I’ve been dating my girlfriend for around eight months now and I’m strongly considering ending things. The relationship was great during the first few months of our relationship, but due to a bad falling out with her long term friendgroup her social life has been whittled down to essentially just me. This caused problems because I feel myself becoming her entire life.
She flat out told me if she could spend every second of every day with me she would. I established early on that I don’t want to spend more than 3-4 days together a week as I really value my alone time and time with my friends and the relationship is still early. However, unless I actively leave the city she lives in to visit my family I feel like I never have that boundary respected. She often forgets things in my apartment, usually medicine or her charger, which turns into her spending a few hours here asking me to cuddle for a half hour and getting angry at me for watching the clock. On days where we aren’t together she calls me several times a day and wants to facetime for hours. There are times where she begs to spend another day with me when I want a day to myself to get work done, sometimes offering favors such as cleaning my apartment while I’m at work.
On three separate occasions, she broke down in tears when I asked her to leave my dorm after spending a few days together straight. It would start with her begging me to spend the night but when I put my foot down she cried and I let her stay. On the third time where my social battery was drained after spending several days together, she told me if she had to spend the night by herself she’d feel suicidal, clarifying she wouldn’t go through with it but it’s how she feels whenever she has to spend the night by herself and she couldn’t drive home to her mothers house due to a snowstorm. She has been diagnosed with various mental illnesses that stem from her dad dying when she was young and is treating it with therapy and medication, which explains the source and I admire her efforts to better herself. She says she has started talking about her attachment issues to her therapist at my urging and she wants to work on it, but I have not seen improvements since.
I’ve told my friends and family all of this, who have offered me different advice. My family and most of my friends told me to leave as soon as possible. A couple of my friends suggested a breakup ultimatum where I give her a chance to change her behavior as her friend group fallout coupled with past trauma makes this behavior not excusable but understandable and it’s on me for not having the backbone to enforce my boundaries(I’m aware I have that problem). My current plan is to just tough it out for a couple more months and break up with her once the semester ends and she can recover safely in her mother’s house and I don’t have to worry about her hurting herself(she has attempted in the past before I met her), but my mom especially is adamant that I shouldn’t tolerate this for another week.
Just want some third party feedback, part of me does wonder if I’m overreacting and she just wants to move a little faster than I do or if this is inching into toxic/abusive relationship territory like my family says. I do love her, she is very kind to me and I know I will miss her company. But I know our current dynamic isn’t healthy and something has to change.
TLDR: My girlfriend’s attachment issues are causing me grief and I’m unsure of how to proceed.
8 comments
End it now. She has issues that you can’t solve. There will never be a good time to break up from her perspective. If you want to look for it, there will always be some reason not to do it – “She might kill herself” “Her family pet is sick” “She failed her class” “Her friends don’t talk to her anymore” (I wonder why). So might as well do it now and reclaim your life.
I would probably lean towards leaving. Why? Because she’s beginning to use emotional manipulation and threatening if she can’t have what she wants, she might want to kill herself. That is the move of a *very* unstable woman who needs a therapist before a boyfriend.
This isn’t healthy and this isn’t something you want to continue. Needy would be putting it mildly. She is also not respecting your boundaries or your time. She thinks she should be your #1 priority and is putting her needs and wants over yours. And that’s never the recipe for a healthy partnership. I don’t think an “ultimatum” is going to help. She is who she is and you’re mentally over this, as anyone would be.
Good luck.
You have set very clear boundaries and she is endlessly trying to get around them. This is not going to improve with time. You need to decide if this is something you can deal with or if it’s a deal breaker. To me, if would be a deal breaker because I would feel like my own needs don’t matter.
This is emotional blackmail. Run.
she has issues but this alone time is your issue. someday when you get married or living with a girl there is no alone time
This does not sound like an overreaction. It’s sounds like your gf needs to really do some intensive work on herself, because she seems to be hanging a lot of her stability and happiness on you, which isn’t jus tunhealthy for her but is unhealthy for you.
That’s not going to change because you do anything – she needs to realize she need to fix herself on her own.
Ya’ll have been together less than a year and she tells you that if she spends the night without you, she will be suicidal. That was the day when this relationship should have hit the break hard and you said to your gf ‘you need to work on your mental and emotional health right now, that needs to be your entire focus’ and gone very low contact.
I would not hang around to wait for that and would be actively working on an exit plan. Several months is way to long, though. I’d start by enforcing boundaries like a fiend – say you are hanging out on your own one day and will talk to her the next day. don’t answer the door if she knocks, the phone if she calls, or respond to messages. Don’t even READ the messages. Enforce that you are taking ‘you time’ and are not going to be interrupted, not even if she is having a world ending crisis, which I guarantee she will because she wants your attention on her terms (she’s not forgetting shit at your apartment, and you know that. She’s planting it and using it as an excuse to go there).
Get a friend – get a couple – and have then sweep your place for anything at all that belongs to her, put it in a box. Say you were doing a deep cleaning and give her back her stuff.
Her mental and emotional health is ENTIRELY her own to sort out. You doing X Y Z is not going to make her better or worse. YOU don’t make her suicidal. YOU aren’t the one that needs to pacify her insecurities. She needs to learn how to work on herself or else she’s not going to be able to function as an independent adult, and right now she is clinging to you to keep her entertained, occupied, and feel noticed.
It’s only going to get worse the longer you drag it out, so start making plans. You can be the bad guy if you want and say for your own mental health you need to focus on yourself and that while you love her and wish her well, this relationship is not something you can be in because it’s not doing either of you any good and stay firm about it. Don’t fold when she threatens to hurt herself. Wish her well and block. Tell all your friends so they know not to let her bully them into contacting you through them.
This is not going to be easy, but it needs to happen. She is absolutely not ready to be in a relationship, and while you can make her realize that, you can not be the one she is in a bad relationship with and protect yourself and your own wellbeing.
sometimes it sucks that break-ups don’t need both people to agree to it, and sometimes it works out that break-ups don’t need both people to agree to it.
even if she can change, it may not change fast enough for you. and you don’t need to be around to wait for that change.