Long post so sorry…
Me (31F) and my fiancé (31M) have been together for 3 years and are currently going through a pretty rough patch the last couple months. My partner and I clicked immediately when we met and he is an incredible man. He’s always treated me well, he’s kind, thoughtful, caring, he’s handsome to boot, you name it! He’s the real deal!
We bought a house last year and it’s been nothing but problems… like you go to paint a wall only to find a leak that turns into a bathroom being completely gutted, so it’s been…a lot… on top of life stresses (job loss, starting a job that makes my partner miserable, grad school, getting engaged, etc.). We’ve both been pretty terrible at communicating recently because we’re handling a lot individually and I know his needs haven’t been met. He has been incredibly overwhelmed and to his credit he told me this but I was not listening because all I noticed was that I was having to pick up the extra work around the house, we have 2 pretty rowdy dogs that need a lot of attention paired with doing home reno projects on top of the regular household running. I’m a teacher and get home earlier so I have time to cook/grocery shop etc. So for that I need to be accountable. He puts a ton of pressure on himself to be the provider and take care of everything. Not that he has to, I have a job and we split everything pretty equally. We have always been good at supporting each other and stepping up when needed but there’s just been so much lately. Prior to our relationship his reaction was to pull away when things got hard, which he’s never done with me but he’s told me about it and he’s even worked with a professional on it (which he stopped seeing when we got together because everything was great).
A couple weeks ago I think it reached a tipping point for him. He’s now completely shut me out. I went out of town to see my family for a holiday and I think he reached his limit caring for the house, pets and the job he hates while I was away. He went quiet and I Marley heard from him at all, which is incredibly out of character for him. He calls me everyday just to let me know he’s leaving work to go to the gym and then when he leaves the gym to let me know he’s on his way home. When I returned we had a conversation about how he’s feeling and he said he’s in a bad place and not doing well and he doesn’t know how to receive my love and support right now and is second guessing everything. I suggested we try counseling, since we did commit to getting married, but he said he’s not sure if we can repair this. He has closed off so much so that his response was, “you can just have everything. The house. The dogs. All the stuff.” Mind you, everything we have he is absolutely entitled to and in fact the house is legally his. That reply told me he’s not thought about what he’s saying and is perhaps being short-sighted into how he can alleviate the stress he feels right now. I suggested to him that we might need some space apart for him to process what that means; to give up the house, our dogs, our relationship, the life we’ve worked hard to build together. It felt like he was just so overwhelmed he just needed to be away from it all. He stayed at a friend’s for a week and we had no contact at all during that time. Which again, is not normal for us. He came back the other night and slept in our guest room saying “I think we need to sleep apart while we figure this out.” He has been distant but I see glimmers of his usual self here and there and it just feels like he’s fighting himself instead to either let me in or shut me out.
We own our home together and our lives are pretty entwined with bank accounts, we are supposed to get married! I love him, he’s the one I chose and said yes to, he’s my best friend and I know he loves me and he’s told me I’m his best friend as well. My instinct says we’ll be ok and work through this…but I’m wondering if I need to do more than just let him be? Do I just wait it out? It almost feels like he’s subconsciously testing me to see if I abandon him like his family and previous relationships have in his past have when he gets this way because that would be easier than facing the challenge?
This is also his home and I want him to feel like it’s a safe and comfortable place but it’s mine too…
If he doesn’t want to continue shouldn’t we make plans for how to proceed? He hasn’t made any moves to pack anything. Nothing tells me he’s ready to be done but I am just so lost. How can I support him?
Tl:dr my fiancé and I have been extremely stressed and are in a very rocky patch. He’s closed himself off emotionally and says he’s not sure if we can repair this. Can we fix it?
4 comments
I would encourage you two to try couples therapy.
This sounds so hard. I do think it can be repaired, but will require both of you to commit to the process, and probably won’t be a quick fix. Definitely go see a couples therapist together if he’s willing as soon as possible; it sounds like doing some pre-marital counseling focused specifically on setting your future marriage up for success (so reviewing finances, communication, issues like having kids etc) would be a good idea anyway
My guess for why he’s pulling away and falling back into his old habit of being very closed off is that he told you he needed your help when he was struggling under a lot of stress, but for whatever reason you weren’t actually able to give him that support he asked for. So it’s very possible that he’s pulling back because isn’t sure how much support he can count on from you. I think a good start to fixing that would be to apologize to him if you haven’t already for not responding to his request for support. You can explain to him that your own stressors sort of blinded you to the seriousness of his feelings, but if you do that make it clear that this is a reason but not an excuse, and make sure to inform him of strategies you had thought of to help prevent this from happening again.
One of those strategies could be couples counseling as well as individual therapy for you to address your specific struggles. But also I think it might be useful to propose that you two start doing weekly relationship check ins to make sure you do have time set aside to check in with each other going forward. If you do regular relationship check-ins once a week (or whatever regular interval works for you) they can be a helpful already scheduled time where you can check in on basic household/relationship logistics, as well as providing a space explicitly dedicated to relationship issues, which means it’s less likely that something brought up then will get misinterpreted as not important.
But before he can do couples therapy or weekly check-ins sounds like first he needs to snap out of his slump and regain some of his trust in you as a partner. He might need reassurance that you are a supportive partner he can rely on, and what he dealt with recently was an unfortunate fluke in your relationship. One thing that might help is offering to take the lead on trying to figure out ways to reduce some of the stressors. Offer him assistance in breaking down his current issues into step-by-step processes. For example, it sounds like he’d benefit from finding a new job. Breaking that down into a to-do list with both weekly and one-off tasks will make it all seem more manageable and easier for him to track his progress than the general ‘find a job.’. So make a list of scheduled tasks to help address this. For example: browse job boards for 30 minutes and save promising postings (1x a week), make template for basic cover letter and save it (done once; edit template as applicable for each application), edit resume, apply to x number of jobs a week (spreading these weekly applications throughout the week if it’s easier to manage). You can also offer to do this for any tasks that might need to be done if he does decide he needs a longer break from the relationship. While that hopefully won’t come up, you helping with that would show you trying to keep his needs in mind even in times of stress.
So sit down with him and first apologize to him for not realizing the gravity of the situation back when he first told you he was overwhelmed. Make a point to talk about things you will do as well as things the two of you can do to prevent that miscommunication going forward. Hopefully doing that, along with couples counseling or, if he won’t go, individual therapy for yourself to make sure you’re working well yourself will remind him that while recent yokes were hard, this doesn’t mean the relationship itself isn’t worth fighting for.
I think you need to give this some time. It’s only been two weeks; and according to what you’ve written, he’s very overwhelmed. He’s not dealing with it in the best way by shutting you out, but also it sounds like he’s in crisis, so he’s not in a space to make great decisions. When you have one of those moments when you see him coming back to himself, that’s a good time to say that you know things have been hard, and to suggest individual therapy for him and/or couples’ therapy for both of you. He has some work to do in terms of learning to manage his emotions; and you both have work to do as a couple — you took on a lot, and you didn’t check in/didn’t made adjustments to keep things more manageable for you both.
Remember that you can’t fix him. He has to decide to do his part to pull himself out of this, and to re-invest in the relationship. I would give it a little more time at this point, but also listen to yourself. You get to say when you’ve had enough.
Love and friendship is great, but if you can’t work through conflicts in a healthy way, you can’t have a good long term relationship.
There will always be stressors in life. What were the things that triggered his crisis? A job he dislikes and you visiting family? That’s not even in the top 100 of stressful situations you’re likely to face.
Yes, counseling could probably fix this, but only if you’re both committed to trying. It doesn’t sound like he’s interested, and this isn’t something you can fix on your own.