How do you end a relationship with a person you don't hate?

How do you end a relationship with a person you care very much for, but find that there are fundamental incompatabilities that cannot be overcome?

There was much crying last night at Steady Eddie's. Between the both of us.

We realize that there are areas of our lives where we are fundamentally incompatable.

I need stability. I want a home. I need to be able to plan for my future. I need to claim a community, make connections, establish myself. Be a grown-up. Being free-lance requires connections to things to generate income. It requires a community.

He's very content living day to day, having the flexibility to move the minute a new job offer is made. He doesn't need a house, connections, or stability. He is an engineer with jobs that he could easily apply for. He is his own stability.

He might want to move further out...up north. I need to stay connected to a town, even a city. That's where I will make my money. That's not his concern.

I am very social. I need to be even more social to generate connections which might lead to income. He's more introverted. He doesn't need to be social.

He doesn't even need to have close friends. He has family. I don't. I need friends to have some kind of family.

I noticed that socializing patterns of adulthood revolve around couples. Single people aren't always welcome and can be suspect. He doesn't care about socializing, so these patterns don't matter to him. He doesn't care to do things with other couples. I get tired of being the Third or Fifth Wheel.

I am very companionate. I like someone to go places with, to share things with--someone who can come with me to social functions and be part of the group. He doesn't care about that. It's not him. If I'm there, he enjoys me being around, but he's pretty self-sufficient. He doesn't need someone to go to social functions with because he doesn't go to social functions. He doesn't care about being part of a group. It isn't important to him. But he would miss me if I wasn't around to talk with.

I am very sexual. I need sex. Women aren't supposed to admit to this need. We are supposed to be self-contained Virgin Queens, waiting for the man to rouse us from our sleep so that we can meet his needs. That's not me. I need sex to feel healthy, to have a sense of calm and well-being, to not get menstrual cramps. I need sex with another person, not just masturbation, because there is something quite special in having someone hold me at the moment of orgasm. I need to look into a lover's eyes. I need to touch him deeply as much as he may be able to touch me.

And he doesn't need that sort of interaction. His sex drive is lower than it was 10 or 15 years ago. He can go for long periods without it. It isn't paramount to who he is, his sense of self or well-being. He's one of those people who can exercise and the urge goes away. He can wait until I reach the peak of frustration and force myself on him.

And that's not me.

I can't force myself on any man. I want to share my experience and my life, exchange energy, be desired as much as desire. And I can't promise him that my sex drive will go away once I hit menopause. I can't promise that I will go dead below the waist and be the perfect parnter.

Steady Eddie believes there's a way to resolve these incompatabilities. I don't think so. They are differences that cut to the core of who we are. We have grown to care for one another, about one another, and to share our lives with each other. But there are these fundamental things that make a permanent, long-term relationship, in my eyes, impossible.

He believes there is a strategy for working our differences out.

I told him that if he is so very interested in preserving the relationship, that he go out and find a book or a therapist who may be able to give him strategies. I don't have the time nor the inclination. I have to put alot of energy into freelancing and don't have much extra to be doing all the work of preserving a relationship that, for all intents and purposes, will not sustain either of us over the long haul.

I need the long haul--the commitment, the social parnter, the lover. And I do not want to do the long haul alone, like I have done most everything else. I don't need to be celebate over the long haul either. I was celibate in most of my last marriage, for most of the time I was in college, too. Out of 12 years, I would say for a good 7 of it I was celibate--either because I was rejected or because I was on anti-depressants and my sex drive was crated in a coffin and buried somewhere in my being. Lucky Bastard woke me up to the pleasures of sex, and I don't want to live without those pleasures and the sense of well-being and health they give me (even if I don't have any of that with him).

I am angry, unhappy, and frightened. I feel like I'm trying to build a house on shifting sand, or trying to hold up the roof of a tent that is collapsing in on me. I don't want to smother and die under a relationship that, while comforting and full of love, is very, very flawed.

I want love, but do not want to sacrifice essential parts of me to get it--don't want to have to go under the spell of anti-depressants because I am so depressed because fundamental parts of me are unable to be expressed. I do not want to cultivate another man who will come with me here or there and who will satisfy my needs while I hold onto another man who is caring and comfortable like a warm, soft, flannel shirt on a frigid New England morning.

But how do we part without anger and without hatred? How do we part with love?