Hi Jackie,
I can offer this. (I think part of the issue is panic, which may be preventing you from receiving what's offered.)
You deserve a relationship with a man who is an 8 or 9 on the good scale. Your struggle, as you know...is with yourself. Men like him are everywhere...and so are loyal, kind men who know what it means to toy with someone (or two someones) and would choose not to rationalize it away.
Immobility is a characteristic that someone like him could take a great deal of advantage of. (And perhaps already has.)
I spent literally decades fixating on men who were ambivalent. I felt it was my mission to persuade them that I was worthy enough to have their committed love and loyalty. It NEVER, EVER worked.
Perhaps instead of all this struggle over whether your assessment of him is adequate to make a decision...you could try another approach. What if you focused on (lovingly) assessing yourself, your own behavior in staying or going or stepping back. What would each of these actions say about your search for happiness, in terms of what you want your life to become? If you don't love yourself now...do you want to? Is that a goal?
If you were someone else, a person you trusted profoundly, a person you respected because you felt NO confusion about whether they truly were wise about life and very good...and who would never, ever advise anyone to do something that was not to help them grow and heal...
If you were THAT person, even for five minutes, what would you tell Jackie right now?
I believe you have enough imagination to think your way out of the box you've put yourself in. I believe you need to stop listening to the voice that says: I can't! I can't make a healthy decision! I can't evaluate anything! I can't think! I can't learn! I can't observe! I can't draw rational conclusions! I can't protect myself! I can't create happiness in my life! I can't change!
You could try a simple exercise of speaking aloud, louder and louder, to yourself, alone in a room:
I can. I can make a healthy decision. I can evaluate what's good for me. I can think. I can learn. I can observe. I can draw rational conclusions. I can protect myself. I can create happiness in my life. I can change.
Another one might be: I can read a book someone recommends. You can read the book I mentioned in just a few hours. You have nothing to lose by reading it. You might have a lot to gain.
(I know you're frustrated that noone here is stepping in to take the responsibility of making your decision. Ask yourself, why would all these different people who have spent so much time sharing and struggling and talking with each other here about issues just as challenging as my own...all be saying such similar things to me now? Why would that be happening?)
Try to calm your panic and truly think about these things. I believe you're reacting out of fear and have convinced yourself that you can't think. I have a ot of sympathy for this...I know the desperate feeling of panic. I remember one of the strangest pieces of therapy to me was that all the books on panic disorder kept telling me, remember, even though your heart is palpitating and you can't breathe and you feel like you're going to faint, die, have a heart attack or go crazy...those are just the sensations of panic and they will pass. You're not going to die.
I am completely confident that you know how to think. And it's not going to harm you to do it.
Your Dad was wrong about you.
Hops