My girlfriend said that I’m more like a brother to her than a boyfriend. What does that mean?

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It means you’re either not ready for romance or that the two of you are not romantically compatible. I went out with a lovely single mom a few years ago. Conversation was awkward, I didn’t ask for another date. We just couldn’t get to the point where we were eating out of each other’s hands.

Fast forward a few years. We’re still friends, but she has a boyfriend now. And I’m looking at her like, damn, I wanna hit that. Perfect romantic tension. But she has a boyfriend now. We spend a couple of hours talking about relationships and we dive into mine to explore what’s working and what’s not working. I keep it friendly and don’t try to push past boundaries. She’s taken and I respect relationships until I’m told not to.

As I’m analyzing it later, I realized that I’ve changed a lot since the last time we spent that much time together. And the reason I was able to change was that relationship myself and her had just finished diving into together. Even though that relationship isn’t really working and I don’t know if it will ever work, it was what I needed at the time.

Romance issues forth from deep in your brain. As you do it more and more, you come to realize that that initial reaction of “hey, that person looks hella great” is often really bad at picking people that you can carry on fun conversations with, who are easy to spend time with, who you still want to get with no matter how much time you spend together.

For whatever reason, you don’t have this sort of connection with your girlfriend. This does not necessarily mean you should dump her for someone you do. Because you might not be awake to romance yet. Sometimes we just have to suffer through painful relationships with people we aren’t compatible with to show us enough about ourselves to where we know what we want out of a partner.

My current relationship has romantic tension, but she has emotional baggage keeping her from committing to a relationship, and I’m growing increasingly tired of waiting for her. If I didn’t stick this one out for longer than any of my friends thought prudent, I would have just dropped her and moved on to the next one without any of the insights I gained from this one.

If you break up with someone before you’re ready to, then you end up in a pattern of relationships, in which you always believe it’s the other person that’s at fault. People can spend their entire lives robbing themselves out of lasting happiness this way. The way out is to learn. A great way to do this is with the assistance of a therapist. I see one regularly.