The short and the long of it

The short answer: you both have steep issues with lack of trust and that can be a breaker for any relationship.

On the more lengthy perspective, it sounds like the betrayal and abandonment you experienced as a tender tot has left you without any adequate idea of what true love is all about. Children who are emotionally deprived often find that any attention is better than no attention at all. This dynamic has transferred into your adult life, so that you only "feel love" when you miss the person who's abandoned you. Doesn't this ring any bells for you?

Before you continue to get into more relationships of any kind, you really owe it to yourself to get into some intense kind of therapy which will help you to recognize your true feeelings, as well as define what love is and what it isn't.

At any rate, no matter how emotionally stable any individual happens to be, there is absolutely no way that someone can force themselves to love someone else. Even if we find someone who posesses all the fine qualities we are looking for in another, if a certain chemistry (which can not be so easily defined) is not there, then true love will not occur. For there to be a long lasting and mutually satisfying relationship, individuals in a partnership must be compatible physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

Your friend seems to be much more prepared for an exclusive relationship than you at this point, although her persistence would be suffocating to just about anyone.
However, for some women having a partner that goes out frequently with his friends can be a threat, especially if they feel somewhat insecure with the realtionship. There is nothing intrinsically right or wrong with this, it's only a matter of whether there is mutual agreement on the issue. If there isn't, then there is bound to be ugly struggles between an increasingly suspicious person chasing an increasingly more distant mate. Bad formula.

I think you ought to give yourself more time to get your own emotional picture clearer, before you continue on an inevitable pattern of continual hurts at both ends. Tweet