Relationship problem

My bf and I have been together for 3 years. We have a loving relationship but he has communication issues I believe. When we are together we are always all over each other in a sweet way and just get along perfect! We do not live together yet. Anyways when we do argue he pulls away and ignores me for a week or 2. This has happened more than a handful of times throughout our relationship. He agrees he needs to work on him and I need to work on not pushing him away. In the past I would text and text and it would make things worse. We had a recent argument a month ago. It was my fault and he ignored me for 12 days then texted me begging to come see me and talk things out. We talked everything out and of course made up and everything was back to normal! The next day he asked me to come over and we watched a movie and of course were all over each other again like little love birds:) it was perfect. We have a very strong physical and emotional connection or so I thought...later on that night we had se again and also the next morning. He acted normal and so I went home after watching a movie at his house cuddled up. This is normal behavior for us:) the next day was normal. He texted me that morning saying good morning sweetheart hope you have a great day and I love you like normal. All day was normal. The next day was the same. Let me go ahead and point out he is prepping and training for a bodybuilding contest and is way into bodybuilding. He is only a couple weeks out and is very intense. Ok so 3 days after making up and talking things out he starts pulling away. He wouldn't call me when he said he was going to and was just acting strange. I asked what was wrong and he gave me silence. He finally texted me saying there was something we ended to discuss but it wasn't major and promised he would call that afternoon. He never called. It has been 2 weeks of silence. I have heard nothing. We didn't argue or anything. We were happy. He has done this before in the beginning of our relationship with a competition. He was on steroids then and I'm afraid that he is on them now. He is emotionally just gone and won't text me at all. I sent a text breaking up with him over a week ago and have gotten no response. It's like he is numb to it all. I contacted his mom bc we are very close an she said he is very grumpy and all he does is go to the gym and work. He doesn't do anything else. He is so focused on this competition I know it is no one else you know? I am scared that he is just gone. I need advice on what to do and what to think. I don't know where to go from here. My stuff is at his house still and he hasn't said anything to me at all. Are we finished or is he just emotionally gone bc of the steroids possibly or the competition? Will he be back? And if he does what do I do?

Take a look around this forum. There are posts too numerous to count regarding "mantrums" and "man sulks" as I call them. It's not about lack of communication skills. Well, it is, but the difference is WHEN TOO EMOTIONALLY OVERWROUGHT TO THINK STRAIGHT/SENSIBLY. When men feel the relationship must be under threat from the woman's point of view, i.e. they're convinced they're about to get dumped or that the fight being allowed to escalate will prove that final straw, and/or that they'll likely end up forevermore forced to always 'stay in the ring' despite their need to get out of it, their minds switch to Fight Or Flight (or Paralysis) mode and they basically turn into gorillas that can still talk, still SEEM themselves but out of whom getting actual sense and cooperation can be like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. Your bf has obviously Flown instead of Fought. Men who Fight or are forced to are the ones who tend to end up putting their fist into the woman's face or kitchen cupboard and regretting it. So you COULD say his decision to create space is sensible if the former is his only option. Obviously, it SHOULDN'T be the only other option (plus the way he's doing it is all wrong); the ideal is to talk it through to a resolution or compromise. But "somebodys" failed to teach this man (or this man resisted all lesson attempts on) how to stay calm under fire and "somebodys" failed to teach/got blocked from teaching you how not to push and keep pushing when someone she's in a verbal fight with has emotionally flooded/lost the plot and desperately needs Time Out in which to first calm down and regroup - what he's referring to when he says, not pushing him away. HOWEVER - *compromise*. I see none. Your nature is to need to get the cause of an argument sorted now-now-now and his is to avoid what could cause the argument to get far worse, blown out of all proportion, now-now-now. Neither of you have forumulated a fight plan that suits both your natures and how you each deal with clashes at least 50/50. And this is what you need to do, once you've both settled down and agreed to meet. Because at the moment, his way is getting its way. And that's not fair to you, NOR to him in terms of its potentially high power of erosion to the relationship in the longer run (you left constantly feeling resentful and insecure, despite the argument issue itself having been resolved, and that kicking the love out of you). And the trouble with this is that the longer you leave his always getting how you both fight done his way and only his, the more it becomes a habit which then starts to feel like a concreted relationship rule and right. So you need to nip this in the bud now. Steroids won't help, though. Quite the opposite because they can themselves make you more aggressive and liable to 'get all unnecessary' at the drop of an even slightly hostile or stressy hat. On which note - regarding his 'pulling away': You've said yourself he has an intense demand on his plate about to begin. So that and the pressure would partly explain it. And because he's got the great excuse of the recent fight and aftermath and how it will have affected him, he's using it as his sneaky justification to get on solely with work and preparing for this competition. However, that does make him a bit of a d*ck, basically, because he obviously hasn't thought through the danger of always leaving you in the dark without saying anything to reassure you. I mean, you might have put up with it THUS far but - everybody's patience has a limit, even yours. So my vote is that he's being his own worst enemy without even realising by trying to use this need for time to himself to force you, via how horrid it makes you feel, into no longer daring to pick an argument in the first place and/or ceasing to expect and insist on timely post-fight debriefs (lest you constantly end up left out on a limb like you are right now). He doesn't believe what you've said in the text, basically. If he did, you're right that he'd have acknowledged it, agreed with it and/or either asked you to collect your stuff or secretly dropped it off at yours when you were out. I call either person having stuff kept permanently at the other's house, a bridge. Knowing they have what's yours that you'd want back in the event of a split (particularly to a see-it-want-it-grab-it merchant) is seen as their fail-safe when it comes to the opportunity to persuade you back in to the relationship once they're ready to. Because, 'of course', it requires a handing-over event, whereupon you get weakened by the sight of them, thereby ripe for being worked on until you forgive rather than have to permanently (you believe) forget the entire relationship. It's obvious his mum doesn't ever have a clue how to deal with him whenever he gets like this. And that he's ALWAYS got like this. So this ineptitude, repeated enough times, will have done nothing but compound his sense of entitlement to 'steal' slots of singledom whenever he deems it necessary out of practical as well as emotional reasons. Basically, to sum it up, this boy has truly crap conflict resolution skills and is instead conflict resolution manipulative (action over talk). So, yes, it's everything: the fight and aftermath, this competition, and the effect of his rearing, quite possibly compounded by the steroids. Yes, he'll be back. WITH some convincing excuse or man-fallibility ("I can't help it, I've tried but it doesn't work, mew-mew"). And that's the point where you make it clear that either you two hash out some FAIR plan of future fight etiquette that you BOTH can cope with and not be made miserable by or else you, ROBINGIRL, need to decide whether you can put up with all foreseeable arguments leading to running/avoiding/hiding for a period (out of the educated hope that it'll lessen over time, as this tends to do, thanks to increased trust/decreased emotional upset plus sense of futility and downright boredom with the pointless, over-dramatic 'dance' inexorably kicking in) or whether you can't or simply don't trust that it WILL ever decrease, meaning you'd be better off finding someone more emotionally intelligent and sophisticated NOW. Yes, it lessens over time. But that doesn't mean he can't help you to help you both to speed it up. It just takes a greater effort to keep control next time. He won't, however, see any need if he himself never has to endure the negative consequences rather than just you. So my advice is to keep quiet from now on, do and say NOTHING in terms of initiating. Start to make HIM worry that this time it could actually be over. You have an excuse. Because you've said and done all there is from your side, so you could say as far as you were concerned, the ball was firmly in his court, with you having held your hands up and said to yourself 'Que Sera - if we're not over, great, if we are, then there was nothing more I myself could have done'. So in the meantime, make him have to sit up and notice you're suddenly not behaving like you always have before (keeping hammering away until he'd 'come round') and start to worry and panic about what that spells, whether it means he's shot himself firmly in the foot by having pushed you to your limit. Then, when he contacts to meet up and talk, treat him like the local vicar ("Care for more tea? What lovely weather we're having today", that sort of friendly but oh-so-formal manner) and don't start to warm up until he's agreed that his behaving this way (or 100% this way) any time you two fight is UNACCEPTABLE to the point where you'd rather be single or date someone else than risk going through that kind of stress and upset all over again. If you behave like you'll always in the final analysis put up with it then, always put up with it you will have to do. So, yes he'll be back, so you need to use this time to your advantage, see it as a bonus opportunity for you - to see your friends, catch up on things that the relationship normally prohibits or makes difficult, please yourself... a "mancation" in other words. After all, he can't reproach you for that. Because it was all HIS idea; you just caught on. ;-)