Dear D, Thanks for the compliments and for sharing yourself. My first thought was to about how nice your letter expresses the difficulties that are normal in establishing a relationship, difficulties that so many experience. For the sake of your getting clear about what is going on, I strongly suggest you take some good time to digest my Map of Relationships. I have found that long distance relationships, while they can be glorious, tend to delay the hard work of getting to a great relationship. The Romantic Phase can feel glorious, but is at the same time a bit delusional. The hard work starts when that romantic glory stops, and it always does. I think that long term relationships, by phone by email between countries, etc. tend to extend the romance at the sacrifice of time. We only have so many years in our lives. Looking back I can see lots of years that I wasted while not going for the gusto. Gusto takes work! Also I think of a timeout as something to use in an intense relationship when at least one is feeling emotionally overwhelmed and both people need a cooling off period. I am not sure you two are in this situation. I salute your desire to find out what is going on in your partner, and I encourage you to think of yourself in the meantime. Take care of yourself. If you want clarity, I believe it is best to look inside yourself. Trying to get clarity from someone else can take a long time. I suggest you don't be too dependent on that. I suggest you ask yourself, "How long am I willing to wait to get close with this person and start working on the deep stuff between us?" Set yourself a number of months. Put it on the calendar. Tell him. When you get there, if there is not significant, very significant movement, move on to someone else. Do this for your sake and his. Check out my article on Getting an Answer. Good luck and learning, and God Bless! Al