I (25F) have a boyfriend (30M) of 3 years and since I was 13 I was never truly single. I was jumping from one relationship to another and I wasn’t single even for one month in my dating life.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my boyfriend. He’s the best man in the world. He is kind, funny, would do anything for me, and we share so many interests. I feel like at home when I’m with him. I’m not scared he’ll cheat on me and I can imagine a future with him.
He has flaws, of course. He’s incredibly lazy, weights 130 kg (287 lbs) and lives a really unhealthy lifestyle. Think fast food, soda, no exercise. When we met, I was active, excited about life, had goals. In the first year of our relationship, I gained 13kg (29 lbs) and I swear I also lost all of my drive. I come home from work, cook, eat in front of the TV, go to sleep. Repeat. That’s my life now. I feel like I’ve aged 30 years in 3.
My problem is, that I don’t feel like I have a personality. I feel like a girlfriend. A wife. A roommate. That’s it. I don’t have friends, I don’t have hobbies, I don’t have crazy stories or memories to laugh about. I was just an girlfriend for my whole adult life and that’s it.
And now, my biggest fear is getting pregnant.
Because if that happens, I know I’ll completely lose myself.
I already feel like I’m disappearing and a child would just finish the job.
I crave the freedom, I want to have something I never had. I want to move to a foreign country and volunteer on a farm, learn to surf, collect memories and live some crazy stories, have a friend group with friends for life, I want to act like a young girl which I still am. I feel like my youth is just slipping through my fingers and I will never get it back.
At the same time I can’t just leave my life that I now have. We have a dog and cat together, we bought an apartment, I have a beautiful relationship with his family, but still, I feel like there’s a version of me in another timeline who took a different path. And she’s out there, sunburned, salty-haired, laughing with strangers who became best friends.
I feel like there is still something waiting for me,
I can feel it in my bones, completely different life. Something big. But I can’t quite grasp it, and it’s killing me slowly.
Sometimes I wish I could clone myself and live both lives at once.
Does anyone experienced something similar? How did you decide and how things turned out in the end?
Comments
I feel like a relationship is supposed to bring out the best version of you. Its where you are supposed to experience life together. We have mostly interpreted that to mean that it means living together, buying property and so on. But i believe that it means everything you want to do as well like moving and traveling.
I understand you and i often feel this way as well. The answer is to communicate with your partner about it. Tell him point blank that you feel stuck in routine and you would like to do these things that will fulfill you.
You deserve to feel and experience these things with your partner. If you feel that you havent been heard, then that will be telling.
“Love doesn’t hold, it liberates” Maya Angelou
If it feels like you’re trapped in your own routine, you should really talk to your partner about your needs. Most of the time, the conversation we fear so much is way gentler in reality than the version we’ve built in our heads, so give it a go !
And then you should do something out of your confort zone, to prove yourself that you’re still willing to learn about life
Do it as the first act of resistance for yourself
It doesn’t mean throw the life that you built away, it can be 2 weeks on hike, sign up for an impro club, start to write a book, go on a solo trip…
Something that reconnects with you and makes YOU feel alive. It’ll built your confidence and your thirst to live your life 100%.
The books that helped me with this : courage by osho / most of the books of Maya Angelou / bell hooks – All about love / virginia woolf of one’s own / Jane eyre charlotte bronte
Good luck on your journey
I hear you. You don’t have to leave the relationship, there might well be a case of the grass not being greener and trading one type of loneliness for another, but is there anything stopping you from starting or continuing hobbies and making new friends now? I and my partner take little trips separately, personally I look forward to having my own little adventure a couple of times a year to enjoy my own company and meet new people but always ending up missing my other half when I’m away. It might even motivate him to up his game.