I really like my boyfriend but I noticed that he’s not so emotionally intelligent like I am. I have been in therapy for years and he hasn’t. But I’m also five years younger than him so it concerns me that he doesn’t know how to validate me. And it’s not that he’s a bad person. He has good intentions but he’s not aware. And If I wasn’t aware I would’ve been doing the same thing.
We had a really long conversation recently, and I brought up all my concerns : So here’s an example of one of them and how he responded:
I have anxiety sometimes in social situations- I get in my head, but I still act normal. He knows this, and I feel like he thinks it’s a bigger deal than it is. I brought up an incident that occurred at a party we attended together. I asked my boyfriend to get me a drink, a simple request that I didn’t think twice about. However, instead of just getting me the drink, he made a comment along the lines of “common, you know where they are. have you never been to a party before?”
To him, it was meant as a light joke, but to me, it felt like a sharp jab. I was overwhelmed by how everyone was crowded around the open bar, but I was also in the midst of conversing with his friends, trying to integrate myself into the social setting, and his comment felt dismissive of my efforts. It made me question how he could say something like that to me in the first place, and when I brought this up during our conversation , his response was,”it was just a table filled with drinks, I didn’t think you’d be scared to go get one.” This felt defensive and belittling, further invalidating my feelings.
But then this is the reason I’m scared to tell him things! Because it was weighing on me and he brushed it off. And instead of trying to see where I’m coming from, he jumped to being defensive and said he doesn’t want to constantly worry about whether I’m okay in social settings. That made me feel like a few things:
* He’s making me out to be someone who can’t handle any normal interactions when, in reality, I was 100% fine socializing with his friends.
* It felt like it was a chore for him to think about how I’m doing.
* I don’t need him to constantly worry about me and baby me, but it is strange that he wouldn’t naturally think about how I’m feeling the first time I meet his friends.
If he met my family or friends for the first time, I would constantly be thinking about whether he’s comfortable, offering him drinks or food, and checking in with him to see if he wants to stay, and that’s a normal thing for a couple to do. But the fact that I had to ask him for a drink and he made me feel stupid about it, and then proceeded to make me out to be annoying and in the way of his friends, hurt me!
I know he doesn’t even realize that I’m upset because to him the conversation was communicated effectively. My therapist told me to recommend him a relationship book. It’s an amazing book he would benefit from. But how do I bring that up? And how do I bring up this situation, because now I have all these thoughts about it but I didn’t say it in the moment and I definitely feel like I can’t move past it.
This is a minor example: but it’s happened multiple times . I opened up to him abt something and he started crying about how he lost someone to cancer, and said “you have anxiety you can work on it, but at least you don’t have cancer” then I was validating him…