TL;DR: boyfriend and I have strong communication and a lot of mutual respect and trust. However there are some fundamental incompatibilities I can’t seem to get over.
I (24F) have been with my partner (27M) for three years now. The story is pretty straight forward. We met at a shitty retail job in college and hit it off. There are many great things about the relationship. We have pretty good open communication and honesty. We laugh and enjoy similar media. We take good care of each other and there is a strong foundation of mutual respect. Both of our careers are doing well for the moment and we generally try to encourage growth in one another. We have fun together.
However, there are some issues. For starters, I have pretty much never been single in my adult life. I was in a pretty bad relationship from 17-21 and I think that I may have used my current partner as a safe place to escape. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t love him. But that means that I have been in a relationship in one form or another for 7 years. I feel a deep need to get to know myself outside of a relationship. To be able to be secure in myself and my self esteem. But I’m deeply scared of being single. I think I could be pretty picky and I’m of course imagining that I’ll never find someone else compatible.
To make matters more complex, many of these feelings about wanting to be single started when I developed feelings for someone at my job. I noticed that this man had some things that my partner did not. He had high self esteem and he was very independent. We were interested in more similar topics. Our future career goals were more similarly aligned, and we had more intellectually stimulating conversations (this is very important to me it turns out). I had a sneaking feeling that the feelings might have been mutual, but I never acted on them. He left recently and I’ve felt incredibly empty. I also thought when he left that I would be able to return more easily to my partner, but it has only made me want to break it off more. I thought that my mind was once again wanting to jump from relationship to relationship. So when he left and it wasn’t an option, I thought things would settle. They haven’t.
I think another glaring issue is that my partner is finding it hard to have interests and friends outside of our relationship. This has put a lot of strain on me to “make him happy”. He says that when we’re together, he is happy. Subtly implying, that when we’re not together, he is not happy. I have been going out with friends more often than usually lately. So I understand that he is wanting more time together. But I feel like our 20s are for growth and self discovery. We should be outside in the world discovering what we like to do. Not inside constantly with each other and no one else.
Also, I seem to have lost some physical attraction to him. Or I possibly never had it to begin with. I am a person more into fitness and health, and it seems to not be an important value for him. Our sex life has of course taken a hit because it’s hard to have enthusiastic sex with someone you’re not fully attracted to.
After writing all of this it’s occurring to me that there are more problems than i initially realized. We have talked about every single issue here already (except the physical attraction issue). And we seem to be at an impasse. He wants to give it more time and see if we can work on the issues. I find myself completely out of emotional bandwidth to do the work, but also petrified to leave.
Has anyone else experienced a similar situation? There’s no abuse. And there a lot of love. But maybe some incompatibilities are too big to fix. Any advice on how to get over the fear of being single?
Comments
It’s fairly common in fact and it means that the two of you need to actively develop both an emotional connection with each other and that you are starting to look for that emotional connection outside of your relationship with this random dude. That’s new relationship energy right there and even if you were to leave your boyfriend and pursue the other person, there’s a good chance that that would likely fade as well. To be blunt: it’s actually incredibly difficult to find a partner. You truly have strong communication skills with, and if your partner is already like that, throwing it away without actually taking a good look at your relationship is not exactly the BEST idea, but you do you.
If I had to take a guess, we probably have something along the lines of responsive desire, and your relationship is covered it up until now due to both the new energy from your existing relationship and the fact that your partner has such strong communication skills with you. Sneaking suspicion or not, if he’s around your age, he’s probably trying to get in your pants. I personally have found the dating within my workplace has been a terrible idea, because I don’t like to mix work and pleasure when inevitably the relationship goes wrong or if there are workplace policies against it.
Once again you do you, but terrified of being single isn’t an excuse to stay, however it does sound like that. You’re not aware of how you’re attraction to other people exactly works and breaking up with a loyal partner that actively communicates with you to see if the grass is greener on the other side does seem a little silly… However, you do you. Good luck.