Some background: we have been dating for 4 years mostly long distance during college and meeting very often during breaks.
Today, something happened between my partner and me that upset me, due to a misunderstanding/miscommunication on my part.
So later that night when they returned home, I brought it up eventually about how I was upset about their response and what I thought was the problem (after thinking about it on my own). Their response to me was that I had insisted on something despite them telling me otherwise. To me, the situation had gone down differently in my mind, so I explained what the situation had seemed like to me based on what my partner had told me and that I had misunderstood.
From there, my partner sort of blinked, sighed, and said sure. Maybe it was my habit of overanalyzing things, but it seemed like my partner was annoyed and had more to say but wasn’t saying anything to just stop arguing and let things blow over. So I asked them if they had more on their mind. And they said yes but they would prefer to just not talk about it.
For me, I thought it was always best to hash things out and talk about what we are feeling and thinking, so that we can better process our own emotions and come to some sort of agreement and figure how we can prevent this from happening again. I mentioned that it would be nice to talk things out a bit more and see where the misunderstanding happened and how better to communicate next time to avoid this situation.
Essentially, after probing a little more, they talked about how they dislike talking about these issues further and these semantics and how they feel that these discussions solved nothing and would be never-ending. In addition, even if I wanted to talk about these things, they didn’t. They don’t want to make these small issues a “whole thing”.
From my perspective, I would prefer to talk about our emotions to try to get a better understanding of how the other feels and thus also feel cared about. To hear that they thought that these sort of conversations were useless and to just move on felt like they didn’t care about my emotions and if I had processed things.
So at this point, they are annoyed and I start having a harder time articulating things. But overall, it seems that the issue is that I like to talk through things, and they don’t. After reflecting, I feel as if I were the selfish, self-centered one who was demanding that we speak of our emotions and such things. It’s me who is the one feeling uncared for when they’re fine. Even writing this is making me think again that I need to get over my overanalyzing, my emotions. Maybe I’m manipulating my words to make me seem like the victim, or maybe I’m conveniently forgetting things or omitting things to fit my narrative. It’s really difficult to tell what the compromise is between us.
My first thought was that if they did not want to talk about it, we could table it and set another explicit time to discuss things, but that was met with a lukewarm response. And even then, I’m still thinking that the end result is still us talking about it, which is acquiescing to my desires. We’ve sort of made up, but at this time, they’ve simply just declared that they wanted to sleep so they turned the other way and have done so. I feel like I should just get over it and not speak of this again, but I feel like it’s been a recurring issue.
I’m just not sure what I can do here. If it’s a me issue, I can try my best to actively reroute my feelings and feel better about knowing that it’s something that I have to fix.
**;;TLDR;; If partner doesn’t want to talk through issues (possible causes, potential solutions, etc.?) but I do, what’s the compromise?**
2 comments
This is written in an awfully vague way, so it’s hard to tell what is actually going here. But if you want to talk about something and your partner refuses to, you have to force the issue (and spend whatever relationship capital is required to do that — i.e. “pick your battles”), or you have let it go. Depends on how important the thing is to you/your relationship.
i’m in the same coop as s/o in this type of situation, if i’m upset i simply just don’t want to discuss it. i’d rather take a little while to gather my thoughts and revisit it if it’s still an issue. i also have been in a relationship with a dynamic like this before, and ( for me personally ) it’s difficult to receive probing questions and the press of a discussion when i’m not in the mindset to lay everything i’m currently thinking or feeling at that moment down on a table. usually during a misunderstanding my brain is running a thousand miles per hour, and i don’t want to accidentally say anything off cuff that could potentially upset my partner further. this is just my perspective into the why, you’re not in the wrong for wanting to understand why your s/o is feeling the way they do, people just communicate in vastly differing ways sometimes. they might just need a bit of time to think.