TL;DR after listening to my experiences, my friends are telling me to breakup with my boyfriend and I’m trying to get myself to go through with it.
Hello everyone. I (F23) never thought I’d be making a reddit post about myself but I’ve been doubting myself so much that I need to see what other people would think; people who don’t know me or my boyfriend (M27) personally. I am actually too paranoid to put details about us on this post in case he comes across this post and recognizes who I am.
We have been together for 9 months in a long distance relationship. Throughout this relationship have been a lot of bumps in the road that can mostly be chalked up to miscommunication and misunderstandings that, while incredibly confusing and painful in the moment, were usually smoothed over after a good conversation.
There are plenty of things that I struggle with in our relationship, but nothing that I feel is too bad. However, I’ve constantly considered breaking up with him and have cried over us very often. Every time the thought crossed my mind though, I would feel guilty and assume it was from a lack of commitment and effort on my part. He has told me before that it felt like I wasn’t putting in effort into our relationship, so I have always assumed it was my fault. I’ve never been in a relationship that I struggled so much with, but that could also be chalked up to how far apart we are and how serious our relationship is.
Aside from my own personal feelings, there are some things that have raised the concerns of my friends, to the point where they are telling me to break up with him immediately. They are friends with the both of us, but have only heard my side of the story so I understand that their opinions are incredibly biased in my favor. Hopefully, by writing everything out I can sort it all in my head.
I have a private twitter account. I’ve used it as a place to dump all my thoughts into and vent. My closest friends follow me there, some of whom are also his. He had followed me there before we got together, and afterwards too. I realized though that I found myself refraining from using the account because sometimes my thoughts were related to our relationship. Typing everything out helped me sort my thoughts and that’s what I used the account for, but I was worried that whatever I posted would potentially hurt or confuse my boyfriend. So I asked him if he could unfollow me there, promising that anything I talked about there would be things I would discuss with him whenever I was ready. Understandably, he did not take kindly to this, and got incredibly upset. He eventually conceded but was clearly unhappy. To appease him, I decided to let him follow it anyway, as long as he understood that anything I typed there wasn’t my final thoughts on a matter, but just my first impressions and impulsive feelings. Despite this, he has gotten upset at me for the things I’ve shared there. My frustrations, my fears. Everytime I shared something related to him in some way (even vaguely) I would have to defend myself and explain the reason behind each of my tweets before I was really ready to talk about them. I don’t really use that Twitter account anymore. When I tried talking about this again, he told me that this topic brought him so much grief that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
It takes me awhile to realize how I feel about things. Sometimes I change my mind about how I feel about things, or what I’m okay with. Especially early on in our relationship, I was very unsure about what I was okay with, and would tell him that I changed my mind and wasn’t comfortable with certain things. It was very apparent that he wasn’t okay with this, and it’s hard to bring this sort of things up without feeling guilty for making him upset. We had broken up once before, but right before getting back together, we were already acting very romantic. He told me that he didn’t want to date for at least another year, to which I shared that I didn’t want to continue doing this kind of behavior with someone who wasn’t actually my romantic partner. I remember him getting mad but I don’t remember what happened between that and us officially getting back together.
I had foolishly shared private pictures with him with my face in them sometimes. This wasn’t something I worried about until I learned that he had kept them after we broke up and told me he felt scummy about it. I didn’t learn about this until after we got back together and I don’t know if I’m overreacting to this or not, but he already knows how conscious I feel about pictures of myself, nevertheless intimate ones. Is this a violation of trust?
His anger terrifies me. Sometimes he will punch a wall or pull on his own hair, but as we are long distance, I’ve never felt threatened by this. However, in heated moments, he would sometimes tell me things I consider to be cruel and mean. He would explain it off as him being too tired and just not expressing himself properly, but they still hurt my feelings. Afterwards, even though I was scared to, I brought up that I had felt hurt by the things he said. I acknowledged that hurting my feelings weren’t his intention, but still wanted to tell him because it was weighing on my heart. This resulted in the worst conversation we ever had. He got defensive, and I emotionally shut down. At the end, I ended up crying and he emotionally withdrew. At the end, I wish I didn’t bring up my hurt feelings at all.
He’s incredibly insecure. He gets jealous when I laugh at someone else’s joke more than his, and often feels like I pay more attention to our friends rather than him whenever we’re in group settings. When someone shares something that gets a lot of attention compared to his, he gets bitter. He tells me constantly that he can’t depend on anyone to give him their time of day or attention and that he will forever be overlooked. I’ve tried to encourage him because he has some genuinely wonderful talents and makes incredible art, but I understand that this is an issue he will have to tackle himself. The problem is that this affects his mood ALL the time. It’s hard to tell if me enjoying the company of my friends at any given point is making him upset. Even a friend just having a good turnout compared to his will be enough to ruin his day. When he’s upset too, he will make it clear to everyone with his tone but won’t talk about it unless prompted.
A mutual friend of me and his ex recommended that I reach out and talk to her, because our relationship experiences were eerily similar. So I recently reached out to her, and wow. My friend wasn’t kidding! Many of the problems that I currently have with my boyfriend are the same issues that she had. These were things that he had blamed her for when he went around talking to all of our friends about how bad their relationship was. It was very enlightening and also kind of scary. If he was willing to talk about her like this, will he talk about me the same way when we breakup?
As a result of all these points, I don’t feel safe enough to confide in him about my feelings or hurts or even some of my successes anymore. I feel guilty for hanging out with my friends sometimes, instead of him. It’s made me incredibly conscious of how much I interact with my peers instead of him whenever we’re all hanging out and it feels like I can’t relax. I’ve told him that I’ve been struggling with this sort of thing before, but he’s told me that this was just the bare minimum. That I didn’t want time take his feelings into consideration, ignoring them in favor of not putting effort into our relationship… so I’ve just stopped talking about it. I Instead, I’ve been confiding in my friends for the past two weeks, all of which have been horrified by what they heard and eventually told me that I should breakup ASAP.
Still,I want to have another conversation about this, about how I am worried about us and the way we communicate about these issues. I still care about him and love him, and to be honest, I feel kinda responsible for him? His mental health has always been not the best, but where he is, he doesn’t have access to many resources or help.
Deep down though, I think I know that breaking up is what’s best for me. I’m really struggling with getting myself to go through with it though. Any advice? Am I being too hasty?