Need advice on how to deal with my avoidant boyfriend

This is close enough to my situation to make me worry that you my girlfriend.(Except we have now committed to buying a house together). So to avoid self harming please ignore the reasonable posts of Patsra & the really quite scary posts of derp55. The only couple of things I would be careful of is firstly whether the relationship will work if you really have a very strong need for closeness and secondly that the suddenness of the change 'two years ago' which seems a bit weird.

Lets do the easy bit first: Phones
I hate phones, he hates phones, they are intrusive and people call and expect stuff from you. They call and ask you to commit to stuff or initiate unstructured conversations with you - all without warning. Even worse they might tell you off for not calling - so thats another reason to avoid. (e.g. I haven't called my grandfather in over a year because every time I do he asks when I'm coming up to visit.)

Solution: Define a regular calling or texting schedule. For example every thursday. Where he lets you know he is alive, you let him know what your plans are and he can let you know his plans. It is important when beginning that you don't put pressure on him to disclose his plans if he doesn't tell you of his own volition. The point is to firstly to show that 'calling in' is not you being upset or trying to be controlling and secondly to explicitly state and ground your own expectations of how often he will call so that you are not upset when he doesn't call as often as you want.

The bit not to bother with white lies
As long as these are white lies and not big lies - Let this slide for a while -I don't think this will change very easily and honestly its more irrationally perfectionist to expect total truth than it is irrationally avoidance to try and shape your loved ones image of you a little bit.


The important thing is the conditional mental model of acceptance & love that people pleasing APD's have. (A mental model which is hard to shift because it is essentially truer though less useful than the model that functional people have)

It goes something like this:

(0) I am judging you and you are judging me.
(1) Unconditional love/acceptance is clearly nonsense. No-one loves a whole real person rather they love a persona that they believe you to be.
(2) If it is conditional then it imposes bounds on who I can be in a relationship
Therefore I can be then either:
(1) Accept that I must become entirely the persona they expect me to be.
(2) Expect to be rejected and try and minimise the damage to me.
(3) Express the persona they want to them and another in other situations.
(4) Do as functional people do and realise that disagreements over small stuff are not the end of the world and that people accept fairly large shifts in peoples personality without necessarily rejecting them or even noticing.

BTW a novel for you to read check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One,_No_on ... d_Thousand

Guys, this thread is seven years old. What's the point in replying?

Fair point. (I was fooled by the necromancy and didn't notice the date on the first 2 posts)