[canadianguy976]

My situation is a bit different than a lot of the other ones asked here. A lot of the questions I saw were being asked by people who were younger than 22 and with their girlfriends for under 2 years.

I've been with my fiancée for 8 years now we've been engaged for a year, living together for 7. So yeah a pretty serious relationship we both have a whole lot invested in it. She fell for this other guy 2 years ago and I found out and our relationship was in tatters and we worked through it and she did everything that I needed to help regain my trust for her. After making it through that escapade with things back to normal and able to trust her again I popped the question. Figured that if we could make it through an event like that we're on pretty solid ground.

So this weekend she comes home to me, visibly upset. I had planned on cooking her a gourmet meal so I was hanging in the kitchen talking to her while I cooked it (I was surprising her). I asked her what was wrong and she went off on this scary track about how she wasn't happy and didn't know what she wanted and thought that maybe she should take a break. I didn't flip out but I told her I really didn't like the idea of her taking a break at all. I made her a really nice dinner and talked to her about it and tried to help her maybe discover what was missing or whatever in her life. A friend of mine's woman cheated on my friend with another friend of mine and she brought up how that was reminding her of the whole episode, she said I stay up late by myself all the time in my office drinking (while she's asleep at 9pm) and rattled off bunch of other things about me.

After she goes to bed (she wakes up hellua early for work, like 8:30PM) I am of course floored by all of this and sit up until 3 in the morning trying to figure out what I think of all of this and where might it be going. That's when I notice once again these empty boxes in her office and in the living room. I had seen them before she said that she wanted to pack up stuff we never use like old CDs and VHS tapes. Of course I look at these boxes now with a whole lot of fear. There's not enough for her to move out but seeing these empty boxes lying around wiggs me out. I tried to find her cellphone to see if maybe she has been talking to someone new but it's not in any of the normal places. Its actually turned off and not in the charger or where she normally puts it or in her normal pockets. I call it and it's turned off. So that makes it worse.

Now I have no indication that there's another guy in the picture and if there is I honestly think it would only be maybe some guy she's thinking about in that *way* and maybe she's getting scared that she might do the same thing again. The lack of the phone in visible places kind of sets me off a bit based on nasty old memories but I didn't go tripping demanding that she produce it or even ask.

So the next day I cook her breakfast and decide to just make myself available for her to talk to for the whole day. I ask her to sit with me and watch TV, she declines and goes to buy a snow shovel then proceeds to shovel the entire driveway and all the walkways. Says she needs the exercise. Fine. Then that's all done I ask her to sit with me and she says that she's going to go to the park to watch the kids tobogganing. After about an hour its like white out conditions out there so I go to the park to make sure she's OK not sitting there crying. She wasn't at the park. She's at the house when I get back, says she took a walk afterwards. She took her cellphone because while she was gone I figured I'd do a quick check.

So this is all getting to be too much for me, I sit her down and ask her out flatly what is going on, who is she talking to on the phone, I need to understand what's happening. Tell her she kind of floored me with that whole talk the night before and she's acting all strange, complaining that we don't spend enough time together when I'm cooking her a gourmet poached salmon meal for a sit down dinner and then when I make myself very available without pushing the issue the next day because for my own sanity I honestly just want to know what's going on. She doesn't really reveal much just that she doesn't know what she wants and needs to take a break maybe, says maybe just for two nights.

So I tell her again I don't like the sounds of that, it sounds like I'm about to get dumped, maybe that's not what she means but the optics are all bad, like were engaged for a year together for 8 like I would figure we're beyond needing to take time apart from each other heck we're committed the entire rest of our lives together and she was overjoyed to get the proposal not reluctant at all or hesitant. She dropped me hints about it for a few months beforehand.

So then because she's not really spending any time with me and any time we do spend together is weird and silent and awkward I decide to play Simcity and kill some time, maybe she needs some time alone so I'll leave her alone and not crowd her. 20 minutes later she shows up in my office and says that she's taking off to her cousin's place to hang out. Probably will sleep there. I tell her I'm mega upset by that but I don't lose my cool.

Obviously I'm just nuked. Alone, 3PM in the afternoon, woman not coming back for the night she says on a Sunday, I go get some damn beer to sit and think. Bump into one of her friends at the train stn and the friend is asking me how are you doing all nice and says that she's worried about my fiancée with her car in the snow. I tell her friends that yeah we shovelled the driveway and her practice was cancelled because of the weather and that luckily she didn't have to go anywhere. But it seemed like the friend knew something more than I did.

So I call the cousin to make sure that she's there and also maybe the cousin can give me some optics on what the heck is happening. Cousin doesn't answer but eventually the fiancée calls me and says I was calling her cousin, her cousin isn't at home her cousin is at her bf's place. She's all curled up at her cousins place alone. I kind of peak off that twist to the story because she's not even there to talk things through with her cousin, what the hell. At this point I'm starting to lose it a bit. I ask her to call me from the land line, there isn't one. She says I can come and visit if I like. I kind of lost it. Said no and hung up. Twists my heart into two that here's my fiancée who I live with and now she says I can "come and visit her" while she sleeps in some other person's empty house.

Eventually she calls back, I apologize about hanging up on her and tell her how that made me feel. My buddy shows up and I tell her I have to let her go because he's here to help me figure out what I'm going to do she should call me before she goes to sleep. She says she's in bed now and ready to go to sleep but it's like 6PM.

Now I may not think there's another guy in the picture but with those nasty memories its easy to trip and think like hell you're asleep at 6PM so nobody can reach you for the rest of the night. I know she's at her cousins place because she offered I could visit if I was scared (she understands that sometimes I get wiggy because of when she was sneaking around behind my back, it's a mutual understanding we came to afterwards when we were patching things together, so no I'm not really paranoid) but its like who is going to come over in this house all alone by yourself if you're going to sleep at 6PM. Call didn't end well.

So I hang out with my buddy for a while and call a friend of hers to try to figure out what's going on. Her friend unfortunately knows absolutely nothing. She feels for me and hopes it works out and talks with me for a while to make me feel better but not much help. Don't really know her other friend that I bumped into that well can't call her. She doesn't have many friends otherwise.

Then she calls me back after my buddy is gone and at this point I'm literally beside myself. With every hour that she's still over there the chances of her deciding to come home is fading exponentially. At this point I'm asking her to just come home please because she's got me really worried with the horrible optics here, what with the boxes and the "taking a break" and all this stuff getting slapped onto me all basically within a 24 hour period. She says she loves me and will be coming back but at 11:30 I'm nearly hysterical. She says screw it she's coming home then, fine but only if you come to bed with me. Comes into the house and goes straight to bed. No hello no nothing.

So I make the scary trip upstairs to the bedroom to sit on the bed. She doesn't say anything at all, eyes open. After a few minutes of silence I just bust it and start sobbing about how I can't lose her twice. Couldn't stay there went back downstairs to get myself back together.

I go to bed later on at like 1am and lie there can't really sleep much at all. She wakes up for work like 6AM and then does her morning thing and before she leavese she says she's upset with me now. I tell her like how am I supposed to feel you hit me with all this in 24 hours.

Anyway the question is what the hell do I do? I'm engaged to this woman and sometimes cold feet is normal but I really don't feel comfortable with this withdrawal thing. I want to help her work it out but in this case I know it isn't really anything I can fix because the problems seem to be inside her own head. I need to know what's happening and going on because I'm marrying this woman. If she has cold feet in general or suddenly isn't sure things could change dramatically in my life. Things could go real bad and we could break up or she may wan to delay the wedding for another year or maybe it will all blow over. But I'm kind of going crazy and given the "time in" and the commitment I think I deserve some answers?

[canadianguy976]

Follow up: extra details


Right now I'm scared that she's going to use that as an excuse to move into her cousin's place for a while, like a week or a month. Don't know for sure, hopefully she comes home to talk about what is happening. Really at this point I need information, like what's happening, how, why, when, what this break will solve, I need her to talk to me.

Now I know a few people here toe the "dont talk to her" don't communicate at all etc etc. But I think it's a bit different of a situation. We've been together 8 years and engaged for a year so just dropping the ball and not talking to her is kind of not really an option. Like if she must I can give her a few days of space if I understand what's going on in her head but running on fumes and all this time invested I can't just drop her and wait for an undetermined amount of time with no contact.

The upside is she says that she still loves me. The only thing is that I'm afraid that she has some bug in her head from some idiot that she's been talking to (guy or girl who knows) that she needs to be on her own and alone for a while or move to some far away place or something, maybe that someone is trying to convince her to move out for a while who the hell knows. If she doesn't stand up to her problems together with me, then in a way she will fulfill her own prophecy of maybe we are growing apart because we literally will be apart and she made it that way.


I mean in a long term relationship you often meet because you are both into the same things, but people grow and adapt over time and will get into different things over 8 years. We don't have many shared interests right now she's into her music and school and I'm into paintball and running my own home business. We talked about that topic for a bit a while ago and I told her that it would be unreasonable for one of us if in order to keep our relationship going one person had to tag along and do a bunch of things they didn't want to do, whether it was me or her who had to suck it up and tag along. She kind of understood that line of thinking and I said that over time people are into different things and I'm sure something will come along again that we're both into just right now we're doing our own things.

I'm no perfect man but I am a nice guy and because I work from home I often cook her meals (I used to be a sous chef) sometimes clean the house do the laundry etc etc blabla because she works a lot and goes to school at the same time. My office is a disaster but that's kind of like my space. We haven't really fought over anything serious at all since the other guy episode a few years back. Of course the usual crap like who's done the dishes or the floors more often than the other but nothing critical or serious and nothing to intense or vigorous. So by and large the relationship seems to have been going well until she dropped this bombshell on me.

Plus it's been a really bad month. My one buddy that I mentioned before slept with my other friend's girlfriend which kind of reminds her of that episode she says. Our house got broken into and they stole a bunch of her jewellery and a bunch of our DVDs (which is why she says she wants to pack unused things into the boxes she has lying around), I had some nasty allergic reaction last weekend and ended up in the trauma room of the ER for like 11 hours. The break in was probably the one that affected us both the most. The loss of the sense of security in your home kind of puts you on edge and ready to do battle. For her the effect was different she just got really sad. She mentioned how we reacted differently in her conversations, but I chalked it up to the differences between men and women. Guy gets wronged, he wants to fight back. Girls react differently and in often unpredictable ways to traumatic events.

So sorry for the extra long long super detailed post. Hopefully she doesn't Google her own situation and find this, haha, or actually maybe that would be a good thing, at this point who knows.