My (25M) girlfriend (23F) isn’t as affectionate as before. Behaves like different person. I feel sad and thinking about what to do next.

We have been dating for the past 9 months so far. We had our share of good and bad moments.

Overall I love my girlfriend and enjoy spending time with her. She’s about to start her last year of university and despite having part time job and quite a lot of studying to do she was able to adjust her work and uni schedule to meet up with me for 2/3 nights per week on average. It wasn’t easy because we live 30/40 minutes drive away from each other and 99% of the time we meet up at my place.

On the beginning of relationship we had sex few times a day and she was very affectionate to the level I couldn’t believe. As time went by the affection has dropped significantly and I am the more affectionate part of relationship. In fact I did the reverse because with time I gradually became more affectionate.

She said that I say love you too much also things like I miss you or you are beautiful too often and they have lost value to her. She also stated that my level of affection is too much and trespasses her personal space and makes her feel uncomfortable.

I have talked to her about this already a few times and explained to her that I crave a lot of physical touch, kissing, hugging in relationship. She concluded that she’ll show more affection only if I’ll step back and let her take the lead because the amount of affection I’m giving to her makes her hold back otherwise we would be „sticked to eachother 24/7” as she said. I have tried to hold back already a few times but I felt like I was forcing myself to count the amount of affection I’m providing and behave like someone totally different rather than being myself.

So after few long talks and discussions about our needs in relationship we haven’t really come up with good solution. I’m still more or less affectionate as described above and she said that she can swallow my level of affection and tolerate it but she won’t be giving more from herself in this departament.

We also had quite a lot of dramas, discussions (which were often started by me) about the amount of sex we have, but it would take another few paragraphs to write in detail. She agreed to have sex with me once a day but often times (like 90% of cases) it’s only my sole desire and she just does it to please me.

I’m not really happy with the way our intimacy/sex and affection is going in our relationship. I know that honeymoon phase is almost always perfect time where there is a lot of love, affection and sex but I really miss the first 3 months of our relationship when the amount of affection and sex between us was blown out of proportion. I have asked her if she’s happy with me and she told me I’m the best boyfriend she ever had and there are some disagreements between us but we can „power through” them.

I’m really happy that she wants to be with me and sees me as a good partner but I’m quite sad that she has low levels of sexual desire towards me recently, she isn’t really concerned with this fact because sex is not as important to her as for me and she believes that her sexual desire will reignite again when we’ll have less dramas. She too misses the first 3 months of our relationship and hopes we’ll have less dramas in the future.

For the past few months I haven’t felt really happy about our relationship. The things don’t look good neither bad I would rank our situation as mediocre. I’m aware that the part of the dramas I caused likely affected how our relationship is functioning (I apologized for them and took my responsibilty) so I feel guilty and want to do better in hopes that our relationship will be as fantastic as in the beginning but I also have the thoughts that this situation might never change for the better and my mood might continue to drop.

TLDR: My girlfriend doesn’t show me as much affection as in the first 3 months of relationship. I crave more affection and feel sad.