You're Just Not That Into Him, Part 1

“I don't think I am as in love with my boyfriend as he is with me. I care about him a lot, we always have fun together and we have good sexual chemistry. He has maybe 70 percent of what I would look for in a permanent relationship. That’s fine for now because I’m busy in grad school and not ready to settle down anyway. No one out there looks better right now but I want to reserve the right not to be exclusive. The problem is, he can tell when I'm not really dialed in as much as he is and starts getting insecure. This makes me less attracted to him and sometimes I feel like breaking up. But then I start feeling guilty. He is a great guy who treats me well and I don't want to hurt his feelings. I just want to enjoy our relationship. Should I stay with him?”

This email I received from “Sandy” sums up a common dilemma in my work with singles. The gendered stereotype is that the person in the position of loving less is male but this is an equal-opportunity predicament in the age of hooking up and later marriages. Generations of gender inequity and sexual double standards may even be contributing to a turnabout-is-fair-play phenomenon, with more women gravitating to relationships that give them greater emotional control and less vulnerability. The happiest outcome would be that both partners end up on the same wavelength with equal feelings over time or content with the trade-offs of unequal feelings, but it doesn’t typically turn out that way.

Here’s how I have often seen the situation play out:

Sandy stays in the relationship. She is honest with Philip and tells him she loves spending time with him and isn’t interested in seeing anyone else right now but wants them both to have the right to do so in the future. She doesn’t want to make any promises she’s not sure she can keep. If Philip can’t accept this, it’s on him to break up with her. This allows her to shrug off her guilt. Philip says he’s cool with this arrangement (since he figures it’s better than losing her altogether) but Sandy is getting mixed signals from him. He seems to be hoping to change her mind about exclusivity by trying even harder to be her ideal partner. She certainly is benefiting from his heightened attention to her needs so she’s got it pretty good.

What happens if Philip keeps acting as if he’s fine when he’s really not getting his relational needs met?
There will be a tipping point at which each can go down an unhealthy Path 1 or healthy ones, Paths 2 and 3.

Path 1. Philip starts becoming more malleable, clingy, and insecure until the love and respect Sandy had felt for him become completely eroded. She starts testing the limits of his willingness to compromise his self-worth. She is secretly hoping that her increasingly unloving behavior will push him to break up with her so she doesn’t have to do the unpleasant dirty work of dumping. But he won’t or can’t. At first, she feels even guiltier but, paradoxically, she gets angrier with him for “making” her feel guilty. She finally hates the doormat he’s become enough to break up with him. Each of them is left with resentment that they are likely to carry into the next relationship in some way, shape, or form.

Path 2. After a few months, Sandy decides to leave Philip so she can keep feeling good about herself and him. She has been getting away with putting much less time and effort into the relationship than Philip and is starting to feel like she is using him. Sure, she thought it was up to him to break up with her if he was unhappy, but Philip doesn’t seem to have the courage, maturity, self-esteem, assertiveness, or whatever else it takes to leave an inequitable relationship. Under these circumstances, she believes she would be abusing her power if she keeps rationalizing that the break-up ball is in his court. So she takes the ball and tells him he deserves the kind of love she is unable to give him right now. She makes a clean break because she knows trying to stay friends right after the break-up is a slippery slope. (I’ll write more on what happens if they try to stay friends another time.)

Path 3. Philip stays in the relationship and is willing to put up with Sandy’s distance because she’s the hottest girl he has ever been with. But after a few more months of perfect-boyfriend behavior, he finally gets fed up with her lack of reciprocity and leaves Sandy, with his integrity intact. He goes through a period of loneliness and grief and doesn’t know if he’ll ever meet someone as attractive as Sandy again, but he believes that sticking to his relationship values and making himself available to others is the only way to find out.

A reader commented on this post and suggested a Path 4 for the person who isn't as in love but gets married anyway. See this reader's comment and my response in You're Just Not Into Him Part 2, You Married Him Anyway.

Have you been in Sandy or Philip’s position? What did you do and how did you feel about your outcome?

Copyright 2009, Linda R Young. All rights reserved