TL;DR; I’m growing in a way that is making us seemingly incompatible and I’m stuck between breaking up and not breaking up for both of our betterment.
Me and my partner have been together for 1 year, 2 months and a half. We love each other a lot and have had a great time together, despite some bumps and issues. Overall, I care for him a lot, and the idea of not being as close to him hurts so much, but I can’t help but think breaking up might be best for the both of us.
When we got together, I had just left a brand of radical Christianity that, personally, restricted me in various ways and leftover quite a lot of trauma that I had to work through. Since then, I’ve become much more free and embracing of my sexuality (I’m bisexual) and the more femanine aspects of my personality. Part of this change has been an increasing desire to experiment with make-up and just an openness to not be restricted when it comes to self-expression as I’m quite creative in that regard.
Anyway, this has been one source of tension as he doesn’t like these things in a guy that’s going to be his boyfriend, but I’m not willing to restrict myself because my partner doesn’t like it. We had a similar issue around piercings (I was considering getting a nose piercing).
These tensions and others have culminated in me feeling a bit like my full self isn’t desirable to him and I’ve unconsciously become someone different around him. Despite loving him so much and caring about him, the idea of being single as an adult (without the prior shackles of radical religion), seems exhilarating, but the turmoil inside around losing this person in that intimate way really hurts, but I feel like it makes sense for both us to go and get what we want (as it seems we’ve had a growing incompatibility).
I’m stuck at the moment. I know that, in time, we may be able to be friends after a period of healing and distance (if we are to break up), but the inner turmoil is really a lot right now, and it’s hard to make a decision. We have spoken about both of our thoughts about breaking up over these differences, and he highlighted are very different interests (we don’t have many in common at the moment).
Any advice around this kind of situation would be much appreciated, especially from experience but any is good. Thanks in advance.
1 comment
My first serious relationship was like this in terms of I(F) was learning self expression and my bf at the time was not very supportive of the ways I was expressing myself. (Tattoos, dying my hair, piercings).
He was also not very supportive of my interests even though I feigned interest in the things that he cared about. Ultimately we broke up (dated for 4 years), went no contact for a year and are now occasionally in contact with each other.
Anyways all this to say I don’t think you can make the relatipnship work if you’re being judged for who you are and how you choose to express yourself. I agree you shouldn’t change anything to be with this guy, but there are definitely people out there that will accept you and appreciate the quirks you have to offer instead of trying to change them.