After 5 dedicated months, I [26M] broke up with my girlfriend [28F] tonight. I love her deeply but our levels in emotional regulation are just too different, and tonight her lack of stability finally scared me into ending things.
For context, I am an emergency room clinician and after the things I have seen, nothing makes me lose my composure. My girlfriend, on the other hand, will cry at anything from being lightly startled, to remembering a dream where I was mean to her, to me not answering “I love you too” fast enough in response to her saying it. She doesn’t believe in herself – and by extension, has had a very hard time taking to heart how much I truly like her. Most of the compliments I give her are brushed off, while some would be questioned until she finds a roundabout reason to feel bad about herself via it. She also has a tendency to put herself in bad moods and then pine for pampering. For the past month, this has happened to some degree at least once per day that I have seen with her. Today, while attempting to do so once more, she crossed what I immediately registered to be an intolerable line.
While trying a bit too hard to initiate a play wrestle with me, she slid off of our bed a few feet and landed on her bum onto a soft carpeted floor. She began sobbing, and I didn’t coddle her because I was so turned off of things. She had put me through a similar test just last night where she intentionally stopped on a walk home with me and texted me once I was half a block ahead demanding that I return and walk with her rather because had decided she wouldn’t walk any further unless I held her hand. Not that she had told me until I was half a block ahead and would need to turn back to go to her. I obviously refused, stating she could easily catch up and we could hold hands from there. In response she took another path home and didn’t speak with me the rest of the evening. With that still kind of stinging in my mind I really couldn’t relate to her crying at all, and accidentally let loose a chuckle of disbelief. She accused me of laughing at her pain – after SHOVING her to the ground, no less. I shoved her to the ground? This is not the first time she has hurt herself through taking fun too far, only to put all of the blame on my physical actions when retelling the story, and hearing myself described as someone who would shove a woman to the floor terrified me. I asked her to leave my apartment and told her I would call her later. Shortly after, I told her on the phone that I didn’t feel safe, and that our differences in emotional expression don’t have any good outlook. We’ve communicated about her putting me through “trials” before, as her tendency for them had brought our relationship to the brink already once before, and she had told me she’d do better. But this was a different scare entirely.
I am suddenly struggling to come to terms with what I KNOW I had to do, and I guess I just feel like I will never have a girlfriend as wonderful as her again. She was fun, sweet, loved committing to the bit; I thought she beautiful; we liked the same foods, music, movies, all of it. But her instability was always almost too much – and today felt straight up dangerous for me. I guess I mostly needed to get that off my chest. I wasn’t perfect either, that’s for sure.
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Any reason you have is good enough to break up if you feel you’re not getting what you want out of the relationship.
As someone who has been in ED and seen the chaos it involves you likely need someone stable who you can lean on in the hard times. Good luck mate!
She acts very young for 28. I think you did the right thing.
lol the fact that you’re an ER doctor and have the patience for this is pretty impressive in itself. You did the right thing, she sounds like she has no emotional coping skills and idk I’m a girl so idk how I would react when dating someone like that but it’s very immature behavior. But also who TF does she think she is? Make you TURN around and walk with her hand in hand? You aren’t her bxtch, you are her man lol. And I get it, I like when guys walk next to me and not ahead but sometimes guys don’t think that way but instead of doing something like that I’d just say hey I don’t really like when you walk ahead of me, would it be cool if you walked beside me just because it’s makes me feel safe or something lol, I wouldn’t pull some princess stunt like that. You did the right thing man, there are too many fish in the sea, she has some growing up to do. You’ll find another beautiful, fun, etc girl that won’t do crazy shxt like that.