I’ve been in a long distance relationship with my boyfriend for over a year. For clarity, it’s a same-sex relationship; he lives in Texas and I’m in Florida. We communicate daily through phone texts and Discord calls and I visited him once last year with plans to visit again next month.
We’ve had a lot of good times and generally got along good especially during the first months. However, cracks have formed over several issues. He has been adamant of wanting me to move in with him in Texas, while I have mixed feelings of leaving where I’ve lived my whole life. I have no family or friends in Texas and would be completely starting over. On top of that, he has no intention of moving here as his family is close by plus he has lots of friends and job plans to stay in Austin.
But what has gradually begun to bother me the most over time is the fact we have some fundamental clashing opinions and beliefs on political issues and even some objective facts of reality. This culminated earlier tonight with us having a heated conversation about a few different topics and we ended up talking about Trump and the 2020 election. He flat out thinks the election was rigged and stolen and when I tried to reason with him about how that’s just factually untrue and a false conspiracy without pushing any particular agenda or candidates, he told me to move on from the conversation and when I insisted, he literally screamed at the top of his lungs telling me to shut up and hung up on me.
This wasn’t the first time I felt doubts or noticed subtly some flags about incompatible ideology or at least thoughts, but all of the instances were fleeting and spread out across months during different calls, and we always ended up moving on to other chats and I would just downplay or write it off. But he’s also in past expressed vaccine skepticism over Covid, questioned or dismissed climate change, and even openly criticized elements of the LGBTQ community despite being pan himself and me being bi.
We’ve had plenty of good times over the year we’ve dated and I’ve given serious thought to the possibility of us living together, but these are way more than just trivial differences of opinion and I don’t want to be stuck in a situation living with someone that I feel I have to walk on eggshells regarding any real serious topics. It’s important to me to have solidarity with my partner’s values and thoughts overall. I already grew up in and have a family that is almost all Republican and conservative and support Trump, and I’m the black sheep of the family being an atheist and left-wing, but at least I know on a basic foundational level that my family has my back and we love each other despite those differences. Its different with a potential partner though and I had hoped to escape from that and be with someone who shares my politics and values.
So this has been eye-opening and it hurts a lot. I don’t really want to move to Texas outside of being with him, but in light of these sobering revelations, I’m not sure I even want to visit him next month as planned. I know people usually don’t change especially as adults, so this seems like a big red flag that we might not be compatible. I want to make the right decision that is best suitable for myself. Should I break up with him and move on with my life?