this is my first time posting here so please excuse any mistakes I might make.
my (21f) boyfriend (22m) and I have been dating for 2,5 years now and while we had some smaller fights in the past, our relationship is going well for the most part. recently, I find myself getting a little distanced but not in a concerning way. I just don’t want to cuddle all the time and would like to sometimes have some space in bed for myself und just lie next to each other. My boyfriend on the other hand started to act super lovey-dovey, gets mad when I don’t want to cuddle, tells me how much he loves me all the time etc. I don’t think this a big problem per se, just something I feel like I should mention.
To get to my actual problem: I’m currently studying in a city 1h away from where we both live (we’re both still living at our parents houses and have not actively talked our planned moving in together). My boyfriend is working in our hometown, so him moving away would be pointless. I’m still going to study for at least 2 years, so ultimately it would be easier for me to just move to the city my uni is in, since I have to travel for almost 4 hours in total everytime I have to go to uni, which I told my boyfriend about today. I don’t have anything planned yet, it is simply something that came to my mind!
After I talked to him about this, his main response was: „I don’t want to talk you out of this but I’m not happy with that.“ I could have lived with that response but after that, he didn’t to talk to me anymore. He literally just laid in bed, his back towards me, not making a single sound. When I tried talking to him about his sudden mood swing, he started talking about how he’s seeing our relationship failing if I move away. He started talking about why I don’t want to move in with him and I told him that we haven’t really discussed moving in together like ever and that I’m not ready for that step. He didn’t take that well and now we’re back to not talking again.
I just don’t know what to do right now. Picking the topic again would end in a fight I fear.
TL;DR my boyfriend doesn’t want me to move out and I don’t know what to do about it
edit: I would still come home to see him from friday to sunday, I’m not planning on only coming once a month or something like that
3 comments
I see a trend here, he gets angry with you when he doesn’t get his way. That’s not okay. It’s okay to be upset or disappointed, but the thing to do is to discuss what you want, listen to what your partner wants, and both of you to discuss what the best options you have for each of you to try to be happy, and if there is no option you both can be happy with, then you break up. But he gets angry with you if he doesn’t get the physical acts from you he wants. It doesn’t matter that he is pressuring you to cuddle and not sex, it’s still just as wrong. He gets angry with you when you say no to him for how he uses your body. That isn’t a small thing. And it now seems to be part of a pattern of him handling problems in the relationship with anger and sulking instead of teamwork.
Do not let him manipulate your life choices. If he’s not on board with a ldr then he needs to do what he needs to do.
I mean…yeah. Right now you live near each other and spend lots of time together, but your life is changing and what’s best for you would be to live much farther away and see him significantly less. Of course he’s upset about that. Of course he thinks it’s going to hurt your relationship. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it anyway, but you get where he’s coming from, don’t you? You’re moving toward your future and he’s getting left behind.
This is a pretty common thing in young relationships, and neither of you is being totally realistic about it because you’re *in* it and it’s really hard to get perspective on a relationship you’re in. He thinks that you should want to organize your entire life around your relationship, ignoring the reality that you’re an individual with goals and ambitions beyond just Being His Girlfriend. You think your relationship will remain intact and serve the same purpose in your life even once it becomes long-distance, which…is not a thing that happens in reality.
You need to move, OP, and the odds of your relationship surviving the move are approximately zero percent. You can face that now and end things on your own terms, or you can spend the next year or so fighting every weekend to hold on to something you no longer have real space for. Someday you’ll wish you’d spent them moving forward instead of trying to hold yourself back for his sake.