When love and hate collide

I've been in a serious relationship now for around 15 months now. It all began very quickly, just after my birthday last year - a whirlwind romance. He was always full of surprises and we had so much fun together, always trying out new things and discovering life together. The world seemed brighter and crisper - time flew by when we were together. It was wonderful.

But after a while, I started to notice things weren't quite the same any more. We'd become very co-dependent, spending all of our time together, but he started acting differently. I'd ask him to do the simplest things for me but he always needed time to think about it. If I dared ask him a difficult question, he would completely freeze me out. Sometimes when I was really depending on him for important things, he would completely abandon me in my hour of need. He even took to drunk-dialling my friends and family, not even stopping when I begged him to please hang up and stop embarrassing me!

Our communication has really broken down lately - sometimes when I'm trying to really get through to him, he just completely switches off and leaves me angry, frustrated and talking to myself, wondering what I've done wrong this time.

As time goes on, I'm just not sure how much longer I can stick it out. I mean, there are still some good times - he's definitely entertaining, always showing me little things that make me laugh, and at times he even teaches me a thing or two - but the bad times now outweigh the good.

I've even sought professional advice and they said I had two choices: stick it out and see how it goes, or cut my losses and run. What would make me happiest is obviously to leave him now and go find myself a younger model. However I've invested a lot already in this long-term relationship and it would just hit me too hard to walk away.

No, I'm afraid there's no backing out now. I'll just have to see how it goes, and try not to kill him in the meantime. Sometimes, when we've had a particularly big fight, I am really tempted. How easy would it be to just... make him disappear? But then I would be all alone and I don't think I can cope with that in this big, bad world.

Is an unhappy partnership really better than none at all? Sadly I'm now so reliant on him that I think it is. Maybe some day in the future I'll be truly happy - just imagine a relationship where you're perfectly in sync with one another, where you know exactly what the other is thinking and you're both working together towards one common goal. Maybe one day...

In the meantime I will struggle on in my increasingly frustrating and unhappy relationship, making the best of a bad situation until something better comes along.

Thank goodness I'm only talking about this eejit: