Honestly, I don’t really know if it’s right or wrong to post on Reddit but everything I try ends up in an argument and I just need a few opinions or advice.
My boyfriend and I are together for 15 years. We live together for over ten years, we grew up together and I can’t imagine my life without him.
I went through his transition with him (when we started dating he didn’t realise it yet), we went through a year of long distance relationship with a whole continent between us and grew from school kids to working adults.
We both are neurodivergent which he only figured out in the last few years while I got diagnosed way earlier (it was already talked about it when I was a child but because I‘m a woman I couldn’t be autistic back then lol)
Our relationship was never the perfect „we never argue and are always so happy“ relationship. We both have our flaws and both have strong opinions but it always worked out somehow.
Over the years I had trouble with staying in jobs while my boyfriend kept working and sacrificing his mental health for us which now drove him in a burn out and he isn’t able to work his normal job anymore.
But – we found a solution for us and we are currently working together and are selfemployed. The work is with animals and it‘s 6 days a week and exhausting but I am trying to make room for him to have at least two „half-off days“ plus our whole off day we have together. (He prefers the half off days as he can sleep on two days a week instead of just one complete day off). I don’t have any special off days or breaks as the work is too much otherwise.
So, enough backstory, now onto the problem:
a few years ago my boyfriend started a hobby.
It is something rather time consuming and expensive, he needs to drive through the country to conventions for it.
Already in the beginning I made clear: you can go to the conventions, but not every single weekend.
We agreed he can go to a four day convention once a month and if it‘s something close where he can just go for a day and come back in the evening we’ll decide together it there is time for it.
This kind of worked out, even if he sometimes booked two conventions a month and told me to stop being angry about it. I was able to get over it.
Over the years we agreed on two more things:
– he needs to find someone to help me out with our (not mine, our!) horses as I’m not able to do a workload for two all alone and care for our horses on top of it
– he needs to text me at least once when he arrived so I know he arrived safely (and if he wants he can put away his phone for the rest of the weekend afterwards)
The last point is the reason I am currently writing this post.
He knows I have anxiety and something happening to him makes me worry. He drives 3 to 5 hours all alone and I just want to know that he arrived at the place he was supposed to arrive. Even our friends told him it’s something he should do as it‘s nothing exhausting for him, just a short text.
And now he‘s gone for three days and I didn’t receive anything from him. No text, he doesn’t read my texts, he just ignores me.
I see that messages go through (we are in a few group chats with friends and I can see he received all of our messages!) so he can’t tell me he didn’t have service at that place (which sometimes happens but then I see that the messages haven’t arrived).
And I know that he thinks him messaging me is overrated and i shouldn’t expect that of him. He keeps telling me he „forgets“ it even if i know that he is glued to his phone usually. He uses it to navigate to the place. It‘s nothing he can forget. Like I don’t want to know where he is or who he is with, I don’t want to control him, I just want him to do the things he agreed with.
And while he is gone I was looking into our shared calendar and saw that in the next 8 weeks he will be gone for 4 times. Which is every second weekend.
And if I want to go to an event or something with him and there‘s an convention, there‘s no way he would even consider doing something with me instead of driving away.
If I try to talk to him he just gets angry and tells me I want him to stop doing the hobby and he needs it for his mental health.
But that‘s not it. I don’t like the hobby, yes, but I don’t care if he does it. I just not want to be left alone with a workload for two while he doesn’t care about any agreements.
He starts threatening to leave me if I persist we talk about it and that we have agreements and I don’t think that’s a fair reaction. …
I just feel like I am loosing him to a hobby and my question is how do I talk to him without him getting so angry with me?
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Obviously, he is addicted to this “hobby” and to being an inconsiderate jerk-0ff.