I am a 22-year-old woman who was seeing a 28-year-old divorced man for 11 months, until this November. When I began a new job in September, our super-hot sex life was thrown for a loop and we began to have intense fights about it. He felt his sexuality was being neglected and controlled and I felt an increasing amount of sexual pressure and scrutiny from him, to make matters worse. I believed we could get
through it with the right approach, but for about a month we continued to fight, rather than communicate, about sex.

He dumped me and decided that things couldn't work. According to him, I had done irreconcilable damage to our relationship when I was unkind, impatient, rude, or yelled during our fights. The next day, when I went to retrieve my things from his house, he also revealed that the woman who divorced him wanted to get back together with him. He had been talking to her in the last weeks of our relationship to "find answers" about our sexual problem, but I trusted that his heart was with me. I felt blamed and abandoned but accepted responsibility for my immature behavior during our hard times.

Recently, we met to talk about the split. I met him thinking, "If he is happier with his ex-wife and no longer feels our profound connection, then I must let go." He said that although he feels that bond with me, he cannot trust me because of my mistakes. His criticism of me holds water and I empathize with his fears, but I am deeply in love with him and thus feel compelled to demonstrate my trustworthiness. Although he seems open to working things out with me on some level and he knows I have learned a lesson about his emotions, he says he will not give anything up for me—namely the opportunity to "see what works" with his ex-wife. I am willing to go at his pace and play by his rules in order to rebuild our trust, but I do not want to end up being his backup plan when she screws him over. He already tried to make that relationship work for six years and she divorced him.

We are meeting next week and everything is up in the air.

What's My Next Move?

My response after the jump...

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You're being played, WMNM.

It's possible that you reacted badly when your sex life tanked (and your boyfriend sulked) and it's tempting to blame your youth, WMNM, but older and presumably more mature people are sometimes unkind to their boyfriends/girlfriends/genderneutralfriends. People of all ages are capable of being rude to their partners, raising their voices, expressing impatience, etc., when they're under stress. But unless you became unhinged at regular intervals—unless you flew into furious, irrational rages when your boyfriend griped about feeling neglected—I don't think you're the problem here.

Here's what I think happened: Your boyfriend began to see his ex while he was still with you and I'll bet you anything you like he was fucking her before he split with you. If I'm correct, WMNM, your boyfriend was behaving badly but instead of admitting it and taking responsibility for the end of the relationship—his relationship with you—your boyfriend accused you of behaving badly and attempted to convince you that the failure of the relationship was your fault. And it worked. You think it's all your fault. You feel so bad about your behavior that you've told him he doesn't have to give up anything to be with you—he can keep fucking the ex while you wait in the wings—and you've also told him that you're prepared to "go at his pace and play by his rules" in order to win back his trust. Spoiler alert: You will never win back his trust. If it's his rules and his pace so long as trust hasn't been reestablished, WMNM, what incentive does he have to tell you he trusts you again?

And even if you never fight with him ever again—even if you never raise your voice ever again, even if you're never rude to him ever again, even if you're never impatient with him ever again—he'll find fault with other aspects of your behavior. He'll point to new "mistakes" that you've made, WMNM, and that magical day when trust is reestablished (the day when it's no longer his pace, his rules) will be pushed further and further off into the future.

Fuck that.

You're being manipulated by a shitty person, WMNM. Your boyfriend is leveraging your first impressions of him (good guy, super hot sex), your competitive instincts (don't want to lose him to his supposedly awful ex), and your regrets about those fights (your unkindness, impatience, etc.) against you in order to keep you waiting for him while he "explores" things with this ex. So here are next moves: You're going to stop seeing this guy (no more meeting up to process your split), you're going to focus on that new job, and you're going to go find yourself a new boyfriend.