I (26 F) and my partner (26 M) have been getting in a lot of fights lately. We have been together for 2 years now and we recently moved in together this month. We used to live together in the past but I had a miscarriage and I had severe depression and I treated him like trash so I asked him to move back to his parents until I heal because I didn’t want to hurt him and I’m an awful person when I’m in pain. I didnt want to be that person and I really wanted him to be happy (of course I wanted to be happy as well) so I decided to seek therapy for a few months. After I felt I was good enough to be around people again, I thought moving in together would strengthen our relationship but unfortunately it didn’t. I’m not going to put all the blame on him because I know that I also contribute to the fights. We’re just so different. I’m emotional and he’s logical. we’re really similar in many ways with our likes and interests, and my emotional side and his purely logical side balance each other out, but there are times when we get into arguments that he is completely not able to see my side. I understand he has a different perspective and I try to see things from his side, which I feel like I’m able to at times and we are usually pretty good at communicating. But sometimes he will blatantly admit that he cannot see from my perspective and he believes his perspective is the best because it is “strictly logical”. I think that you need to have a balance of emotions and logic because everyone comes from different experiences and therefore people have different perspectives. However, it’s frustrating when we get into arguments and he shut downs emotionally which can hurt my feelings and I end up compromising my point of view for his “rational” views since I know he won’t understand my side. Is there an end to this? I just feel like we can never communicate properly because he believe he is right and my emotions are invalid because I’m emotional.
Tldr; boyfriend is logical, I’m emotional can this relationship work?
8 comments
It just sounds like you two are incompatible. Every pair works differently. Not everybody has to have a balance of logic and emotions to work. It might be more common, but that doesn’t make it right for everyone. You can have two logical people work well. You can have two emotional people (unlikely) that could work well. It all comes down to compatibility though. Two incompatible people will not work no matter what.
If I’m honest, I think he doubled down on the logical stuff as a defense mechanism. He’s a human being too. Just like you, he also has emotions. Emotions that got absolutely fucked all the way up when the love of his life had a miscarriage, and the fucked all the way back down when she pushed him away.
Listen, you weren’t wrong for doing what you needed. You went through hell. All I’m saying is, so did he. However logical he was before, he’s hiding behind that shell twice as hard now. You blame him for not being open to your perspective? It didn’t go well for him. He may not have even been able to grieve.
Stop fighting with this side of him. Work with him to open the doors back up.
A logical standpoint is not an excuse for arrogance. If he is so hamstrung by his logical mind, than no, this will not get better. Logically, there isn’t a problem to him because he’s not compromising his logical standpoint.
Logic and emotions are not estranged from one another, infact, in many aspects, they guide eachother.
He is hiding his incongruence for logic, which is surprisingly illogical.
I mean, the problem is he’s a fool, so that’s hard to fix. If he insists his arguments are logical, you can ask him what his axioms are and how he chose them. You can actually ask him to draw the chain of logic. You will quickly find that he can’t. Because any human who actually does that (and I know some who do) will admit that their axioms are based on emotions, since that is how humans work. Which is why people who are actually logical respect and value emotions.
I am the logical one, and my wife is the emotional one. I will tell you one thing: using logic as a crux to bypass empathy, or even sympathy, is not a characteristic that I ever want to have. I tend to be over pragmatic and have to snap myself back to the reality that I am talking to a person that has feelings, and you better damn well know that said person is ENTITLED to their feelings. There’s always a struggle between what is actually the ground truth versus what is being projected to be the truth. Are you actually angry? Anger is a secondary emotion usually shrouded by insecurity, guilt, fear, etc. If you take time to be transparent about your feelings, then logic can help both parties understand their frustrations with one another. At the end of the day, if you truly care about your SO, you’ll actually have empathy for them. I absolutely take more time to get to that point because I don’t understand my SO’s perspective, but it’s not going to stop me from trying. How would you feel, after some sort of trauma in your past, when your partner all of the sudden triggers past pains from it? Would you immediately tell your partner that this current experience reminds you of that, or would you shut down and just claim that “you’re being emotional and can’t deal with this”? Communication, empathy, understanding, all of these things lead to healthy resolutions. Shutting down is actually a relatively normal behavior. Is it the most healthy one? No. But this might be your partner saying that they need some space and won’t be able to verbalize their feelings at the moment. The real problem lies when what people say is meant to hurt one another. If that’s ever the case, then someone needs professional help. Being kind can be so difficult when you’re so headstrong and set on your opinion. At the end of the day, is the fight going to harm someone, will it lead to a significant loss of money, will it alienate you from friends or family, will someone be physically or mentally hurt? If so, then you’re having an actual dispute. Otherwise, it’s just surface level things being exacerbated by projected feelings. At the end of the day, just be kind to one another, to start.
Can you provide an example or two of one of these arguments?
“Woahoa, what I want to know is,
Are you kind?”
My favorite lyric of all time.
This guy isn’t even trying to be kind.
Someone who tells you they believe their perspective is the best because it is “strictly logical” sounds an awful lot like the person that tells everyone how smart they are.