[giggles]

About eight months ago, I started dating a lovely man in a new city I moved to, and things were going very well. We were both from the same country, and things were going very smoothly to begin with.
However, a few months in to the relationship, as we were in the first flushes, a close friend of mine passed away and the shock of it really affected me. My boyfriend didn't seem to understand the bond I had with my friend, as she lived abroad and he had never met her. I was overwhelmed with grief, and tried to put a brave face on it in front of him. After all, he was a friendly face in a strange city, and the only thing that offered me solace.
The flipside of this was, I put immense pressure on him to be the salvation of my happiness (mistake number one!). I also didn't cope very well with the grieving process, and became sleepless, depressed and anxious. I wasn't getting much work in my chosen profession, and was taking many menial and draining jobs to survive. After a while, I started nitpicking on a serious level with this poor man. I also became incredibly insecure and clingy. It was as if my reaction to someone being whipped away suddenly by death, was to cling closer to everyone else around me.
To make matters worse, I had a mentally ill landlord, who was very erratic to deal with, and then a family member also passed away. My boyfriend, found the strain of my behaviour too much to deal with, and ended our relationship. I was devastated, but started to try and fix things. I started working out more and lost weight, I started counselling, made some professional changes in order to get better work. We started communicating again a month later, and arranged to meet a few times. We began to rekindle our relationship, tentatively.
But now, he claims that he is still traumatised by my earlier behaviour and doesn't know if he can move past that. He wants to take things slow, but I feel he's having the best of both worlds: the non-committal newness of our trying again, and asking me not to expect any sort of a future. Should I walk away now? Is he capable of understanding I had an out of the ordinary experience that cause d a huge shock and some equally shocking behaviour? Or should I do as he asks and just take it easy and bite my tongue, despite feeling like I've allowed myself be put in a powerless position with him holding all the cards?
I feel he is being unfair by his reluctance to move on from this, and it's a deal breaker for me. But should I give this time? I'm very confused. I like him very much, but possibly he does not like me enough, right? And if that is the case, I should like me more and bow out now?