Hi, I’m looking for some advice regarding my current relationship from people who have been blindsided or people who have successfully navigated serious issues. For some background, me (30m) and my girlfriend (29f) have been together for a bit over 2 years, we do not live together and there are no children involved. Also probably worth me mentioning that I have a whole host of mental health problems, most of which I’m really only coming to terms with now, I’m now on medication and in therapy. My therapist has suggested I may have something called an avoidant attachment style, and It seems to fit.
I have a tendency to fall really hard at the start of the relationship, then after a year or 2 I notice that maybe this isn’t what I want for the rest of my life, and I leave. This is about where I am now and I can feel myself detaching already.
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have got into any relationship before I got this stuff addressed and fixed myself, that is very much on me, but I didn’t even know these problems were a thing until recently and ultimately, we are where we are.
On to the substance of this post, what are are the problems in the relationship? Well, my girlfriend is an incredible person, she’s kind and smart and successful. In terms of quantifiable problems, the only one that has come to the surface is that she wants children one day and I am not sure I have it in me to be a consistent and available father, we have had this chat and she seems convinced that I will change my mind in the next couple of years. Having that conversation was bloody awful for me, felt like a bomb was going off in my chest. The other less quantifiable problems are for some reason I don’t really enjoy spending time with her anymore, but Im struggling to pin down if that’s just because I don’t really enjoy doing anything anymore or if it’s more about her. I’m also concerned that maybe we don’t have enough in common for this to last for years and years and the thought of living with her doesn’t exactly thrill me. None of these have been addressed with her.
So what’s my questions? Those of you who are good at successfully navigating conflict, how do you go about discussing your feelings in a way that doesn’t sound accusational and yet still gets to the route of the problems? At what point and how do you determine that these problems are not fixable?
Those of you who were blindsided by a partner, I do not mean to drag up painful memories but what do you wish that your partner had said or communicated before hand, what would giving you space to talk and the chance to fix things have practically looked like?
I ask because I think in previous relationships I hsve been truly awful at conflict resolution and even if this relationship doesn’t work, I would like one of mine to some day, and If that’s going to happen I need to improve this.
Thanks for reading, any advice welcome.
TLDR: I suck at communicating and need advice on how to successfully navigate conflict in my relationship.Also I would like to know what a good faith effort to fix a relationship looks like