I am so upset and can’t think what else to do but write about what happened and maybe get some advice. I’ve been with my partner for 6 years, we’re both early 30s and never liked the idea of marriage but fell quickly and deeply into a committed relationship. We are both homebodies and not great at expressing feelings. Over the pandemic I have gotten bored and depressed. I don’t like my job or the city we live in. Because of these things I started craving change and started pushing my boyfriend away in a desperate attempt to gain control over my life. We don’t have a perfect relationship, and our recent talks about how I’ve been unhappy have helped identify a lot of things we can change and work on to be happier together.
We have come really close to breaking up a few times over the past month, with me almost always instigating/following through. This morning (I’m currently staying at my parents) I said something that made him want to walk away from the relationship for good. Leading up to that moment, he was always the champion of our love, saying I am the best thing in his life and he knows we can work through this. He knows how depressed and confused I’ve been about the right changes in my life to be happier, but I know leaving our relationship without working on it isn’t the right change to make and have told him this. This morning I told him I was still nervous about our future, and he took it very badly, saying it was too broken to repair if I can’t be consistent about wanting to work on things. One thing we talked about working on is being more honest about how were feeling, which is what I thought I was doing, but I can see how it hurt him and how its not productive to voice every doubt and fear I have about commitment. I am just so heartbroken and worried that I did ruin out relationship beyond repair. I don’t know what kind of advice I’m looking for, because I’m not sure he can forgive me for breaking his heart, but just talking (typing) about it is helping. 🙁 I’m so sad
3 comments
I don’t think you’ve ruined your relationship. I believe he was just hurt in that moment by your words and overreacted. He will calm down, and the two of you can talk. Explain to him when you’re both calm that you were just sticking to what you two promised, and felt you needed to share your concerns with him, be it for reassurance or just not wanting these worries to build up in your mind and cause you to do or say something that would cause more damage because you couldn’t let it out.
I personally believe the cause for almost all problems between people in any kind of relationship is a lack of understanding. A talk my fiance and I had a long time ago is that we need to have calm discussions about problems. No matter how hurt or angry either of us is, we need to talk calmly and not let our “explosive” emotions do the talking, amd we do it in a format similar to “this is the problem I’m facing, this is how I feel about it, this is what I think will help, how do you feel?”and then listen to the other person’s response.
Take this advice to heart and I’m sure the two of you can spend the rest of your lives together happily. You did not ruin your relationship, and you can use this situation as a chance to strengthen it instead. Good luck!
> This morning I told him I was still nervous about our future, and he took it very badly, saying it was too broken to repair if I can’t be consistent about wanting to work on things.
Gotta agree with him on this. If your issues are external to the relationship and you’re just venting about your job/location/etc it may get annoying long term but it’s still an us vs the world thing and is very manageable. But when you start voicing concerns about if you’re with the right person to that person, that’s internal and that’s not going to make them feel very close to you or like you value protecting what you have from the outside world.
Additionally, it’s hard to hang your hat on “I know leaving our relationship without working on it isn’t the right change to make and have told him this” if you’re consistently getting close enough to ending things and he either outright knows or is picking up on it. It’s like fake punching someone over and over and stopping just in front of their face then saying “you can’t get mad, I didn’t actually hit you”. People aren’t going to want to deal with that over and over whether you hit them or not.
Only he can tell you if he wants to keep trying.
Sounds a bit like you’ve been using his “champion of our love” work as an ego boost, and he’s all out of fucks to give. It’s time for the tables to turn.