I \[27M\] feel like I might not have a place in her \[22F\] world anymore.
\*\*Apologies for this long story, It’s pretty complicated for me 🙁
Let me start from the beginning. I am architecture student and met my girlfriend who is studying pre-med in a different university in 2019, right before the pandemic struck. As we developed through our relationship she slowly opened up into how she transferred universities because her fellow students all turned on her. Tl;dr to this is that she experienced something legitimately traumatic and started to neglect her studies and part of that were group works and the professor punished the entire class for her negligence and people started to turn on her and even spread rumors. It ruined her social life, gave her anxiety, and for a time she even resorted to different forms of self harm.
Just as 2020 went and did its thing she was finally able to transfer to a different university 8miles away from my university (her previous uni was closer). I didn’t think anything of it since all our lectures would be held online.
Throughout the lockdowns, we both found solitude being in our homes, we called every night, we shared insights on our studies, shared our thoughts on each others lives and we were both able to reflect and grow. She even started being more open to her family and develop her relationships with them.
Around April 2022 the lockdown restrictions started to ease up and slowly our country is slowly re-introducing face-to-face class and duties. With her being a pre-med student she her internship was greenlit, the program goes like this. She and her fellow students would be assigned to 10 different hospitals and clinics in 10 months, to serve 1 month for each and each location would have a different randomzied shuffle of interns (even those from other universities). My responsibilities on the other hand went on overdrive as her internship kicked off so we both understandably went easy on our relationship.
However, in the span of a few months I started to notice that she has been less recipient to my advances, flirting and general exchanges with her. Not that she ignores it but her response feels flat and that’s she’s constantly exhausted, always needs to be typing down notes, medical records etc. . and by her 5th month of duties I confronted her about it.
And what I found out kinda broke my heart, apparently she’s been crushing on one of her co-interns but doesn’t show it to him nor reciprocate conversations as she worries about how she would react if he made advances. Apparently, as she attended these internship duties she finally met the new crowd from her new university in the flesh. She’s been hitting it off with this new crowd of co-interns and are able to share life. She said every time she’s assigned to a new hospital and meets a new batch of interns she’d generally interact well with them and will always have 1 guy to crush on but never acts on it and she says that by the time the duty ends and she moves on to the next hospital/clinic the feelings fade and that she just has scenarios of being a couple with them in campus/internship duties or in social gatherings.
We finally had the time to sit down and talk about it and she started showing pictures, tiktoks, videos of her and her co-interns going through the motions, lectures, reports, treating patients, being taught procedures, general shenanigans, social gatherings, and basically having a good time.
That’s when I realized that she was never cheating, we still had nightly calls but it would feel empty sometimes. Our relationship was on a steady downhill because she was finding herself, making the friends she’s always wanted to make, and dreaming about different loves that could have been, she said “imagine being in a power couple here”. She wasn’t cheating, she was just finding her place to call home in society, a fresh start, something her broken self when I met her could only dream of. She’s was doing it, she was on the path to the life she was dreaming of and this is what she was putting all her energy into. The smile she had on her face while telling all the stories of her experiences while we were apart and was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on a human beings face– glowed even brighter than when we started dating. She looked so happy to be where she is now and is even excited when there’s on-site lectures to see her new friends.
My heart melted for her and was even falling for this newer version of herself. She was full of life.
Thing is, I am an Architecture student who studies and lives 12miles from her now, our dates are infrequent, and we never really had the space and privacy to get intimate since her internship started. In our latest date (cuz this was our first date since the conversation) I could see her sometimes starting at me as if contemplating whether I still had a place in her life or not. I’m not in some internship but my architectural studies could be just as demanding as hers, so time is very limited for the both of us. I couldn’t relate to her changing sense of humor, the topics she likes to talk about these days. But every day she still says she loves me; she talks about the measures she takes to deal with these crushes.
Yet I worry that she has found her own self and knows what she wants, she always says she loves me and says that she doesn’t want to ruin such a good relationship. But that doesn’t change the fact that and that I may not have a place in her new world. I can’t be with her every day to face difficult medical tasks with her, I can’t casually make a 12mile drive to her for lunch and come back without having spent 3hours on the road. I can’t relate to the humor she has grown accustomed to and I know she’s not as attracted to me as she is with the latest hot intern she runs across.
I just know I won’t belong; this is her world.
I don’t want to leave or end the relationship, neither does she, but we both feel like we’re now worlds apart from when we started. I want to make it work, it’s terrifying but I also don’t want to take away what she has found.
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One day the 10-month cycle of duties will come to an end, idk what happens then.
Will her attraction and deeper affection to me return?
Should I just let her go?
I want to stay but we’re worlds apart and I don’t know where to stand.
But the less my romantic needs are met and the more I see her drift away, the more my heart crumbles.
I love the new her but I’m not sure the new her could love me.
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How should I handle this going forward?