[Skyline]

I feel disappointed and let down, not because of the fact in itself that you couldn't make it this evening or because I think that you should have called me this afternoon since you were free and you knew that I was, but because I want to be with someone who can't stand being away from me for more than a day and who will jump at every opportunity to spend time with me (within reason), and time and time again I perceive something you do which proves to me that you are not that person. You cancel plans, you choose to do something else over spending time with me... and it would be completely unfair of me to ask you to go to lengths to find a way around whatever obstacle is making you cancel, or to demand that you should choose to spend time with me instead of doing most other things, but that doesn't stop me from being acutely aware that if the tables were turned I would go to these lengths and choose you over most things.
As I said, I'm not upset at you for not being that person because you can't help how much time you do or don't want to spend with me, and in exactly the same way that you might not be that person for me, I am not that person for someone else. I'm not saying I don't believe that you love me, because I do; you've told me with words and proved it to me with actions, and I'm extremely grateful for that.

I'm just saying that you're not loving me the way I want to be loved, and I don't know quite what to do with that knowledge.

Firstly, I don't know if it's a question of you not loving me fully relative to your capacity to love and therefore not giving me your all, meaning that one day you will find someone who you will go to great lengths for and want to be with constantly but that I'm not that person, or whether you do love me fully relative to your capacities and that you are giving me your all but that your way of expressing love and your own experience of love is significantly different from mine, leading you to act in a way which is totally normal and loving according to your own nature but which doesn't correspond to my needs. It's either one of these two things, and depending on which one it is I would view this situation very differently.
Secondly, I don't know how you would act if you knew that I needed this kind of attention that right now you don't provide for me as much as I'd like. Either you would continue acting as you do now and wouldn't be bothered to compromise, in which case I would be incredibly disappointed because that would mean that once more I have fallen in love with someone who isn't in love with me (although you do love me in some sense), but at the same time it would allow me to move on and be confident with that decision; or, you may make an effort to give me the kind of attention I want even if it isn't in your nature to do so, in which case I would feel that being with you is worth the suffering because you clearly care about me an awful lot, at least enough to go the extra mile.

Part of me, though, wonders just how justified and sane my quest for the "right person" is. I know that we all have different needs when it comes to love (amongst all other things): some of us need a lot of space between periods of togetherness in order to maintain that eagerness of seeing the other person as well as to maintain our sense of individuality, whilst some of us, on the other hand, have a predisposition to become dependent on their partner and crave physical proximity at all times; some of us need to have frequent conversations with our partner to stimulate ourselves intellectually and feel in touch with them and aren't so needy in terms of physical intimacy, whilst some of us, on the flip side, want little verbal communication but need a lot of physical intimacy in order to feel connected with their partner; some of us have a need to express our emotional vulnerabilities to our partner and expect the same in return, whilst some of us have no desire to express ourselves emotionally and get easily irritated by our partner showing sensitivity. The list goes on, and I am aware that all of us are on a different place on the spectrum of needs in a romantic relationship. What I'm uncertain about is how realistic it would be to expect someone to have the same (or extremely similar) needs as mine so that we could both easily satisfy the other naturally without having to make too many compromises, and for that person to be able to fall in love with me and vice-versa. What if I am attracted to people who can love me fully, but their needs and experience of love are too remote from mine to ever be able to satisfy me naturally? What if people who have the same needs as me and would know how to satisfy me just aren't attracted to me? I know that it is necessary to make compromises in love and that it would be naive to expect the other person to know all of my needs intuitively, but I don't know to what extent I should trust this principle; because there must indeed be a point where the compromises necessary to make a relationship work are too numerous due to the people's needs being too remote from the other's, and it simply isn't worth the effort, but I have trouble discerning where the line is.

When am I being too lenient with my partner not satisfying my needs, and when am I asking too much?

I'm hesitant to express my needs to you first of all because I am afraid that doing so would reveal you to not be in love with me as I am with you, in which case our relationship would inevitably have an expiring date, and second of all because even if you did love me as much as I would like you to I'm scared that you would be put off by my demands if they are too, well, demanding, and that you would feel upset, judged or inadequate. But at the same time I know that in every relationship, unless my needs are magically the same as my partner's, I will have to state them clearly for them to be understood and potentially met. It's just that I've only recently become aware of this reality (as in, in the past 2 years) and I have little experience communicating in that way with a partner; and the first and only time I did, it resulted in us both coming to the conclusion that he wasn't all that "into" me and he wouldn't be able or willing to go to the effort to fulfill these needs of mine, leading on a period of misery for me in which I felt inadequate and insecure, and eventually leading to our (inevitable) breakup. This experience understandably makes me all the more hesitant to express my needs to you, because from that past relationship I have come to see my needs as clingy and overdemanding, so I've internalied this and I tend to supress these needs or allow them to surface when I'm alone, but never express them out loud.

I'm not quite sure where I'm wanting to go with this. I suppose what I want to do is first of all make it known to you that you aren't fulfilling my needs; and I don't mean this in a critical or judgemental way, because I am aware that your needs are different from mine and therefore it shouldn't be expected of you to intuitively guess these needs and fulfill them without me ever telling them to you. Which brings me onto my second point, which is that I would also be enthusiastic and glad to hear you state your own needs to me which aren't being met, so that I could better satisfy you as your partner. I would be grateful to do so first and foremost because I love making you feel fulfilled in any way I can, and secondly because it would be an amazing learning experience to rise to the challenge of fulfilling needs which I myself don't identify with.
Again, I'm hesitant to do this because although I know that you're someone who is very aware of psychological mechanisms and you seem to be pretty self-aware, I don't know just how much emotional intelligence you have, and since this is your first "proper" relationship I wouldn't expect you to have given much thought to the complexity of relationships and it wouldn't surprise me if upon hearing my suggestion to open up about our needs you would feel that I was being too serious and making a mountain out of a molehill.

Maybe I'll tell you about all this, maybe I won't. If I do I'll probably have to be in that open state I slip into when very tired or high or physically intimate with you. I'll see about it.