General Discussion

@MyHartWillDrogon That sounds like a difficult position to be in. Are you at least keeping what you do have with the person alive? And yeah, I understand being awkward.

@Wolfalisk One of my friends is teaching me the value of thinking in the long term. You may feel behind in some capacity, but maybe you've made up for it in some other aspect of your life? I feel somehow behind people my own age, maybe in part because everyone my age is starting families and I'm not even thinking about that right now. But with my friend's perspective, things happen when they happen, and we don't have to rush ourselves.

@dirtycar Thank you! That's a sensible answer. I was definitely depressed when my first relationships started and it showed in how much I just threw myself in and let the circumstances define me. I've recently been diagnosed with schizoaffective, and maybe because of that I've always felt sort of restless.

@Blackthorns You sound like my mom (in a good way). She always warned me to be careful when I started a new relationship, and asked me how much I knew about the person when it seemed like things were getting serious.

A part of my stress over this comes from the fact that the friend who's helping me out so much has feelings for me. He's assured me several times that that's not why he does what he does and he'd be perfectly happy with whatever I choose to be with him.

Part of what I want to work on is forming more friendships, so I guess I will start with that. Like you said, see where it leads.

@Meqathi I'm not going to turn this into a therapy session, but I want to mention since you brought up past traumas that I have an extreme amount of anxiety due to how my parents fought when I was young. I don't really have a good picture of what a healthy, functioning relationship looks like. So, I'm always second-guessing my behavior around people, making me feel like sort of a robot that can't make friends.

But you're right, you do have worth and the right to express it. We should just throw our hands in the air and say, "I don't care what anyone thinks," but we can't because it's hard to ignore our flaws when we have those traumas from the past.

@stoprocknroll Yeah, I have high anxiety too, and do the exact same things. At first I kept waiting for the blow to come. He'd be accepting and supportive, and I'd wonder what he wanted from me that he was being so nice. I was shocked all the time, that he didn't blow up in my face at petty things like I was used to. I didn't even know what to do with myself, because like you said, I had no foundation at all for what a healthy relationship is supposed to be.