TL;DR: my (31M) girlfriend (32F) of 7 years needs to be attached at the hip to me 24/7. We live together and work from home together and we do everything together and it is never enough for her. She gets upset if I go in another room and decompress or try and learn new things. She gets upset if I hang out with friends and she is not there and had told me I can’t go. I am tired and don’t know how much longer I can take this.
We have been together for 7 years. Over the years I have explained that I need personal time to myself even if it is for a couple of hours. I am becoming bitter, tired, and angry because she expects my constant attention and cries or gets angry if I need my own time to decompress or relax. She sends me at least 10 videos on Instagram everyday during work hours and expects me to watch them and comment. If I don’t respond to her texts quickly enough she gets angry and has yelled, screamed, and cried and told me I don’t care about her. She tells me that being in a separate room while working from home should be enough time to myself for the day. It is not enough, I need time to relax and unwind. The other night I went into the other room to try and study to advance my career and get a new certification. When I came out she broke down crying and told me I don’t care about her and that we hardly spend time together. We live together, eat together every night, usually watch tv every night, go on trips together, we are attached at the hip. My friends and family have pointed out concerns over the years and even continuous discussions with her about needing time to myself does not work, and this continues. I have lost friends over the years because of this because she wanted me to spend time with her and cancel plans with my friends (I regret this immensely and would change this if I could). I no longer feel like myself and feel like a shell of a person who is depressed and angry. I feel like I need to leave this relationship and start over, but there is a lot of guilt involved along with time spent. I don’t know what to do
5 comments
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm it’s one thing to actively want to spend time together and another when they’re not giving you a choice
I beg for my partner to go out lol
You can break up. This relationship doesn’t fit into your life, and trying to make it do so is hurting both of you. Why should you two be together when it makes you both unhappy? But worse, she has been abusing you to try to get what she wants, instead of accepting that you two do not want the same things and would both be better off apart.
She’s anxiously attached. Only she can work out why she isn’t secure. If I had been in a relationship with me years ago I would have broken up with me. The only way I was able to reconcile my anxious attachment to men was to be alone and learn to be at peace with myself, but it took self-awareness to even start that journey. It sounds like she doesn’t have that self-awareness.
Only you can make the call as to whether you stay or go. You seem to know why you want to be out of it, so write down why you want to stay in it and if you can’t think of positive reasons then you might have your answer.
Jeez, I can’t believe you’ve been putting up with this for seven years. Even inmates have more freedom than you.
Sure, you’ve thrown 7 years down the drain and it sucks, I don’t understand why you didn’t address this waaay earlier and either stopped enabling her insanity or left. But it’s better to do it now than to spend the rest of your life as a prisoner of an unhinged person.
Dude, what are you, in high school?