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Should I Stay or Should I Go? Dear Dr. Neder: My boyfriend and I have only been dating a year and 2 months. I do really care for him and I pray he cares for me as well. Here is my concern, he has hidden things from me before, and I have found out and now I'm getting afraid he is doing it again. He has promised me that he will tell me everything but I have to pry information out of him! This is very frustrating, and I’m confused as to a good way to handle this without breaking the relationship off. Please help! Hello! You know when you have to deliver bad news and you know that the recipient isn't going to take it well? That's what I'm feeling right now. You're not going to like my advice at all. My dear, I'm sorry to say, you're absolutely, positively wrong here - 100%. Demanding that he be "totally honest" with you is simply setting him up for failure. It's too bad that he doesn't know enough to not have agreed to this in the first place, but that doesn't make him wrong in trying to deliver it. The problem is YOUR expectations. Let's dissect this a little: YOU want him to divulge everything you think you might ever be concerned with. You've snooped on him in the past (wrong, wrong, wrong by the way!) and found things you had no idea the meaning of. Because of this, you want to make HIM the bad guy and now demand something totally and completely unreasonable simply because YOU don't trust YOURSELF to make good decisions about things! No matter how hard you try, you don't get to make anyone else responsible for your insecurities. That's why he can't possibly live up to this "agreement" even though he made it! It's totally and completely impossible! How is he ever going to: 1) Read your mind to know every little detail that you might want to know so you can: 2) Judge him on every little move, action and thought he might have, so that: 3) You can relax and feel "secure": 4) Which you never will anyway because security has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else but yourself? It can't possibly happen! You're setting him and your relationship up for failure from the very start. Why even be in such a relationship? The problem here isn't about him at all - it's about you and your insecurities. He can't help you with that, YOU have to grow up and deal with realities just like the rest of us have to. You don't get some special consideration to be able to delegate all this away to someone else! That's just ridiculous! So, to answer your question: YES, you should stay but you need to get the hell over this for yourself. He's not the problem here, you are. I'm afraid it's time to put on your big-girl panties and come and sit at the adult's table. See? Didn't I tell you that you were going to hate my advice??? In that way, I started by doing the exact same thing you did. I tried to give away my responsibilities in how you feel with my very first paragraph. It didn't work, did it? Neither will your tactic of trying to make him responsible for YOUR feelings either. Best regards… © 2009, Dr. Dennis W. Neder Other Relationship Issues, Books Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery...brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to. - Euroda Welty
Dr. Dennis W.
Neder is the author of Being
a Man in a Woman's World
I and Being
a Man in a Woman's World
II. Have a love, dating,
relationship, sex or man/woman question? You can
write to him by going to: beingaman.com/ask_question.asp
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