My partner wants to constantly have long talks about emotions and it is becoming exhausting

I (32M) have been with my partner (25M) for about a year. Early on he let me know that he has suffered a lot of trauma, both physical and emotional from everyone around him – his parents, bullies, past friends, exes etc. Almost all our physical dates included long periods of him telling me about his bad experiences. I always felt horrible and tried to reassure him that I would never do those things and that my worst quality according to most is my stubbornness. I never get physical in arguments, I try to not be manipulative (some times I catch myself slipping), I am (almost brutally) honest and generally think that if you don’t like someone, you should cut ties with them (which I have done with multiple people, friends and family).

After a while we had to go LDR because of my job in another country. When we facetimed, he’d often be in a bad mood. It was usually some argument with his parents, which ruined his mood for the rest of the day. As he was already distressed, he’d be more snappy with me, which resulted in a lot of arguments along the LDR months. After an argument, I noticed that he would always need long, exhausting conversations, which would go in circles in order to feel like the argument had been solved. Even if I told him I understood his perspective and I would try to improve my attitude, he’d still sulk and say he didn’t feel satisfied and that he wanted the conversation to last longer.

Lately, it’s become a bigger issue. We’re currently non-LDR, as I’ve returned to my folks for the summer, and he will always try to be upset about something. The list of the triggers (in no particular order, non-exhaustive) of the past few months have been:

• Me not doing something minor he wanted in a video game we play together
• My mum’s meal prep food tastes too “frozeny” and he’d rather starve
• Me telling him to prepare something else if he didn’t like the existing food
• Me asking him to make me a coffee when he was making his
• My mum coming in the house (we live in the same building, but not apartment) to pick up something of hers
• The phone ringing
• My ex asking me something about work (we worked together in an ongoing project)
• My dreams
• His dreams
• Me telling him to stop wasting water/electricity (bills double when he’s around, even though we’re 3 and with him 4)
• The sea being kinda murky
• Soup too watery

One main issue is that whenever we talk, if I try to talk about my side, he will always try to inject something irrelevant about how my actions hurt him so that we never discuss my point. It has to be about him, it has to be him that has been mistreated, misjudged and attacked, and my experience is trivial in front of his insurmountable issues, such as his socks having a hole. It doesn’t help that he’s always misinterpreting my words because he’s struggling with using and understanding language (he’s told me it’s because of his high school trauma). He’s using wrong words and understanding my words incorrectly, but we’ve worked on that somewhat and I correct him so that our conversations make sense.

As you can guess, I have come to a breaking point regarding conversations about his feelings. They feel like punishment, since they must never be quick, the solution must not be provided early on and it needs to drag till Daylight savings time ends. As I mentioned earlier, even if I do everything right and I say all the right things, he will not be satisfied if it ends too quickly. Me trying to avoid the endless conversations has had some kind of conditioning effect on him, and even if we do talk he’ll keep it in the back of his mind and he’ll try to start a new conversation with the same issue when we are not in an argument, so that he feels satisfied with the length we’ve talked about the issue.

I’ve attempted to offer compromises, such as he can talk non-stop if he so wishes, but if I don’t have something to offer I will just let him speak, or if I have an issue with something he does, I get to talk about it, but he can’t bring up an irrelevant issue, so that our talk does not focus on him. He’s been able to do this once or twice, but I can see from his attitude afterwards that he doesn’t like not getting to do the talking. I know these are not ideal, but I am not a talker. For me an argument is solved when the initial problem is solved and the angry emotions subside. For him an argument is solved with at least 2-3 hours of talking, even if we are still angry and the issue persists.

Advice?

TL;DR: My boyfriend is always upset by something and wants to talk about it extensively. He struggles with expression and often misunderstands or miscommunicates, but it has become obvious that he wants the conversations to end only after he has been satisfied, and only if it means he was right. I am fed up with those conversations, he will not compromise with shorter ones or solutions.