Loving someone who says they love you but avoids commitment

How long do people wait, and is it worth it?

The waiting here runs from a couple of months to several years, and nobody who waited longer got more clarity for it. What the people here spent that time doing was mostly asking, in one form or another, and what they got back was either silence, a version of you're being unreasonable for asking, or warmth without an answer.

The ones who stayed the longest are the ones who describe the worst of it now: sleep going, self-esteem going, shame after each round, and a sense of being unable to answer the people around them about what this even is.

The ones who stepped back are not happy either, but their pain has a shape and an end they can see, and they say the pattern of repeated disappearing now tells them more than anything that was said to them.

Ember’s view. The question of how long isn't really the question, because the length isn't what changes anything here; every one of these people already had the answer early and was waiting for it to be said out loud instead of shown. What separates the people here who got some footing from the ones still turning is that they stopped treating the other person's words as the evidence and started counting what actually happened over the same weeks.

You could try keeping your own plain count of what was offered versus what arrived over the last month, and read that instead of the last thing they said to you; for the people here who did this, it cost them the hope they were still holding, and it came with real grief and a body that took much longer than the mind to catch up.

How do I get them to actually commit?

Nobody who stood here found a way to get it; the ones who asked directly were told they were immature for asking, that the arrangement was take it or leave it, or let's see where this goes, and the ones who did not ask held back because a real no would have undone them.

What they got instead of commitment was closeness in the meantime, an arm around them on the couch, a hug after the refusal, kisses and a confession of feelings, and several say the closeness made the not-asking easier and the waiting longer. The people here gave a lot while waiting, years, their family and friends, their sleep, and a couple came to see that the giving had been their side of a bargain the other person never agreed to.

Where anything got clearer, it was the person here who made it so, by saying the thing, I don't want to stay in this loop, this thought scares me; the answer came back plainly, no date, no title, and it was an answer.

This light holds no one whose partner became ready because they were asked well or waited well; it holds people still waiting and people who stopped, and the ones who stopped say the mind accepted it before the heart did.

Are the moments of closeness real, or am I fooling myself?

Every person here has those moments and can describe them exactly: being pulled close on a couch and falling asleep in her arms, a forehead kissed, a hug in the doorway right after the refusal, you're the only one I want.

None of them thinks the moments were fake; what several came to see is that a moment being real to them did not make it a promise from the other person, and that the two had been running together in their mind. The moments had a timing a few noticed only later: they came after a withdrawal, or right beside a refusal, so that closeness and the no arrived in the same evening and the closeness was the part remembered.

What the people here were fooling themselves about, if anything, was not the warmth but the direction: that warmth this real must be heading somewhere, when the other person had said, in words, where it was heading. Holding both, the real closeness and the real no, is where most people here are standing, and the ones with any footing say the footing came from letting the no count.