amalek

Hello all, thank you for the forum,

So, my first real relationship encountered a large road bump last night. I am still coming to grips with exactly what happened or what went wrong, so bear with me. Also, bear in mind that this is what would be called "long distance", in that we see each other every weekend but typically not during the week.

We have never had an especially sexual relationship. We always got along extremely well as friends, and the sex was just a nice release for me on top of all of that. She has always professed to being an asexual person by nature. I am not good at servicing her in that regard, as it were, but she has always told me that it wasn't a big deal for her. I took her at face and just figured she didn't mind. I was 21 when I met her, she was 19. We are now 23/21 respectively. Keep in mind, I've never exactly been an exciting guy. The past year or so has been pretty boring, and we haven't done anything adventurous, which is something that she likes. As an aside, I am also awful sexually and despite her assertions to the contrary, I'm sure that has something to do with it.

So, to sum up, it's been two years. Two extremely good years. Thursday, she told me that she was freaking out because of all the work piling up this weekend for college (I graduated, she is a senior). She tells me not to come visit this weekend as was originally planned because I would be a distraction and she might end up hating me. Fair enough, I think. I'll give her the space she wants.

Friday we talk a bit, nothing too serious, and I think all is generally okay. She makes some vague comments which might have to do with the relationship, but I can't tell, so I just assume she's still freaking. She's freaking pretty hard, mind you, but not anything specific enough for me to respond to. She says I love you, I miss you, etc, when we finish the conversation (on AIM).

Saturday, she doesn't answer my texts all day, which is unusual. She finally answers at around 11:30PM, hops on AIM, and tells me that she went to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty with some German guy from her German class. She kissed him somewhere in there. This is the first lie she has ever committed against me. She has never been isolated enough to do something like this, as before I graduated we were around each other constantly. This isn't a huge deal because we had previously discussed this kind of fidelity, and she had even told me that she might end up kissing this guy. I say, okay, whatever, as long as you don't betray me emotionally there won't be problems. This is all on AIM. At the beginning of the season, she kept saying "we won't be able to have lunch - who am I going to have lunch with?" Things like that. I offered to come up once a week to have lunch with her - it's about an hour away from my job, but hey, no big deal. If she's upset, I'll come visit. I want to do it.

She also tells me that she didn't feel anything when she kissed the German guy. She was kissing him to figure out if there was something wrong with our relationship, or something wrong with her (the sexual thing). She found out that she doesn't really enjoy kissing. She doesn't feel any differently about me than she does her roommate or her parents or her friends or the German guy right now. She seems to be freaking out that I will be the one person she can/should rely on. She feels like she's going to be dating me forever, which might be bad because she's still young and still wants to experience more. She wants to know if being in love or if dating someone new can be different than simply best friendship. Is this what love is (she says)? Is this what it's all about? She wants to find out. She wants to find out and not be tethered to me in a purely monogamous relationship or in a dating scenario, as she doesn't even know what dating is. Neither do I, for that matter. This is all what I interpreted. I cannot tell for sure what she was trying to say because I'm very dumb.

So, today, I send a text at around 6:30AM because I was having trouble sleeping, asking if we could at least meet in person to talk about it. She had to work today and do homework all afternoon. She did. We spoke when we got back over webcam and I read to her some thoughts I had jotted down in the meantime. She was smiling a lot, and generally agreeing with what I had to say. We later spoke on MSN for a while, mostly jovial stuff, sometimes relationship stuff. We came to the conclusion that it's not necessarily that she wants to date other people - she's very impulsive by nature. I say, "Do you want to keep going like we were?" Response: "I don't not want to." I ask her if she has lost sexual attraction to me, and she reiterates that it was never really important to her, but the way that I go about sex is probably a major turn off. I treat it like some kind of duty that she has to do, and something that I have to get done. Don't tell me how badly I messed this up, believe me, I know. I also am not as affectionate or romantic as she wants me to be. She has never said this, but I know it to be the case. Slowly, the debate in my mind turned from "she doesn't want to be with me anymore out of no where?!?! she just bought me a present on Wednesday!" to "She's trying to tell me that I have some serious shortcomings and she's second-guessing spending her time with me, no matter how much time that may be."

She told me she would be saying goodbye to the German guy this evening as he is leaving on Monday. She went to get dinner, and isn't back yet. I'm assuming she went out with him and is sorting things out for herself. I am leaving her to her own devices and not sending texts or otherwise harassing her. I am holding out hope that she tries to explain things to him, or at least just gets it out of her system so that I can move forward with improving where I am lacking. I am an extremely selfish person by nature, like all the men in my family, and she has put up with it up until now. I seem to have hit the breaking point Wednesday when I was bugging her about something, and according to her roommate, she doesn't want to be "my girlfriend, mother, and therapist."

So, I figure, okay, I'll extend the olive branch and ask her out on a date, bring it back down to a level where she doesn't feel so threatened, and where we should still be anyway since I've never really taken her on dates, etc. I ask her if she wants to go on a date this weekend, she says "That's fine." I say, hey, look at that, Oktoberfest in NYC on October 5th, this Sunday. Sounds like fun eh? She says, "Yeah, just expensive." We've always pinched our pennies as students, and she doesn't like me buying her things. In retrospect, I should've just done it anyway. I work full-time now, though, and I make good money, so I don't even think twice about spending it on her. She's going home this weekend, and I'm well-acquainted with her parents and they like me. I figure I'll go with her like I usually do, then go to NYC with her on Sunday as planned.

So my question for you is: what next? Regardless of how I fucked up to bring it to this juncture, or maybe I didn't even fuck up at all, what do I do now in regards to her? do I call her when my head clears up a bit? do I just let it go and hope she'll call or text me in the next few days? I still want to take her on this date just to see how it pans out, see if we still have chemistry. How will I know that I should call it quits?

It's very complicated, as you can tell, but I just don't believe that after two years she's ready to drop it like this. We have something too good - she agreed. We have something special, she said - something unique, compared to how others act.