Relationship crisis - advice sought please!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Part ways with a quickness. A woman who wants to bring a child into the world with a man she barely knows without a solid plan for the future is no kind of mother. A child would bond you to this kind of instability for the rest of your life, not just 18 years.

I would also suggest that you look into counseling. I say that with all sincerity and without judgment. Personally, I think most people could benefit from counseling. At 31 you were willing to allow a woman you knew for two weeks to move in with you. Add that to the situation you find yourself in and the fact that you don’t see how clearly bad this is and I think that’s a good recipe for perspective. I applaud you for asking for advice, but as obvious as this is… the answer should be crystal clear.

Good luck and keep us posted!

62

It looks like you’re better at math than I am. This is a lifetime decision.

Recently, my GF’s son has gotten into his first real crush. GF, being the open-minded type that she is, strongly emphasized condom use. The son turned it down. His thinking is that pre-marital sex is a bad thing. Not because of any reasons of morality, but because he knows that no form of BC is 100%. One slip-up, and he’s bound to this girl for life.

Smart kid.

63

Let me add yet another voice to the chorus: No, she is not acting this way just because her desire to have kids is just so strong. Normal women don’t act this way just because they really want a baby. SHE IS ACTING THIS WAY BECAUSE SHE IS CRAZY.

While obviously I can’t diagnose her over the internet, a lot of what she is doing sounds reminiscent of borderline personality disorder. The deeper involved you get with someone like that, the more painful it ends up becoming.

My guess would be that the true reason she is so obsessed with having a baby is because she thinks that a baby will love her and won’t be able to leave her because of her crazy behavior like everyone else (rightfully) does. Thank God you didn’t get her pregnant and leave your kid trapped with a mom like this.

You cannot reason with her to get her to stop acting this way. The only thing that might actually help her is professional psychological help.

64

zhlf210? zhlf210? … I think he’s run! I hope so. I can’t help but notice that no one in this thread thinks this person is a good idea for you - me included. I’ve had enough friends bewilder themselves (at best) for years with people like this. You’re not even getting any sex? Ouch.

65

I’m feeling bad b/c I think the OP genuinely cares about this woman. It isn’t easy to push someone away when you’re still dealing with loads of warm fuzzies from the early relationship. Sorry your heart is being ripped out, OP.

Maybe it would serve the OP to enumerate some of the reasons this woman may have for doing what she’s doing. Some of these have already been cited.

  1. She’s pregnant with someone else’s baby, looking to pin the paternity on him.
  2. She wants to avoid moving back home at all costs and figures pregnancy will shame him into making this arrangement permanent, also giving her legal recourse.
  3. She’s emotionally needy and desperately wants to entrap him.
  4. She thinks a baby will be someone who will love her and can’t leave her.
  5. She’s a victim of some abuse in her past, looking for a protector.
  6. She’s got some huge debts for you to pay off.

Other dopers may be along to add others.

The manipulation is, at best, a sign of emotional immaturity…love is supposed to be freely given and adults recognize that. At worst, it’s conniving to set you up. Either way, I’m a big believer in operant conditioning: if you cave in to her, it will only reinforce the behavior. She’ll know she can get her way and push the boundaries every time, a little further and then a little further.

Moving in together so early, while your brains were in the throes of endorphins, was a mistake for both of you. Some things can’t be rushed…you can’t be in love with someone you don’t really know, although infatuation can mimic the effect.

Freud said something to the effect that we’re never so vulnerable as when we love. Maybe you’ve been alone awhile, just pining for someone who you could share your life with…she may have been in a similar situation. In the best of circumstances, people on first dates project the best self to the potential partner—that’s just normal. But when people are needy, they don’t see flaws in the other person; it’s like a mirage in the desert. And others can spot that and manipulate it to their advantage; they will project anything that will get them what they want or need.

OP, let’s turn the tables. If you wanted to marry her and/or have a baby right now and she said she wasn’t ready, would you react as she has? From what I’m reading, it sure doesn’t sound like you. That, I think, means that her attitude doesn’t come from a healthy place of understanding, give-and-take, patience and so on.

All that said, please watch your back. Unstable people are capable of many things. A lawyer I know was telling me about some divorces he’d overseen. He mentioned some movie he’d seen where the character said, “This is either going to end badly or not at all.” Be prepared for her to go nuclear when you drop the news on her—and remind yourself that the alternative is years and years of the same and worse.

66

Don’t even have sex with a condom on. She will dig it out and inject it in herself. I wouldn’t even masturbate in the shower with her around.

I am sorry you have had to hear everyone here, but no way. Man you have known her for 3 weeks and she obviously is very manipulate. Those first few weeks should be her best face so-to-speak.

while(true)
{
std::cout<<“RUN!”<<std::endl;
}

I wouldn’t be surprised if she was already pregnant (not necessarily by you) and sees you as financially stable to take care of the baby. Get a paternity test ASAP when she tells you she’s pregnant.

67

I don’t think that that’s the case. If it were, she wouldn’t be refusing him sex. She’d be hedging her bets.

lavenderviolet, interesting guess on the BPD. We, of course, can’t know for sure. But from the information given, it’s a safe bet that she’s trying to plug up some deep psychological hole. It may be as simple as her just needing validation as a person.

I once lived with someone who ached for a child. She begged me on a number of occasions to marry her and get her pregnant. Her biological clock was ticking like Big freakin’ Ben. You could feel the homones when you walked in the room. I sometimes felt so bad for her that I was tempted to cave in. I felt even worse when I asked her to move out. But being that she died a few years later, poor thing, I would now be the widowed parent of a ten-year-old. I’m glad I did what I had to do.

68

If you truly do care for her, learn this;

“You cannot help someone by doing for them what they could or should do for themselves.”

Learn it here and now, or take an object lesson, you get to choose.

Everyone is telling you to run because the God’s usually send you a pebble, right before they smite you with a boulder. Ignore the pebble at your peril.

I wish you good luck my friend, I have a feeling you’re going to need it.

69

No one has yet mentioned what might become a possible scenario with this girl…she gets pregnant, you guys stay together…and as soon as the child becomes a child, and no longer a cute,cuddly infant, she suddenly loses that maternal instinct, blames you for getting her pregnant when she was too young and not ready (yes, to HER this will be logical) and runs off (most likely to some other guy she’s been seeing for a few months already) leaving you to raise the baby on your own, alone.

Even if you stay together, get married, have a baby…she’ll still stop having sex with you. She really doesn’t like sex. You won’t get any, ever again, unless she decides she wants a second child, or a third…

This girl has problems that are too big for you to fix. It’s nice that you are so big-hearted that you actually feel bad for her being in so much “pain”…but she’s not, not really. The pain is just her way of manipulating her. I’ll bet if you went and had a long talk with her parents, they could tell you tales about this girl that would show that this has been a pattern for a long time. And she will tell you that they abused her and are lying about her.

Run. Pack her stuff up, ship it home, buy her a bus ticket and change your locks. Today.

70

Hey! I know you! Well, I know a guy who you’re going to be if you get the crazy pregnant.

The only person I know who was eager to get pregnant in the first months of their relationship (actually the very first month) was secretly planning to be a single mother. She admits now that she just wanted a baby, saw him as a means to that end and worked on convincing him that she wanted to be with him forever with the intention of booting him out when she got her baby. However, he’s the only functional parent in the pair so she wound up sticking with him so he could take care of the children and housework while she did whatever the hell she wanted. She’s since had three more babies on her own timetable - once she lied about taking contraception because he didn’t think they were ready for another baby, another time he looked like he might finally leave but they were still having a sexual relationship so…

Anyway, he takes care of her and the kids, and he’s unable to work because she flips out if he leaves her to take care of those babies that she wanted so badly. She starts messing with him while he’s at work - threatening suicide, staging dramas, demanding he drop everything and rush home because she can’t handle the children. Simultaneously, she also belittles him for being unable to support his family and uses that to justify “separating” from him every few months and screwing around (she manipulates the situation so he won’t move out, so she still gets the benefit of having him as a live-in nanny/chef while she gets to go out and fuck around).

Don’t worry about what will happen to her if you dump her; I’m tipping that inside of three months she’ll have found another sperm donor and be well on her way to her happily ever after. And you will have had a narrow escape but have lived to tell the tale.

71

Even if she was not, someone so whacked out and determined to have a baby will probably have little difficulty finding a sperm donor or two and still do her best to make it yours.

72

Well, last night I got home and she apologised for all the baby / marriage stuff she was ranting on about on Sunday night. I’ve been telling her we need to enjoy the ‘here and now’ of our relationship before we look to the future, and she had done some things round the house (like painting the kitchen) to show that she was making an effort. We had sex last night for the first time in three weeks too.

So, we’ve kind of rebooted the relationship and I ducked the difficult conversation. The only glimmer of hope is that at some level she does know she is being irrational and tries to suppress it. Hopefully she can truly suppress it - the next time it happens, I am going to try and end things with her.

I shuddered when someone mentioned ‘border line personality disorder’ - my brother’s a doctor and he’s already suggested it :frowning:

Wish me luck please dopers!

73

Good luck, Kiddo, but I can’t help thinking you “dodged” a potential life-sinking bullet here.

Youe “Uncle” Quasi:)

74

I can’t wish you luck with the relationship…I’m sorry. I think that would be like wishing a gambler luck when he’s already lost more than he can afford—yet he thinks rolling the dice “just one more time” is going to win it all back.

I get it, btw: there’s a notion that love believes, love presses on through difficult times, etc. But I think you’re fooling yourself here. And I empathize: the biggest distance in the universe at times may be between the heart and the head. The heart remains a child, but the head is the older and sadder-but-wiser adult who keeps the child from getting into too much trouble. Usually. I hope.

My interpretation of these events? She realizes she pushed you too hard and doesn’t want you to get away. She gave you sex to resuscitate your need as well as to deflect the difficult conversation. You can sweep the dirt under the carpet for awhile, but it will resurface as soon as she thinks the relationship is stable enough to handle it, or until she can’t suppress it.

If possible, why don’t you have dinner with her and your brother the doctor? If she doesn’t know he’s a doctor, don’t tell her…let her act as naturally as possible around him.

  1. A guy I know his got mixed up with a borderline pd and when she got pissed, she had someone cut down all the trees in his front yard. :eek::confused::smack:

  2. I was taking a psych course in college and someone asked the prof (also a therapist) if he had difficulty with any particular type of patients. “Borderlines,” he said. “They just wear me out.”

I will wish you luck, however, with picking up the pieces if it all goes bad. Keep us posted!

75

Too late to edit my previous answer, but just wanted to let you know that the woman you do finally wind up with, will be very fortunate to have you as a husband.

Quasi

76

I snipped this post but I pretty much agree with the whole thing. An exception might be the dinner with your brother, as I think she’ll be on her best behavior at first for meeting one of your family.

She apologized for Sunday, but that doesn’t change the three weeks of no sex, and the other “baby now!” demands. Three weeks is a really long time in a two-month-old relationship, of which you’ve been living together for 6 weeks, to be stonewalling you there - and not even for “we’re moving too fast” reasons, but for “I really want to have a baby and sex makes me sad if we’re not going to” reasons!

If she can be mad at you for weeks about something like this, about demanding a baby only two months after meeting, what will it be like down the road when you’re not making enough money or she wants another baby or she thinks you’re talking with your friends too much? What else will she demand when she doesn’t think your life revolves enough around her wants and needs?

Good luck, I think you’ll need it. If I were you, I’d make your own luck by leaving now.

77

Heavily protected sex, I hope. Because if not, you’re crazier than she is. :smack:

78

I have a now divorced friend who was in this pretty much same situation.

Started dating a girl

She moved in with him from her parents after only a few weeks - she got “kicked out” of her parents house and had no where to go…(Really!!!)

She wanted to get married and have kids, NOW.

She withheld sex to get her way.

He started making breakup noises

She started putting out to keep him from dumping her.

“Oh, I guess I’m pregnant…pill didn’t work!”

I’m also not going to wish you luck. I will try very hard to actually feel sorry for you when you end up a miserable creature for being this stupid despite overwhelming signs.

79

That’s really kind of you Quasi, thank you.

Thanks to everyone else for their advice and support too. I know we’ve only temporarily ‘rebooted’ the relationship and I need to find the right time to end it completely, aiming for the minimum of pain and hurt all round.

Current thinking is - after Christmas? We’ve got loads of interwined social engagements between now and then, don’t want her to be in tears on Christmas day, etc. But maybe I’m just being cowardly and procrastinating :confused:

80

If you KNOW that you need to end it, why on earth would you put it off? This won’t be easier after Christmas.

And no, you have not “rebooted” your relationship. She has simply realized that she came perilously close to driving you over the edge, and backed off a little. Nothing has actually changed.