some strain on the relationship.

That being said, I still feel taking a break everytime the relationship goes off-kilter is not the way to go, and I don't think saying things like "I want to be in a normal relationship" in the heat of the moment is too healthy either, not to mention that it takes two to tango in order to have an argument.

To me, for this to be a reoccuring issue and for the breaks to be a reoccuring solution, it screams that you're both having some communication problems. It doesn't matter who's at the end of what or who's starting what. What matters is that the communication is not there, and that it gets to a point where you both have to be broken off from the "together" label before you can start breathing again. That's not the way it should be, especially not if this is someone you plan to get married to. What happens then? File for divorce every time you need some space? I'm not trying to come down harsh on you or criticise you or your relationship at all. I'm not trying to say either one of you is better off without the other. I am saying that I think what you're both doing is treating a symptom when you should both be doing some work on yourselves and on your communication with each other to get at the cause, because I think anyone deserves that and I think you're going to see this issue doing nothing but resurfacing until you finally start working on the underlying issues.

[floridaellen]

I would agree with Eclaire. My SO and I have broken up before but when we got back together we said that if we ever broke up again it'd be for good. The cycle of constant breaks and such is a signal of a deeper issue.

[Rugger]

Everything's pretty much been said, so I'll just give you a hug *HUG*.