Cold Feet

I've been going out with my boyfriend for nearly six months. He's absolutely lovely, we get on really well, never argued and generally seem to be very compatible. I get on very well with his family, as does he with mine. We're both 17 and are taking very different paths in life once this year ends, so this is unlikely to be very long-term. My last relationship of 3 years ended because I couldn't handle how serious my boyfriend was getting. He was talking about marriage and children and I just couldn't handle it. This relationship is much steadier- neither of us are comfortable with soppiness or future plans or the idea of being 'serious'. Yet we did seem to get very serious very quickly. Recently I've found myself freaking out about it. For example, on Thursday by boyfriend said that he loved me (not for the first time, just because he was being sweet) and my brain just seemed to panic. I was struggling not to hyperventilate. It just threw me into a complete state of panic. Yesterday my friend jokingly said 'it would be so sweet if you two got married!' and a similar thing happened. It was like someone had flicked a switch to freak me out. I do care about my boyfriend very much. I've never been very good with commitment, and I think that I spent so much of my last relationship having to listen to all these future plans from someone who I actually didn't like very much [abusive] that now my automatic reaction is to panic. My boyfriend was very understanding when we talked about it and asked if we wanted to go back to square one- no sex, nothing coupley, just the sweet stage you get at the very beginning of a relationship. I don't really know what to do. Does anyone else experience something similar? It just feels like I've suddenly got cold feet about the whole relationship and, while I know that I don't want to break up, I don't know what to do about it.

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