How long do you wait to find out?

In My Humble Opinion
1

TEXT WALL INCOMING

I’m currently dating a wonderful woman that I met eight months ago. She’s gorgeous, incredibly smart, and an uncanny amount of sanity compared to many of my peers. I’m incredibly smitten. I’d like nothing more for us to be boyfriend/girlfriend, but she doesn’t seem so certain.

We met on eharmony back in March. Things went well, and after a few months progressed into an actual relationship. She still lived with her parents (24) because she was very close with her family, who were Catholic (though she isn’t religious herself). While she is very open-minded, her family is conservative, so conservative, in fact, that she didn’t want them to know that she was even dating. This set a little red flag in my head, because a 24 year old is an adult in my opinion, and what they do during their own time is their business. However culturally (mexican, catholic) it was a different story. Because she lost her virginity to me and seemed to have no problem staying at my apartment until 2AM in the middle of the week in spite of having to be at work at 8AM the next morning, I didn’t press the issue.

On evening I made the stupid, stupid mistake of casually mentioning that I’m too polite to ask people to leave my apartment. She flipped out, thinking I was taking things for granted and stormed out. Around 4AM she texted me and said she didn’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore :frowning: I was pretty upset, I still liked her, and particularly frustrated she would text-message me this instead of talking it out in person. The next night she talked with me about it over the phone, and in a surprise move, suggested we be friends-with-benefits. She enjoyed the intimacy and a few other things, but there were other things about me that apparently drove her batshit and she didn’t want to put up with it. I agreed to being FWBs.

Over the next couple of months things progressed very well. She really enjoyed the FWB arrangement and the times I made her flip out and get angry were few and far between. I started to learn what was important to her in a relationship, and take the things inherent to me and bend them toward those ends. In other words, instead of trying to be the kind of person I thought she wanted, I brought out the things she already respected/like about me. We got closer and closer, and it culminated in having her come with me to my best friend’s wedding. The wedding was beautiful, I did a great job as Best Man (everyone loved my speech, felt like a million bucks :smiley: ) and given that we never spent the night together up to that point we didn’t drive each other crazy spending 3 days together in a hotel in Anaheim either. Talking in private to me, people were surprised she wasn’t my girlfriend, based on our body language. It was hard to explain to people what she was to me, because honestly she’s more than just a FWB, more like almost-not-quite-girlfriend.

So now here I am, happy but happier if she was comfortable being my girlfriend. Every time I’ve brought it up she’s gotten defensive and pushed away, so its tricky bringing up the issue delicately. If you’ve progressed through this wall of text, then I ask you this question, where do I go from here? Obviously if I press her, she’ll pull away, but if I wait, who knows how long I’ll wait before she comes around (if she ever does…:dubious: ). In the past, its never ended well for me ‘waiting for the other person to make up their mind’ but at the same time things have never progressed this well with someone who wasn’t my girlfriend at this point.

2

Off the cuff: you’ve got yerself a craazy one here, yessir.

3

It sounds to me like she’s serious about just being FWB’s. She doesn’t want to be your girlfriend and in all likelihood never will.

4

I will offer this—if you volunteer to take the training classes in order to convert to Catholicism, she will be all over you. If you don’t want to convert, you’re going nowhere. Voice of experience, YMMV.

5

She doesn’t want to be your girlfriend. She just thinks of you as a close friend. If this FWB relationship is causing you emotional troubles, stop sleeping with her.

6

Really? Because it seems like she herself isn’t that Catholic- she doesn’t go to church except for weddings/funerals/baptisms/etc, doesn’t care if the person she marries isn’t Catholic, etc. The thing is the Catholic thing seems more about pleasing her mother. I mean obviously I could be very naive about this.

And if she just wants to stay FWBs indefinitely, why go through all the motions of meeting my family and stuff? They all like her a lot, but they all also assume she’s my girlfriend. To me, it would just seem simpler if we used that title and stuck with it, but to her, the name itself has this huge connotation even though nothing else changes.

7

It has been my experience that how little Catholic education a Catholic child may receive, he/she is Catholic first, foremost, and forever. I am sure there are exceptions and you may have found one but I think the odds are against it. Now please don’t take this as being anti-Catholic in any way even though I am a Southern Baptist and an Ancient Free & Accepted Mason.

I would like hear some Catholics inputs on this and I am NOT trying to start an argument.

8

It sounds like she likes you, but feels that there are things about you that are incompatible with a relationship. She has probably told you about the superficial things, but I’m guessing there are other issues that causes a mental block when she envisions you and her together.

You probably don’t want to hear this advice, but take a break from her. Date other people, involve yourself with other things. She may be able to overcome her block when she’s alone for a while and starts missing you. But beware. The mental block may return if and once you start seeing her again. In all likelihood it will. Especially since she’s not willing to talk about it.

9

Do you go dutch on dates or are you a paying?

10

Instead of saying, “why pay for a cow when you can get the milk for free,” your relationship is why pay for the bull when you can get the meat for free.

You are being used.

KSO has it.

Have a serious sit down with her. Just be prepared that what may come out of that means you will have to walk away, for good.

11

The problem here is that a) it sounds like Incubus has fallen, is falling, or will fall for this woman, and b) there is the slightest, smallest, most remote chance that the FWB could work over time, in conjunction with him pulling the “better man” renovation, to convince her that her prior concerns are no longer valid. As long as those two items exist, it’s going to almost impossible to convince him that walking away is a sane option.

So the choices are simple. Sit down and have a talk with her, and be prepared to walk away.

Or, stick with the FWB and hope that she comes around, but have some sort of timeline in your head–6 months, a year, whatever. At some point the FWB thing will wear thin, and you will, again, need to be prepared to walk away. If I was a betting man, I’d put money on you choosing the latter.

12

In Spanish the same word is used for “girlfriend,” “fiancée” and “bride;” there’s places where it euphemistically means “concubine” (not as in live-in gf or as in fwb, but as in “the second woman”). Same for the male equivalent word. One of the reasons that circus with the ring seems so absurd to me emotionally is that by the time I, or any Hispanic friend of mine, call ourselves someone’s “novia,” it means we’re thinking we’ll marry him.

Is she able to point specific things about you that drive her up the wall, or does she just say “there’s things I don’t like”? If you two decided to marry, how would her family react? If you two decided to marry and you had converted to Catholicism, or could say “I took the courses but I can’t betray my faith, my beliefs don’t mesh with Catholicism”, how would they react then?

She’s not going to marry you unless she gets to a point where she sees herself backing you up against her parents (“y serán un solo cuerpo y una sola carne” - “and they shall be a single body and a single flesh”) - and she’s not going to call herself your girlfriend unless she can more-or-less picture herself choosing the curtains for your (plural your) house.

13

Sorry, I used the wrong verb: …“we’re thinking we’ll marry him”… is actually sort of a strong may. But if you don’t think he seems marriageable you don’t call yourself his novia nor him your novio.

Pointing out specific things that bother her can be very difficult: she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings and some of the things which bother her probably look stupid, but they bother her because they are representative of something deeper. For example, with one of my boyfriends it bothered me enormously that he was never willing to listen to “my” music; it seems silly but the thing is, if he isn’t open enough to listen to what I like for half an hour (and maybe, just maybe, discover something new he likes), I don’t think he’ll be willing to “give up” on more-loaded issues (like schooling). He talked everybody’s ears off about how he was willing to negotiate and listen to me… but then, he did not listen to me! It’s in the small things that you give proof of the big ones.

14

Obviously you’re below her perceived standards. That’s why she doesn’t want to show you to her parents. Girls who are prude often develop a white-knight/mr right complex (at least while they’re young), and you just aren’t up to it. I’m not saying that she’s too good for you, rather that her judgement may be off and she doesn’t know what she wants. If she’s wrong, it’ll take experience for her to realize it (ie, life experience with other men). But if she’s right (and I don’t know enough to be sure she’s not), then… well… lucky you.

15

I do not believe you have a future with this woman. I am sorry that you have fallen for her. You say she’s uncertain about being your girlfriend, but it sounds like she’s a certain as she needs to be - she will tolerate you as a FWB, but not more.

Don’t you want more than someone who tolerates you?

16

Sane women don’t “flip out” unless something truly world-shaking has hit them. Sane women also can take “I have such a hard time telling someone to go, even when I have work early the next morning” gracefully.

17

To be fair, that’s not what he said. The “I’m too polite to ask people to leave my apartment” line would have made me mighty insecure too. (It wouldn’t have made me angry, tho.) It’s a very odd thing to say. Sort of like, “go on. guess. do i ever want you around or not? well?”

18

If she was completely unaware that he had work the next morning, than yeah, that’s a dickish thing to lay on someone without explanation. But if I go to see a lover on a weeknight, and they’ve at some point told me their schedule, I could see a sheepish “I’m too polite to ask people to leave my apartment” being dropped when I’ve rudely ignored how long I’ve overstayed. (Kind of an awkward phrasing though; “I’m usually too shy to ask people to leave, but I really do have to get up tomorrow” would be kinder, or “It feels so rude to ask someone to leave, I’m sorry, but as you know…”)

At any rate, everything this woman’s done, including this baffling FWB scenario, don’t indicate that she’s a good prospect for a serious relationship, even if she was amicable to the notion.

I’m a huge fan of friends-with-benefits (even if I hate the term) arrangements but entering into one, or staying in one, where you’re not perfectly happy to have it continue as such indefinitely is slow emotional suicide. If you really want her to be your girlfriend, you’re going to have to be willing to ask for that and walk away if refused. Which in this case, doesn’t sound like a bad thing.

19

Oh. When reading the text I got the impression it was the girl who had work.

20

Run away. No good will come of this - you’ll end up getting hurt.