He (32M) is very religious, I (34F) am not; he wants to end things, I don't; need advice on interfaith relationships

First time posting for advice, but long-time big fan of this subreddit. I feel really stuck and I'm hoping for some words of wisdom.

I've been involved with this man for around 2 years, though we've never been exclusive. Both of us were coming out of long-term relationships when we met, and he in particular was hesitant about getting too emotionally intimate too quickly (though we were having sex occasionally at first). I brought up exclusively dating around the 4-month mark because I wanted some clarity on what we were to each other and I really liked him and wanted to date him. He said he wasn't ready, I told him I needed some space, we cut contact for a period of time. I fully intended to try to move on from him entirely, but ran into him through a mutual friend a bit later, and we started talking again. We kept things platonic, though, and developed a good friendship over the course of the next year or so; in fact, I’d consider him one of my closest friends in the city we live in. During that time, he dated another woman, and went on casual dates with more. I've also been dating through one of the apps, though none of the dates led anywhere, plus covid restrictions made meeting new people very challenging for most of last year. Then we started hooking up again around 5 months ago. Things seemed great to me, because not only is the sex phenomenal but now we'd built this solid friendship too. Which leads me to last night.

We hadn't seen each other in a while, and I was super excited to spend some time with him. We ordered to-go from a local restaurant and sat outside on the river to eat and enjoy a beer or two while catching up. Things were very easy-flowing and light. Then he brought up a weighty topic we'd shelved a few months ago, about our differing views on sex, which then led to a conversation about religion. He was raised in a very Christian household, and his faith is the central pillar of his life. While he doesn’t make a secret of this, it’s also not something he constantly talks about, and somehow our conversations over the last year rarely touched on it. I was raised Catholic, but stopped practicing in my late teens, and haven’t really engaged with any sort of faith since (which isn’t to say I’m completely opposed or uninterested). He apparently had been mulling all of this over on his lonesome and has decided that our religious differences are a disaster waiting to happen (a nuclear bomb, as he put it) and therefore he doesn’t want to get more seriously involved. He says a lot of his bias about it is due to the ex-girlfriend he was with prior to meeting me, as he felt their relationship ended very painfully because of the fact that she couldn’t share that part of his life with him (she was raised Jewish, but to my knowledge wasn’t practicing). My response to that was—I’m not her, and how does he know for a fact that I couldn’t share this with him when it was practically one of our first serious conversations about what it would look like? I asked him if he could see himself ever changing his mind, and he said he didn’t know, but for my sake he’d commit to a hard “No I won’t ever change my mind” because he doesn’t want to keep stringing me along.

The thing is, this man is someone I would want to spend the rest of my life with. He is whip-smart both in the academic sense and the emotional sense, intellectually curious, a good listener, driven but not obsessed with his work, playful, loyal, enjoys many of the same hobbies I do (from dancing to listening to music really loudly in the car to reading). We have fun philosophical conversations, both like traveling, have really good physical chemistry. And we have the same long-term goals: eventually want to get married and move closer to our respective families (we grew up in a similar part of the US) and have children. He challenges me in a lot of ways to be a better person than I am, whether it’s motivating me to exercise more or to try to view life more positively. Sure, he’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. Our relationship with each other isn’t perfect. But overall, I think what we have is something special. Possibly the worst thing about all of this is, he agrees with me. He told me half of him is thinking “You’re really gonna do this [get involved in another relationship with religious differences] again?!” and the other half is thinking “You’re really just gonna throw all of this away??” It seems to me that he’s scared of trying, despite all of the very-real and tangible good things we have, for fear of a potential of being hurt...but isn’t that true of any romantic relationship?

There's lots of detail I haven't gotten into here, for the sake of not writing a full-length novel, but I'm happy to clarify anything. I’m really, really hurting right now. While I freely admit that I can’t make him open his heart to this and that if he’s done it’s truly over no matter what I say/think, I’m hoping for more perspective. Am I being naïve? Are these differences between us a fundamental incompatibility and therefore truly insurmountable? Or is this something that others have worked through, and how?

tl;dr: Guy I've been involved with on and off for 2 years is ending things because he's very religious and I'm not, even though I'm not opposed to learning more/having it be a part of my life. Advice from those in relationships with religious differences (whether positive or negative) desperately needed.

Submitted July 27, 2021 at 04:34AM by peopledodumbthings https://ift.tt/2UWTn85