relationships

I'm very bad at maintaining relationships. One thing I realized I do sometimes is that I withdraw from my emotions when they get too extreme, in either direction. This is very bad when you're around people you like being around a lot. There are three distinct examples of where I fucked up some really good opportunities.
Example 1: I remember a time in seventh grade where I had a really strong crush on this one girl. She was really hot, athletic, smart, creative, and friendly. One time I remember another girl asking me if I liked the crush girl, and I blushed for like 5 minutes. I couldn't help it, and I felt so out of control. I didn't like that feeling of complete helplessness, like I just surrendered my logical thinking self to be a slave to emotions.
I never wanted to feel that vulnerable and helpless again, so I decided that the next time that happened, I would control my physical reaction and not blush, and even feign dislike. It worked like a charm. No longer was I a slave, but the master of my emotions. I could turn them off any time I wanted, and it felt good at the time to re-establish control.
Example 2: There was this one girl that liked me a lot, and I liked her a lot. We chilled out for hours every day after school and on the weekends too. We'd go fishing, and she'd make food for me, and we'd just shoot the shit for hours with new things to talk about every time. Well, one day, she wrote me a 10 page letter on how much she liked me and how she liked being around me. I screwed that up by pretending that the letter meant nothing to me, even though my heart fluttered with excitement as my eyes seemed to pierce straight through the paper and words to absorb everything where was to say. But because I didn't show my emotions, I screwed up a good relationship. We don't even talk anymore, and the last time I saw her, it was just full of awkward pauses.
While this felt bad at the time, in retrospect, it was probably a good thing I didn't get too emotionally attached to this girl because she had too many problems going on. She had early child abuse problems, slit her wrists, and was totally dysfunctional with family stuff.
Example 3: This is probably not a good example, because I'm sure I can salvage this one. But anyways, continuing my sad story, this was probably the weirdest hook-up ever. A mother in a boot camp I went to stated that she was psychic, which is probably true, and she told me a couple things that I found very very interesting. Anyway, she invites me down to her place and stay with her daughter, claiming that she's hot and that she and I would be married.
Now, I'm a very open-minded guy, and I also believe things happen for a reason. I'm also very much an explorer, willing to try almost anything once. So I call her about once a week or every other week, just feeling her out and seeing how things are going. She's hot, flexible, cooks, down to earth, learning latin dancing, and is just a fun girl to talk to. However, I feel like I'm getting too busy and just stop calling her and stop taking her calls. I can still recover from this one by calling her again, which I will do some time this week. It's officially on my list of things to do.

While these stories aren't very tragic and they probably aren't my soulmate or anything permanent, I have identified a personality problem, a pattern that may lead to destruction of good friendships and relationships. When I start to see myself going through a pattern of withdrawal, I need to go through a rationalization of the situation, and put a value to continuing to withdraw vs. expressing what I feel. In this way, I can completely master the situation by choosing what I express and what to hide.