Possible, but not on the old terms

What this means

Your answers point at a split picture, and the split is the useful part. Some of what he said has shown up in real life. There is at least one thing you could point to and say, that is different now. And some of it is still living entirely in conversation: the part he agrees with in principle, apologizes for warmly, and has not rearranged anything to fix. Meanwhile the maintenance of the relationship — who texts first, who raises the hard thing, who smooths the silence — is sitting mostly on you.

None of that means this is finished. It means that going back to exactly how it was would put you back where you were, on roughly the same schedule. The old terms produced the old ending. If anything is going to be different, the terms are what have to change.

Why this happens

Most people are sincere when they apologize, and most people badly underestimate what changing would cost them. He may not be managing you at all. He may simply be doing the part of change that is free. Feeling bad is free. Saying the right thing at midnight is free. Rearranging a habit, a friendship, a drinking pattern, a work schedule, or starting therapy and staying in it past the third session is expensive, and the expensive part is the part that predicts whether anything holds.

There is a quieter reason repairs stall, too: nobody ever said out loud what fixed would look like. If the standard is "be better," there is no day on which either of you can tell whether it happened, so the relationship drifts back into its old shape by default and you both find out in about eight months.

What this is not

This is not a diagnosis of him and it is not a ruling on the two of you. Twelve questions cannot see your relationship; they can only reflect what you described today. Nobody here is telling you to stay and nobody is telling you to leave. The point is to make the thing you already half-know specific enough to act on.

What to do next

Write down the two things — not ten — that would need to be true in three months for this to have been worth it. Make them observable, the kind of thing a stranger watching your week could confirm. "Be more present" fails that test. "You tell me the same day when something goes wrong" passes it.

Then say the terms out loud instead of testing him silently. Something like: "I am open to this, but not to how it was. What I need is this and this, starting now, and I want to sit down in three months and say honestly whether it held." Silent tests are the most common way a second chance dies: you set a bar he cannot see, he does not clear it, and you conclude something permanent about him that he never got a chance to answer.

Hand back some of the maintenance. For two weeks, do not be the one who breaks the silence, makes the plan, or opens the hard topic. Not as a trap or a punishment, just to see what this looks like when it is not being carried. And if it would help to look at the whole picture rather than only the ending, the relationship health check covers the parts this quiz does not.