Those are some impressively unrealistic expectations you have there. He’s your boyfriend, not the help. If you want someone to tell you how awesome you are all day every day, while you do nothing but bask in the glow of his admiration, hire a lackey.
Courting **is ** a game. Everyone is on their best behavior, and checking that behavior against the rulebook constantly. There’s nothing especially devious about it, it’s just a best-foot-forward thing.
But no one can live that way all the time. It’s exhausting. And so at some point, we relax. This is a *good * thing. It’s called “intimacy” and it’s supposedly what we all long for. There’s a difference between “pulling back” and “settling in”, and the tradeoff for being able to spend the evening eating pizza and watching movies in your pajamas without worrying about whether you’re being sufficiently witty and charming, is that things become routine.
It’s just plain not reasonable to expect someone to incessantly court you, and maintaining a relationship requires an entirely different approach than obtaining one. Relationships aren’t about grand gestures. Establishing a relationship is about being a great “boy/girlfriend”. *Keeping * it working is about being a great partner. Worry less about whether he tells you how much he adores you, and more about whether he asks how your day was, and actually listens to your response. Who cares if he brings you flowers, if he forgot the milk you asked for?
[QUOTE=Ale]
Funny thing, I´ve had the opposite thing happen; I mean, I´m that kind of guy that continuously shows affection, express feelings and all that. /QUOTE]
I used to be that guy too, and one thing I can tell you: When you’re constantly on in that mode, it will wear you and the relationship out.
Okay, okay. Seems the consensus is that his change is natural and actually a good sign. I may tend to overanalyze things a bit when it comes to relationships, probably because I haven’t been in one for a long time and I’m just an overthinker, anyway. The change really was just so drastic, it threw me for a loop in a way.
And Telperien, I don’t have time to link, but I was very concerned in the beginning with his attentions, it did seem over the top, and I did post a thread about it. I got over it real quick, though, and did get used to it.
I think basically what has happened is that he became comfortable with us before I did, and I wasn’t quite ready for the settling in that he seems to have done. We shall see how this progresses, and I’ll try not to fuck it up.
These are all good points, but something to keep in mind is how his “inattention” is manifesting itself.
Ok, so no flowers (rather an empty gesture anyway, but I’m digressing), but what if you are worried about something with one of your kids? Or there’s been a minor glitch at work and you want to talk it over (hopefully NOT mindfucking it to death)?
How is he then? Does he show his affection in other ways? This sounds stereotypical, but is he concerned about your car maintenance? Or something similiar? (your computer, your cell phone?). Does he laugh at your jokes, still?
I highly doubt he is guilty of “bait and switch”, but I would be concerned if not only the razzle-dazzle was gone, but so was the listening and/or the humor.
It’s obviously not true in all cases but I think it’s generally true that women tend to look for hidden meanings that men never had any intent to make. If a guy says “you look good in that dress” he usually just means “you look good in that dress”. Don’t try to analyze this for hidden meanings like “Why is he saying this now? Does he want something or does he feel like he needs to make up for something? Maybe he’s going to say something bad and wants to soften the blow. Maybe he’s looking for me to complement him. Maybe he doesn’t like the other clothes I wear. Maybe he’s telling me that dresses make me look more feminine and he really means his masculinity is threatened by me getting paid more than he does. Or maybe…”
In my opinion, if you went from intensely being chased to nothing but the phone calls and the sex, something isn’t right.
I for one, don’t give a guy a pass because he doesn’t feel like courting anymore. If someone loves you, they tell you and they show you. Maybe not quite as often as in the beginning but those sappy emails should at least be coming once a week and those flowers once a month. If you want to be treated a certain way, I think it is foolish to give this guy a pass because people on a message board feel that being loved and admired is too much to expect to last forever.
Trust your instincts. If you think there is something not quite right, you are probably correct.
Maybe he doesn’t like to be “chasing” someone either, and just did it because it’s culturally expected of males (as you point out, that’s “traditional”) and therefore he figures he has to do that during courting or he won’t ever get involved with anyone.
I respectfully disagree. I love and admire my wife more than anyone on the planet. I think she’s an extraordinary person, a brilliant artist, and an ideal partner for me. I also know perfectly well that she loves and admires me just as much, and in exactly the same ways.
I haven’t sent my wife a sappy e-mail in (probably) seven or eight months, and haven’t given her flowers in three or four. She hasn’t sent me a sappy e-mail in longer still, and I’m pretty sure she’s never given me flowers.
I for one think it’s not such a good idea to go establishing hard and fast rules on what constitutes being loved and admired. If (when I was single) a woman told me that, all other considerations aside, she required electronic poetry weekly and flowers monthly or she would decide she was no longer loved or admired, I’d have concluded that she and I did not share the same definition of those words.
And I think it’s foolish to buy into a **fantasy ** of what it is to be loved and admired. Should you dump a guy who is always there for you because he failed to get you whatever diamond pendant Kay Jewelers is pushing this year?
Flowers and sappy emails aren’t love and admiration, they’re at best a placeholder, a signifier of love and admiration. At worst they’re an appeasement, a facsmilie of love and admiration. There’s a reason for the cliche of the husband who sends his wife flowers every time he fucks somebody else.
I had a friend like this. She told me that if someone tells her, “Your hair looks nice today” then she would not take it as a real compliment because she would think to herself, “What was wrong with my hair yesterday?”
Here’s a question: If a guy “settles in” to a long term relationship, and does not court her like he once did, but still loves and cares for his gal, and the gal asks why he doesn’t do all the nice courtship stuff anymore, what can the guy tell the gal in response that doesn’t make him sound like a total cad, such as, “Sorry, honey, the courtship is over, better get used to it.”
Look, we guys are very simple. We either like you or we don’t. We either like having sex with you or we don’t. And even if we don’t like sex with you, we generally like it more than not having sex with anyone.
What it sounds like is that he doesn’t really like you that much anymore, but he’s content to continue having sex with you. So basically, other than the sex, the rest of the relationship has become an unpleasent chore.
As to the why he might not like you anymore, I can only guess since I don’t know either of you. It could be any arbitrary thing.
