Have you ever felt like you should break up with someone but you really didn't want to?

If you are unhappy for more than a few weeks without resolution of a problem, yes, time to break up.
Listen to your inner self and just DO it. You don’t “owe” anyone anything but your integrity.
If a relationship gets to a point of wondering if you should “stick it out”, the answer is NO!

Free yourself and the pother person.
Otherwise you are being a martyr, and martyrs get burned at the stake.
Why don’t you trust your intuition?

You have to be true to yourself. Is this relationship making you feel happy and content or are you always second-guessing about whether he really cares about you? By the sound of it, it is the latter. You may very well love him, but don’t you deserved to be loved in return?

I would try to give yourself a little distance from the relationship. Even a week or so to think about what you are getting out of this relationship and what you are putting into it. Once you have a clearer idea about this, talk to him. If he confirms you and the relationship are not as important to him as to you and that is unlikely to change (in other words it isn’t a phase he is going through), then you need to decide if that is enough for you. It wouldn’t be for me.

He says he loves me, and I believe him, but I don’t think it means the same thing to him that it does to me. He is just not an emotional person.

I struggled for many years with this question in my marriage; it always was a relationship with real positives and real negatives in it. While I had pretty much decided not to end it, my husband “broke up” with me 6 months ago. It was – and still sometimes is -devastating but I am surviving and thriving. If you don’t feel he can meet most of your emotional needs, it would be better for you to break up sooner rather than be mildly unhappy for years.

If he loves you but not in the way you feel he should, you need to think about whether your perception of how things should be is realistic or idealistic. He is who he is. He can’t change the way he loves you to suit your perception of how he should love you. Can you learn to accept his love as he presents it?

I know how you feel and yes I have. You’re just prolonging the pain I think. You wish he would change, or something different would happen. It sucks a lot. But you can not force someone to love you, or make someone like you as much as you like them… It sucks. No one can decide what to do, sometimes you have to do what you feel is right. But I’ve been in that situation before and all is did was prolong the pain. I kept on hoping and wishing he would change and love me, because I did love myself…...

I did believe I was worth the love that I (that everyone) deserves…... So I settled for much less and stayed with a man who didn’t love me and didn’t treat me right…..

Maybe take some time off if this is really bothering you, to the point where you would question the relationship. You just said even though he says he loves you, you still feel unsure. Maybe look at the relationship from another angle or outside the box, looking in. Only you can choose what you want.

It’s called a long term relationship.

May I address this from the other side of the coin? I dated a guy for two years and was (or so I thought) in love with him. I would have said ‘yes’ if he had asked me to marry him. Instead, he broke up with me. It was a shock.

In hindsight, I am thankful that he saw that, while we loved and respected each other, there was little hope of sustaining the relationship without a ton of work. We were just way too different in so many ways. For all of the dumb things that he said or did, breaking up with me was one of his smartest moves for both of us. Every time a question comes up that makes me think of that time in my life, I say a silent thank-you to him.

Ever heard of the song I Found Love on A Two Way Street? It fits your situation.

I’m an idiot. He just came home with jewelry for me.

@mostlyclueless Oh well – throw all our advice out the window then and be happy!

Removed by me

I was going to break up with my now husband. I talked to my mom about it and she pointed my track record with really good guys. They would get closer and closer to me and I would pull away. I spent a while thinking about what she said and reviewing past relationships and she was absolutely right. I decided to give the relationship a real chance.

We are just about to celebrate our 18th anniversary. He was a great guy when we were dating and he is my ideal husband.

Would anyone disagree if I suggested that it’s in his best interests to keep her feeling this way? If so.. please explain. :)

Perhaps you can explain why you think it is in his best interests? Not disagreeing with you but I would prefer you to elaborate on your point @ninjacolin.

No. If it isn’t right, it isn’t right. I didn’t waste time trying to coax a relationship into being. Life is too short and I’m worth more than a lame connection.

@mostlyclueless Soooo, some sparkley little trinkets lure you back into the nest in an instant?
Are you a women or a female Bower bird? lol
Whatever….good luck.

@Coloma, I’m not a big jewelry person, but as they say, it’s the thought that counts. I thought it was a very loving gesture.

@mostlyclueless Perhaps, or, it could also be manipulation if he’s on to your confusion. No disrespect intended, just an observation that it seems all of your concerns evaporated with a display of gift giving. You’ll figure it out.

It is certainly easier to buy something that glitters rather than address the primary issues of what you feel constitutes a good relationship (one that does’t suck, whatever that means).

@gailcalled Exactly. Loving gestures have nothing to do with solving relationship issues, frosting on a bad cake is only masking what lies beneath. haha

Here is a song for you. More Than Words by Extreme.

So, some questions for you…Does the BF show that he truly cares about you, other than the new jewelry? Does he reach out to hold your hand when you go for a walk? Does he know that you aren’t a big jewelry person?

The fiance and I use the three little words all of the time, and I specifically state why. However, like in the song linked above, if these words did not exist, we would still know that our love for each other is strong and deep by our actions. We also talk about almost everything in great detail. He knows what I desire, as I do with him. I wish for the same in everyone’s relationship.

I have felt that way, yes.

@Pied_Pfeffer, he does show he cares about me. He is very physically affectionate, tells me he loves me often, goes out of his way to do things to make my life easier. But we have never had that crazy passion stage that new couples usually do, and I am sure if we broke up, he would feel sad for a few days and then easily move on. When I go out of town for work, I think he’s relieved to have alone/guy time. It’s nothing pathological, I just feel like I am so much more emotional than he is, or than previous lovers have been. So when we talk about the future, I have this wrenching feeling like, I don’t know if I can really do this forever.

@Bellatrix if she thinks he likes her less than he does.. then she’ll keep chasing him and he won’t have to worry about being left. Maybe the truth is that he likes her way more than he lets on.. but as long as she never finds out then his place in her life is secured… right?

@ninjacolin, how does that make sense when the premise of this question is that I’m thinking about breaking up with him over not feeling loved enough.

@mostlyclueless If you don’t think you can dothis forever now, you probably won’t be able to. Listen to your heart; it doesn’t sound like there’s a right or wrong here, but possibly an emotional needs difference.

sigh.. maybe it doesn’t make sense.. but, how do you know he doesn’t like you more than you like him?

@ninjacolin, so you are saying the problem is that she is pushing so much and acting so (sorry @mostlyclueless but this is how I see things) desperate and insecure that he might leave her that there is no incentive for him to be more demonstrative about his love? I agree, that is quite possibly correct and the jewellery purchase supports your premise. She posts here she is feeling insecure and suddenly he buys her jewellery. I am quite certain she has also given him signals she is feeling less than secure about the relationship too. Good to have the male perspective too @ninjacolin.

Can I add too @mostlyclueless, reading your later posts, perhaps the problem is with you and not him. I agree there is probably an element of truth at least in what @ninjacolin has said but it seems to me you have unrealistic expectations. You say he is “physically affectionate, tells me he loves me often, goes out of his way to do things to make my life easier” but then you claim you love him more than he loves you. You want “that crazy passion stage”. Unfortunately not all relationships have that and. That phase is also more about brain chemicals and infatuation. You have a man who you admit loves you but you want more. You want him to do more than show you affection, tell you he loves you AND go out of his way to make your life easier. You want him to be you, or your past lovers or someone else. And then you wonder why he is perhaps relieved when you aren’t around! You sound very high maintenance and if I was him, I doubt I would even be there still trying!

He isn’t you. He isn’t your past lovers. He is a man who it would seem to me as an outside observer reading your commentary on your relationship, loves you and cares about you. If that isn’t enough, for his sake, you should move on.

@Bellatrix, let me just ask this, how would your husband respond if you left him?

You can become defensive, but he hasn’t left you. You just think he will and frankly, he might. It seems to me that you are more likely to leave him though because he doesn’t love you as you want him to love you. You just described him as showing affection, doing whatever he can to make your life easier and telling you he loves you. That isn’t enough for you though. You just said, what you want is the heady infatuation that comes with some new relationships.

I don’t have any fear that my husband will leave me but then I am not insecure as a person. I also believe that if my relationship had problems, I would be as much a part of the problem as he is and I would work to see how I was creating those problems and what I could do to resolve them. If he didn’t want to be with me, then he would leave and as long as I knew I had done all I could in the relationship, that would be just the way it is.

Sorry, I was unclear. I didn’t mean to suggest that I thought he would leave me, or that your husband wants to leave you.

What I wanted to get at is this—I agree that I have a lot to be grateful for in this relationship. Despite that, something feels a little empty or missing. I think a good way to capture that is knowing that my partner would not be terribly upset if I left him. He would be sad, but he wouldn’t cry, and he would move on easily. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m presuming that your husband would be devastated, and may never be the same.

I can only guess how he would feel but really, I am focused on making my relationship work today rather than worrying if he might leave me tomorrow? And I have no plans to leave him myself because I think he is pretty damn amazing. You on the other hand seem to be questioning whether you should stay in this relationship and whether your partners loves you as much as you love him and how he might respond if you broke up (whoever instigated it). The only control you have over that is in whether you seriously invest in what you have now. How he reacts if it doesn’t work, as with my husband, is out of your hands and mine. That will be for them to work out. I know I will be dealing with my relationship breaking up in my own way.

If what you want to know is how to get joy and passion in your relationship, that is an entirely different question to the one you asked. You asked should you break up with him because he doesn’t love you enough. I am not reading that he doesn’t love you enough from your posts. I am reading “he doesn’t love me how I want him to love me” and he can’t fix that. Only you can. You can tell him you want him to be more passionate, but if that isn’t him and you know it isn’t him, you are putting pressure on him that seems to me to be unfair.

I am also concerned that you maybe chasing an illusion. It seems you have a good man here. Is the headiness of fresh love worth losing him or giving him up? Only you can answer that. In trying to help you figure that out though, can I ask what happened in these previous, heady relationships? If that was so good, why aren’t you together now? Perhaps you could spend some time working out what IS in this relationship that is valuable rather than what you would like to see there. Then you might be able to evaluate if what is missing is really as special as what you already have?

@mostlyclueless Allowing another to devastate you is unhealthy. WANTING someone to BE devastated if you leave them even more unhealthy.
Anything more than initial sadness and disappointment is unhealthy.
What do you WANT? Seems to me you want some sort of insane Hollywood fantasy, you break up with him and he chases you around trying to win you back. Gah!

Hot romantic love is not true love. True love is warm, caring and steady, not hot, fickle and ambivalent.

Oh good god. I don’t want him, or anyone else, to be devastated. I just think grief is a normal reaction to losing something important to you. I would never break up with him to try to get him to chase me; that’s insane and completely petty and now I’m just insulted.

@mostlyclueless I think I understand what you are saying because my husband had no deep passionate feelings for me and I repeat – if you aren’t getting what you want or need, you should think about ending the relationship.

^ Words of wisdom…from those of us that have traveled the path.
I’m not trying to insult you @mostlyclueless just asking the hard Q.‘s…wanting you to think.

Unfortunately, it’s not your place @mostlyclueless to suggest that he loves you more or less than you like him. Only he can tell you how much he loves you. You have to take him on his word unless you are willing to call him a liar.

Communication is important. It’s super cool that you brought to conversation to us, but you really need to have it with him.

If he’s doing his personal best then, as @Bellatrix suggests, you’ve gotta make a decision about whether what this dude has to offer is enough to suit your needs.