You are not crazy, and I am sorry for your predicament. It truly is heartbreaking. I do believe that this guy loves you and has significant commitment to you. He wouldn't have been with you for 8 years otherwise. But he is kind of leaving you hanging. The thing that would bother me that most is that he seems to have felt that it was you who needed to change a lot to be acceptable to him. Well, why was he even living with you at all? If he is waiting for you to measure up to some ideal in his head, that is never going to happen.

The crisis is going to come when one of you has to make a real sacrifice for the two of you to be living together. Someone is going to have to move. I'm glad you had the strength to stay where you are in a good academic program, and will stay to finish that. But then what?

You could eventually give him an ultimatum. That's problematic too. If a guy decided to marry me because I threatened to leave him otherwise, I don't know that I'ld find that too romantic.

Some guys do have a real phobia about marriage, but usually that's a guy who has been through a failed one. He's been with you since he was 21. So you are kind of all he really knows. He may have decided, and this is typically male, that he kind of likes it just the way it is. I think that age 28 is kind of late for a girl to be kept on ice. (but it's not that unusual these days.)

No, you're not crazy. It's totally understandable for you to be upset and even feel some despair over this. What's sad is that the two of you may eventually get married, but end up not having as good a life as you could have by jumping in sooner, rather than later. I've known other couples like you two. They waited and waited . . . till he felt ready . . . till they had so much in the bank . . . till they could afford a house . . . till they both had their jobs where they wanted. So the woman ends up having children a bit later in life than she ideally would have wanted. They seem to end up being behind in life and trying to catch up. Life is absolutely guaranteed to surprise you with things you could not have anticipated. Then when you finally are a couple, you will have tough things to deal with - like career setbacks/job loses - that no one anticipated . . . and you look back on the 8 years that you weren't really together and it can seem like you wasted time. And all the careful plans about how you were going to have everything nailed down just right don't quite come to fulfillment. I've seen it . . . I've seen people cheat themselves through all this shilly-shallying.

Here's what you might say to him, in some version: "Honey, if you feel that I still have a lot of self-repair to do before I could make you a good wife, then maybe we should just accept that I'm not really the woman for you. At age 28, I'm probably about as put together as I'm ever going to be. With more years of living, I'll probably get wiser, but I'll also get more tired and have less stamina and certainly be less youthful." I understand that you love him with all your heart. And I don't doubt that he loves you. But is his commitment really all you need it to be? You talk about having come through tough times with him and being stronger for it? I can't help but wonder if those tough times didn't involve you having to bend yourself to conform to him. You don't have to tell me, but, in your own mind, look at those "tough times" and see if there was a pattern in them of you mainly having to give in to his demands. A guy being a bit marriage shy is one thing. But a man pushing 30 years old, who is with a girl from the time he is 21, and he still can't quite see himself married, is someone I would suspect of being a teensy bit on the self-centered side.

And you can accept his reluctance because he comes up with what you term as "fair criticism?" You are taking way, way too much responsibility for this relationship not having jelled by now. So: You've just not been everything he needs you to be, but he has been hanging around for 8 years because . . . why? . . . he's such a good sport, he wanted to give you plenty of time to reform your errant ways? Come on. Women do that for men, but men don't do that for women. No. They don't. He's got a good education and prospects of a good career and he's been keeping you around for 8 years, in hopes that you'ld someday measure up to what he wants? There's plenty of women out there, and he is with you because he hasn't seen anything that he wants more.

So that's kind of good news, and then it's not. If he really thought he could have done better, then he would have by now. Yet, he doesn't want to give you credit for being the woman he has wanted to be with. I'm afraid that, sometimes, if a woman is willing to be with a man on any terms, then that's exactly what she gets. He knows exactly how in love with him you are. He's been figuring, for a few years now, that you just won't leave because you are that unable to. And he's been right. Unfortunately, that can actually make you less desirable to him.

When you convey to a man, "I'm lucky I have you." then, the man thinks, "Yeah, that's right . . . you're lucky to have me." And you've spent 8 years conveying that. You've kind of done yourself a lot of damage. Hard to undo.

So, I have no real solution for you, but, no, you're not crazy, and were I you, I'ld be crying myself to sleep every night. You do have an alternative. Ending is one. That would be very hard. And you'ld still be crying yourself silly.

I guess, I would take a half-way measure. (I kind of did this once.) I would give him his freedom and then see what happens. My guess is that he will say, "Fine." But then he'll keep coming back to see if he can get you back into the relationship as it is now. He'll call in a few months and say, "Let's just go out to dinner." That will be just to test, if you will melt when you see him. Then you're back to the same old game. Maybe, you've already done that.

If you hand give him his freedom, and he doesn't come around with a more serious proposition and you don't cave in to pressure, then maybe you will find that he just doesn't want you bad enough to marry you. At age 28, I would move on, in that case. You can do better. You don't believe that because he's all you've known. (At age 28, I did that. The guy ended up calling me 18 months later wanting to get married. By then, I had fallen in love with someone new. So you never know.)