I (17M) have been dating my boyfriend (18M) for a couple of months now and we have known each other for years beforehand. We have gone through so much tough shit together and we have a mutually supportive and healthy relationship. I have gone through a lot of traumatic relationships, some resulting in ptsd, and most of my previous relationships ended with either abuse or abandonment. My boyfriend and I are both autistic and neither of us are very good at expressing emotions properly or understanding social cues. My boyfriend is also not the most verbally affectionate person as he tends to show affection by spending time with people and many times can’t convey his emotions well with words. Sometimes I have trouble understanding that part of him and I will get worried that he is going to abandon me and/or he doesn’t love me anymore. Today, for example, when we said goodnight to each other over text he said “night” without any heart emojis and while I didn’t express it my brain went into panic mode. I am not sure what to do in situations like these because I don’t want him to feel obligated to be overly verbally affectionate to me as he doesn’t usually feel comfortable with that, but I’m also extremely stressed out and I started crying earlier. I would love to know if there are any things that I could do in situations like these or anyway I could communicate this to him without making him feel forced to do anything uncomfortable.
TL;DR!
I’m feeling anxious about my relationship even though I know nothings wrong and I want to know what to do.
1 comment
What my partner and I do is we agree to tell the each other if we have a problem. We also agree to answer honestly if asked. So that way, when we aren’t being informed there is a problem, we can feel safe and secure knowing that there isn’t one. It does mean having the hard conversations when something does come up, but that’s good to do anyway, and it makes the rest of the time so much less stressful. Then you just have to trust each other to actually follow through and mention issues when they do come up.