Snipping the Heart Strings and Parting Before Death

Dear Jen,
I've been in a relationship with a man 11 years my senior for the better half of the past decade.  We started dating when I was 19 and he was 30.  I use the term "dating" politely, but what I really mean is that I've been fucking his brains out for all of this time without any sort of commitment.  We have the most healthy sex life I could have ever imagined.

I'm in love with him and he tells me he cares about me, but never uses the "L word."  He does all of the things you would expect from a boyfriend: takes me  out, pays for things, does man-shit around my house, takes me on trips, etc.  He insists that we don't define our relationship in conventional terms, because my position is that I would love to shout from the rooftops that he's my guy. 

I guess the meat and potatoes of my question is this:  does the commitmentphobe ever turn around?  I've built a life around this man and wonder if he will ever marry me.  I've gone through several boyfriends and even came very close to marrying one, but it always go back to my "Mr. Wonderful."  Will he ever come through or should I give up?
-Waiting and Wondering

Dear Waiting,
When I first moved to Los Angeles seven years ago I was a train wreck.  I was paralyzed by a broken-heart, knew no one, was totally broke and had zero idea what the hell to do with my life - my plans of being a rock star hadn't quite panned out and I'd sorta neglected to get a Plan B together.

At the time, part of my morning routine included spending 30 seconds on the rear bumper of my car, hopping up and down like an ape.  Apparently the fuel pump on my beloved ‘87 VW Golf had bitten the big one, and in order to get it to start I had to "slosh the gas around a bit, help it into the engine somehow."  Or so said Jason, the genius I worked with, after I barked at his initial suggestion of a four hundred dollar trip to his mechanic’s.  My car had no grill (the automotive equivalent to no front teeth), one working door handle, two hubcaps, a hundred and ninety eight thousand miles and was found more than once in someone’s front lawn when the parking brake just couldn’t take it anymore.  So even though I loved my car more than I loved most people, it seemed a little high-falutin to go out and buy it a brandy new fuel pump, especially when I hadn’t chewed on the right side of my mouth for nine days due to a cavity that I was too broke to fill. 

My mornings with my car, one hand clinging to my hatch back while the other waved my neighbors off to work, seemed par for the course.  My neighbors would chime in with clever witticisms like “you sure know how to go for a car ride!” and I'd laugh and laugh and cry and think to myself, car, I understand why, even after a good solid humping, you still sometimes don’t feel like starting.  Why bother?   What's the point?  Where do we have to go anyway?  It wasn’t until it began stalling out in traffic that I decided I had to do something.  Neighbors were one thing, but a rush hour’s worth of drivers screaming at me to move my fucking car while I frantically performed sexual acts on its rear end, in flip flops, in my thirties, was my rock bottom.  I knew there were plenty of ways to earn four hundred bucks that would be equally, if not less, humiliating.

So I got the fuel pump fixed.  And then tied the bumper on with a tow rope, stuffed a beer cozy in the sunroof to keep it from leaking and headed out to Utah for my annual backpacking trip.  We made it all the way, problem free, but when I pulled up next to my friends who are two of the biggest hippies to ever Grateful Dead their way across the planet - the kind who re-use the same plastic bag 47 times - they took one look at my car and shook their heads.  "Jen, it's time." 

Nobody likes hearing that it's time to get rid of the thing they love, but if it's not working, it's not working.  You deserve someone who's going to scream your name from the rooftops, not who's going to constantly validate your feelings of unworthiness.   

If this guy wanted to be with you, he'd be with you - otherwise why didn't he come and steal your hand away when you almost married someone else?  Humping him until he comes to and realizes you're the one for him may work, but it also may not.  And since you can't predict what someone else is going to do, you can only give them the heave ho when they're not doing what you want, it's time to cut the brother loose and get on with it.  Life's too precious to live it on someone else's terms.  And too short to be humping the wrong guy.