TL;DR after 4 days apart, I begin questioning the relationship and get cold towards my partner for personal reasons that I don’t understand.
I (32F) started dating a wonderful guy(33M) a couple of months ago. Our schedules are daunting but we generally make plenty of time for each other when we can. We are both high level professionals and our careers are very important to us. I have his schedule and he has mine, and sometimes those just don’t align.
My issue is that if I go more than 4 days without seeing him, I start feeling like it’s time to end things. Then I see him again and it’s all just fine. It’s not just with him though. I’ve always been like this. I’ve been thinking about the root of why and I’ve come up with:
1) my love languages are quality time and physical touch and I need those regularly to feel connected.
2) my libido is through the roof and directly correlates to my level of overall satisfaction with life. Not exactly healthy, but I’m in my prime.
3) I definitely probably have some abandonment issues. Not like I need constant validation, but instead like I will distance myself if I feel abandonment is even a slight possibility. When I see him again after it’s been a few days, I’m pretty cold and disengaged for a while until we spend some time cuddling, etc.
I haven’t seen him since Saturday and in my emotional mind I’m telling myself that there’s some way he could have seen me by now for sure, and he just doesn’t want to. Logically, I understand both of us have commitments that are very demanding. I also realize that this week it’s been mostly my schedule that’s limiting us, so I truly am just being a brat.
Things I’ve considered to help:
1) meeting halfway after work. No. We are both homebodies and are so taxed after work we just want to curl up and defragment in our safe spaces. We also don’t enjoy eating out so grabbing dinner together isn’t an option.
2) I loosely changed my schedule 2 days a week and he did the same but because we both keep bankers hours, sometimes we have to use that time for other business. That’s what happened this week.
3) weekday overnights. We already wake up at 5 and this would add an hour commute to one of us, on top of lost sleep from spending time together.
I’d like to understand this and get past it so that I can develop a healthy relationship/attachment. Why am I like this and how do I fix it?
2 comments
I think you need therapy more than anything. Out of the 3 things you listed, only the last one is truly a mental health issue. Something like this can’t be fully resolved through compromise alone because your mind will then set a new standard and chase an unrealistic compromise after.
I do this also and have yet to figure out why. A lot of the same reasons as you with the love languages and abandonment issues, which is an interesting insight.
I wonder, have you told your bf about this happening to you?