I Want This Relationship More Than Anything in the World

You wrote that your boyfriend has broken up with you four times in the past year. That's a lot of break ups!

I think that your repeated badgering to get him to tell you that he loves you is a symptom that you're terrified that he's going to break up with you again.

To make matters worse, you have been traumatized by a previous abandonment (when your previous boyfriend cheated on you). No matter how much you ask him for reassurance that he loves you and no matter how many times he tells you that he does, you will never find comfort. As you see, you will simply second guess his words, and wonder why he didn't reciprocate with words that are as effusive as your own. The bottom line is you need to heal yourself.

Do my Personality Profile and discover the origin of your abandonment fears. You will discover, I'm sure, that you were abandoned in childhood and that this set you up to choose a boyfriend who cheated on you.

I will go a step farther and say that your abandonment issues led you to choose a second boyfriend who abandons you. In fact, your current boyfriend has his own abandonment issues. He chose a girl who cheated on him and now he seems to break up with you before you have a chance to do him wrong.

What's more, he seems to like to keep you feeling off balance, never quite giving you back as much as you give him, so that you end up carrying his own feelings of insecurity; you feel worried that doesn't love you enough; and you feel worried that he's going to leave.

He has the same worries that you do and when he can't stand his own anxiety, I think he breaks up with you. By holding back with you, he arouses your own clinginess. You crowd him with questions and demands for reassurance.

I suspect that this makes him feel like running away from you and perhaps he's created this scenario, without consciously realizing it, so that he can run away from you before you have a chance to dump him.

The bottom line here is this. In order for this relationship to work, you both need to own your abandonment issues, trace them back to their childhood origins, work through the feelings.

Above all, you both must commit to talking with each other whenever the fear arises in either of you.

The key to a stable relationship is to stop acting out the fear. In your case, you must resist the temptation to act on your fear by badgering him for proof and reassurances of his love. Instead own the fear and talk about it.

In his case, he needs to get in touch with his own fears of getting close to you and having you walk out on him. He must own the fear and talk about it rather than act out by distancing from you, triggering your demands, and then using your clinginess as an excuse to break up. Talking about the fears and not acting them out is your key to lasting love.