First, let me say THANK YOU! for a wonderfully helpful web site. Then, let me say I AM SO FRUSTRATED... I am the clinger. So I tried pulling back... giving him more space, although on the avoidant scale I think he's about 2000% avoider and I'm about 50% clinger. I really am not that clingy at all. The thing is now... by avoiding him the quality of our dialogue has gone completely down-hill. What's worse is that by not talking he has imaginatively done a lot of my thinking in the relationship for me, without ASKING what I actually think. He tells me the decisions he's made for both of us... can we say total POWER STRUGGLE? So what's my contribution? I think I can be bossy and controlling when I want attention, so I've tried to stop demanding attention. I've tried to tell him how frustrated I am. I don't think he hears me at all. But its possible I also don't hear him because I know he is trying to say complimentary things to me sometimes when we talk, and those compliments get on my nerves. I feel like he's trying to make me feel better about the relationship by complimenting me-- unfortunately what I am hearing when he compliments me, is that he's paying attention to something I did six weeks ago, and that it took him six weeks to pay attention! I think he hears whatever his mother used to do to him that drove him nuts. (His mom was totally demanding and very clingy). His parents also seem to have been WAY more critical of him than mine were (we're both only children, but he's a perfectionist, and I'm absolutely not). But I have the testicle it seems, I'd like to fix it, yet I am quite afraid that all his build up resentments against his over-meddling mother are just going to spill out on me and I have to take it. I don't want to take it, it almost seems like abuse?