Love happens, and not always--maybe not even usually-with the right person. With more time and experience, you'll realize that this man was only one of your loves, and you'll be filled with relief that you waited, allowed yourself to go through more of these journeys--one of which will probably yield a more suitable mate.

You started in with the sex and love thing a little bit later than some, and you're feeling older than you are. You're still new, and your experiences with the love and relationship thing are new. Leaving someone you love, but with whom you know in your heart you will not be happy, not be able to create your truest life, is difficult. It's also the right thing to do, and in a couple years that will be obvious to you.

You'll thank yourself for mustering the courage and strength to leave now and go after the life you were meant to have. You don't actually have to have all that much money to get out. Maybe you can borrow a little from a parent, a couple thousand, get a tiny apartment in a city somewhere, scrape and pinch and eat cup o noodles and work hard and breathe your independence. You can do it. Good luck.

It's just like in fourth grade, when the guy who liked you pulled your hair to show it: Tomreedtoon is in love with Heather! I can't believe it took me this long. Everytime I read his crap, I try to figure out what to say to him to make him see how absurd and embarrassing and hateful his relentless assaults are, just so he'll stop. But now I realize why he can't.

For most of us who are bothered by his unecessary, mind-numbing meanness, common sense dictates that if something really bothers us (like HH bothers TRT), then we ignore it. So it has always been confusing as to why Tom would feel such an irrational compulsion to trace the contours, again and again, of this well, well-worn territory--his scorn for HH.

Now, although I still hold a tiny light of hope that he will one day realize how twisted and sad and creepy his behavior is, I think I can now bypass his posts without feeling the usual pang of frustration. I encourage others to do their best to ignore him as well, and we can all (with the exception of Tom) have a little less ire in our day. Bottom line: he can't help it. He's unhappy; he has a weird thing with HH; end of story.

I feel so much better now.

I think it's interesting that the guy was "engaged" for three years, engaged at the time the LW reconnected with him, and was both ambivalent about his situation and able to start dating the LW right then. It's a little weird that someone can be "engaged" for that long and not really engaged, if you get my meaning, and that weirdness makes it less weird that he would be with the LW now for two years and display the same ambivalence.

It sounds like he's older, has been around the block, had his share of longish relationships, and is simply not in the emotional/mental state to unite with someone in a truly complete way. He just doesn't feel compelled. And that said, if I were the LW, who seems to want more (perfectly legitimate), I would doubt the ability of this relationship to satisfy my needs for a more complete kind of union.

This guy is holding back, coasting, unwilling or without desire to make a transition to true couplehood, and that's where he's at in his life. It's just about timing, I guess, and frustration for the LW, if she sticks around.

I normally don't like to join the usual chorus that wonders aloud why people even make issues out of such minutiae, but in this case...really, LW? This is the most pressing situation in your world? Enough so that you wrote an advice columnist?

I can't imagine how difficult it would be to walk through this land of infinite tiny inconveniences and things that rub us oh-so-slightly the wrong way and to take the time and spend the mental spare change to get this annoyed by each one. Exhausting. Look the other way if you don't like it.

Just wanted to chime in with the rest of the anti-glue trap chorus. When I was little, we had rats in our fancy brownstone, and glue traps dotted around the kitchen like tiny diabolical oases. Many mornings, I was the first up, and was greeted often by the strangled squeaks of a new victim. The rodent would be trapped, sure. It would also be bleeding from various orifices and in obvious agony. Unless you don't possess a soul, you'd have to whack it to death after your gruesome discovery. We'd send the gluey guy down to my grandfather on the first floor in a trashbag, who would then bring out a golf club and practice his swing to end the critter's brief and brutal existence. I'm not proud.

Anyway, the glue trap era is a permanent scar in my psyche, and so I offer this tale in hopes of preventing trauma both human and rodent. Eek.