Background info: On-and-off relationship lasting for 5 years between 33/m and 34/f.
The first two years of our relationship were very volatile. The best relationship I had ever been in at first, until one day after we had started having some early conflict, he sat me down one day to tell me he had lost feelings for me, but he was committed to staying together. He had very recently been making declarations of love, so this was pretty shocking. He ended the relationship shortly afterward, then came back months later apologizing and wanting to get back together.
Fast forward, we spend the next 2 years or so in an intensely good, then intensely bad relationship cycle. He has always been the one to end the relationship, and some of the ways he has acted toward me in them over the years have been very hurtful. Just as examples, he has broken up with me suddenly in the middle of the night and asked me to do a long-distance drive to drop him back off at his place two hours away, then drive myself back home at ~3-4am; He has told me he had contempt for me, then hung up and didn't speak to for months, during a final conversation where we were coordinating moving his items out of our shared house. That breakup resulting in the move-out actually occurred about six weeks after he had executed an elaborate marriage proposal for me involving my entire family and a scene from my favorite movie, proposing on a boat with a custom ring he had made for me. He has dropped me off at work when we've been in conflict saying 'I don't love you" as I'm getting out of the door to go in.
Some of them are more mundane, like breaking up with me in a coffee shop after we went to a yoga class one morning, but they all share this quality of him essentially getting to a state where seemingly has very little empathy for me and is just… indifferent to any of the commitments he's made or our relationship or even me as a person. This state can last for days, weeks, or months, then he returns.
For another about 1.5 year period, we are primarily no contact after I won't accept him coming back after a time he leaves. I pretty harshly institigate no contact with him because I had lost complete ability to trust him. During that time, he independently did trauma therapy and a lot of personal work on attachment and repair, etc. I also was independently doing some of the same after our breakup. After months of NC, we would text occasionally casually, before we ended up being friendly again for a bit. We talked through the things that had happened between us, there was a lot of what appeared to be genuine remorse and change his conflict resolution and emotion regulation skills. This was demonstrated over a sustained time even when we did have conflicts that definitely would have blown up between us in the past. Aaand, at the end of it, I still decided to return to NC and try to move on with my life.
We reconnect on a friendly basis after some birthday messages recently, and things seem really, really good again. So we get back together maybe six months ago…. and it was so great! I felt happy with him and like he had earned my trust again, my family accepted him back as family and he just went on a trip with us, we've been looking at houses to live in together and we've done well at navigating conflict when it's come up. He was promising me commitment and stability etc. again. It really felt like we had finally done the work we both needed to do to have a healthy partnership and navigate conflict together instead of falling apart.
Until we started to have conflicts related to integrating our existing pets into our new home. It's an area of conflict that's very difficult for us bc we both have strong feelings about it. But anyway, we had a disagreement this week that ended up us both apologizing… But after that call, he has drifted back into the state from the past again. He is checked out, unable or unwilling to have empathy for me, oscillates between attacking me because he believes I am lying about my intentions about his cat, and cold indifference to me. We are still together, but the whole relationship has shifted from "you're my whole life" to essentially indifference to me in the span of a week.
I have tried everything I can do to try to get the version of him that can see me as a full person to return. Giving him space, trying to explain what's upset me, clarifying my position, trying to accommodate his needs, and at this point, he will barely talk to me. He sent me a messaging saying he wanted to repair a few days ago, but when I engaged and then wanted him to clarify some things he said in his apology message, he said "I can't have a serious conversation rn." and has just… never returned to address it, even when we went through with our casual ritual to watch a TV show together, he treated me like, a buddy or something with no acknowledgement whatsoever about what's going on between us. The next morning, he asked if we could schedule a time to talk after Christmas… but not about what he even means by that. I said I was available in the afternoon or evening and he said "kk" and… yeah.
I love this man and the future we were building together. But at the same time, I am at my wits end and drowning in anxiety about how confusing his behavior is. If anyone has ever had a partner that acted this way, can you please give me some advice about how to navigate repairing something like this? Or honestly, if this is unfixable, just some advice about how to handle it ending without all the psychological scars of all the other times.
Thanks in advance for reading all of that.
*tl;dr (34/f) in on/off with (33/m). Want to make the relationship work if I can, but stuck with repairing with a partner who has a pattern of behaving in hurtful ways despite a demonstrated capacity for insight and change.