You have drafted the message about nine times. Every version sounds either too casual, which defeats the point, or too heavy, which you are certain will make them vanish. So you delete it again and tell yourself you will bring it up in person, knowing you will not, because the last four times you were together it was good, and you did not want to be the one who ruined a good night by asking what this is.
Eight months of this. You know their sister’s name and their coffee order and what they are like when they are sick. You do not know whether you are allowed to call them your person. If you are still working out whether that even counts as a situationship, it does, and the ambiguity is the point of it.
Why you have not asked yet
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You are not weak for staying. You are doing something your nervous system considers extremely reasonable.
Early dating is an unbelievably vulnerable time. You are not fully chosen yet. You do not even know if they are dating other people. And you do not know if they are looking at you like you are good enough for them yet. So you are neither fully chosen, nor do you know if you are actually fully acceptable to the person. It is a really hard time, when it is uncertain what is going to happen. It is just hard.
A lot of the time we are really scared to fall in love, to be vulnerable, because we start to feel that fear of rejection or abandonment and we assume the worst. And in an odd way, when you drop into those negative emotions, it starts to feel like a kind of comfort and safety.
It is safer. This is a known place. Even though it is a painful place, it is a knowable place. There are no unknowns in it. And you are not actually facing further rejection or abandonment. Whereas the reaching out, being vulnerable, saying I am actually really scared and I want to be with you and it is hard for me to feel this way, that is infinitely more scary. That takes real courage. That is arguably the hardest threshold for people to cross, when they feel most scared of being abandoned or rejected, and closest to feeling unworthy in some way, to somehow sit in those feelings and still reach out to another and let themselves be seen.
So the eight months are not a failure of nerve. Staying undefined is the cheaper option, and your body keeps taking it.
What the waiting is doing to you
There is a cost, and it is not emotional in the vague sense. It is metabolic.
When something happens to you that does not get processed, the body does what it can. It moves on. But the unprocessed emotional content gets left in what I think of as an internal mempool. Unconfirmed. Floating. Still taking up space. Still demanding energy. Still broadcasting to the system, this needs to be processed, this needs to be settled.
That is what anxiety is. It is unconfirmed transactions. The nervous system keeps looping them, keeps re-broadcasting them, because they were never included in a settled block. The body will not let you forget, because the body knows there are open transactions that need to be closed.
Every unanswered text is an open transaction. Every ambiguous “see you soon” is an open transaction. You are running a background process that never terminates, and then wondering why you are exhausted by a relationship that technically does not exist.
The conversation you are rehearsing is the wrong one
When people finally do bring it up, they usually bring the wrong thing into the room, and it costs them the outcome they wanted.
There are two ways to speak. One is the Story of Other. “He never makes plans.” “She is always vague.” “They only text me when it suits them.” The other is the Experience of Self. “I feel overwhelmed.” “I feel terrified of being abandoned.” “I feel shame.”
The Story of Other is seductive. It is the narrative you tell your friends at brunch. It feels good because it makes us righteous. And it is always a dead end. You can spend your whole life running that corridor. Story of other never leads to growth, never leads to healing, never leads to sovereignty. It is the path the lab rat discovers again and again has no food at the end.
You have been building a case for eight months. You have evidence. You could win the argument. And winning it will get you nothing, because a person who feels prosecuted defends themselves, they do not reach back toward you.
What I was actually doing at the start with Teale
Teale and I were not monogamous at the beginning. We had not had a conversation about not dating other people. She went off for about a month, living in the wilderness, and while she was gone I hooked up with my ex-girlfriend. Then I called her and told her.
What was going on in me was not complicated once I stopped defending it. I had met her and it was amazing and I loved her so much. On another level, the part of me I now joke about as Sexy Figs was really not particularly happy about the idea that I would stop getting validation from other people. I was coming out of the funk of a breakup. I was susceptible to getting validation through being wanted, being desirable. I just was not quite there. I should have been much more transparent and clear.
My worth in love was determined entirely by whether I could be seductive. Whether someone wanted me. Whether I could perform the version of myself I believed I needed to be, to be chosen. What I now joke about as Sexy Figs was built on fear. Fear that the real me was not enough.
You cannot build a relationship from a protector part. The Seducer might win someone’s attention, might even win their heart for a little while, but he cannot carry a relationship. The point of a relationship is a secure base, and The Seducer is not a secure base. He is a representative, as Chris Rock would say, the polished version of myself I sent in ahead of me so nobody would meet the frightened, tender boy underneath.
I say this because you are probably assuming the person who will not define it is being careless with you. Sometimes they are. Often they are running a protector part that has worked for them their whole life, and they have no idea it is costing them the one thing they actually want. That is a different problem from someone who is genuinely unavailable, and the difference shows up in what they do next.
The dance that keeps this frozen
What happens between you two has a shape, and both of you are doing your half.
In our work we do not call these pursuer and withdrawer. We call them the Relentless Lover and the Reluctant Lover. The Relentless Lover reaches when connection feels at risk. They protest for closeness. Their body says, please do not leave me, please see me, please let me matter. This is not neediness. It is fear of abandonment living inside the body. The Reluctant Lover retreats when things feel intense.
The pursuer pursues because withdrawal feels like abandonment. The withdrawer withdraws because pursuit feels like criticism. Both are right. Both are also making it worse.
So when you go quiet for two days to see if they notice, or send the deliberately breezy message, or bring it up at the end of a night out when you have had two drinks, that is protest behaviour. It comes from your competent place, your protester place. And it guts your partner, leaving them feeling unacceptable and scared. Which is the opposite of what you were going for. If you recognise yourself here, the demand withdraw pattern is worth understanding before you open your mouth.
If you are not safe, that comes first
This whole article assumes an ordinary painful ambiguity. If this person is threatening you, tracking where you are, controlling your money, or frightening you physically, that is not ambivalence and it is not a defining conversation you need. Call a domestic violence line in your country today and talk to someone who can help you plan.
What to say, word for word
Right underneath your request of another is the vulnerable experience you are having. Share the vulnerable experience. Do not put a request on it.
So not “where is this going,” and not “I need you to decide by Friday.” Something closer to this:
“I am having a vulnerable experience, because there is some way I am not feeling loved. I get scared that I am not a priority to you, that I do not matter to you, and it leaves me feeling really sad and alone.”
Then stop talking. Do not ask for anything at the end of it. The less you describe another person, and the less you ask questions of them or ask them to do stuff, the less threatening you will be to them emotionally. When you actually let them see you as just a vulnerable human being, you give them something they can move toward.
Their response is your answer. Not the words, the response. Someone who moves toward you when you are that exposed is telling you something real. Someone who manages you, reassures you without changing anything, or makes you feel foolish for saying it is also telling you something real, and you already know what it is. You do not need a fifth month of evidence.
If they say no, or say nothing
You will grieve this more than you expect to, and you will feel stupid for grieving something that never had a name.
A client told me once that she was going through a breakup and not feeling great, but that it was because she was getting better at boundaries. Instead of taking two and a half years to figure something out, it only took her a few months. Then she said the thing I have quoted to people ever since. You can create that corrective experience for yourself by knowing, okay, this person was not trying to hurt me, and they are not bad. They are just making choices for their life that do not work for me. And I cannot regulate my nervous system being with somebody who is making that choice. So it is sad. It is sad, and you have to grieve it. But it does not mean they are bad.
That is the whole thing. You are not leaving because they are a villain. You are leaving because your body cannot settle in a place with no floor, and you finally believe that matters.
Eight months of drafting a message is your system telling you there are open transactions. Say the vulnerable thing, take their answer seriously the first time, and let the block settle. If you want to work out your exact words before you say them, or sit with what their answer actually meant, you can talk it through with Figlet.
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
