I don’t know what to do… Let me tell you the story..
I’m old, my GF [33/f] and I [36/m] have been together for 4 years, and living together for 2.5 of those years. Our families know each other, we hang out with each other’s friends, our lives are completely intertwined at this point. When my GF and I first met, she expressed that she wanted to get married one day and have a family, and I also felt as though I could see myself doing that one day as well. Also, it bears stating that when we met - my then 30 y/o GF was still a virgin so I am literally the only guy she has been with (sexually).
Our relationship was good for the first couple years but I’d been hurt really badly by past GFs and I knew going into this, even if we did get married – I wanted to take my time getting into marriage as I understand that this is the person I will be spending the rest of my life with and I want to really know and understand that person before I commit. But alas, we became very committed without marriage and I was perfectly fine with that. Then, at just about the 2 year mark of our relationship – we had a massive blowout. We’d had conversations about marriage in the past, but one night after drinking with our friends my GF transformed into a different, meaner person and started hounding me about marriage. She said that I wasn’t serious about the relationship, started bringing up how her parents and my parents proposed to each other after a couple months and all her friends online were married. She told me I didn’t love her as much as she loved me because if I did, I would have proposed already. She was in tears.
Well, I love her very much but this completely crushed me. I always pictured the day I got engaged as out of nowhere, having a surprising romantic proposal – at one of our favorite spots, and being able to sweep her off her feet. But now that we had this blowout, I felt like if I did it any time soon it would feel forced – like I did it to appease her, not out of love. Many mean things were said, but we the next day – she went right back to acting like normal. She acted like everything was fine and we hadn’t just gotten in a huge fight the night before.
I love her, so I played along and things were fine for another few months until we went drinking again and bam – out came the anger. This time, it was even worse with her saying if I didn’t propose soon, she was completely done with our relationship, and that she would leave me. I was confused – I still hadn’t really gotten over the initial fight enough to be in a place to even get close to feeling ready to propose and here we were, back at it again. She really said some things this time that shattered some of my faith in the great relationship we built – I got in my head. “was getting married to ME the most important thing to her, or was it just getting MARRIED period?”. This time, she’d really expressed the urgency of the issue to her, and I just felt hurt and let down. Again, she acted like everything was fine. We continued hanging out with our respective families, making appearances, acting normal – being normal. But again, I was in no place to propose – these fights really hurt me. I always pictured that when I found the woman I was going to marry, the marriage would just really be an afterthought – a side effect of an amazing relationship between two people that couldn’t be without each other. But now, I feel like that piece of paper is everything to her, and It is our relationship that has taken the backseat. I tried expressing this to her in emails after these fights, and she sometimes acts like she gets it but continues to reiterate her dissatisfaction with the fact I haven’t proposed yet. Since I care about her and I want her to be happy, I still (a few months after the second blowout) started looking into ways to propose. She didn’t want me to do it without asking her dad first, and he lives 3 hours away (without LA traffic) so I had to figure out how to do that. My mom gave me her old wedding ring but it had issues and I couldn’t use it, and I was looking at engagement rings online as well. My heart was still sad because of some of the fights we’d had but I was hoping that getting married would make her happy and all our problems would magically disappear.
Cue to 6 months later, (this was last Friday) and she’s out late with coworkers. We were supposed to meet up and go to a mutual friend’s birthday party and she was supposed to be home at 8:30. She texts me at 8:30 saying she’ll be an hour later. No biggie and I was at a work friends house, so I just waited. Then, 8:30 rolls around and she says it’ll be more like 9:30. Okay, still fine. This continues until the final time is 10:30, at which point she finally arrives home at 11 and I get a text message from her that reads “I can’t do this anymore”. Ugh. She then goes into how the past 3 years have been so hard, she cries to herself on certain nights and telling me for years she wanted to get engaged but instead of buying a ring, I bought snowboarding goggles (to go snowboarding with her family btw) or an Xbox game. She said my priorities weren’t her. I know she thinks that was the issue but the issue was actually all the fights we’d had about getting married. I think if we didn’t do all that, it would have already happened but at this point – every last bit of the romance is gone. There is no way for me to do it and feel like it wasn’t forced, and for one of us not to harbor some form of resentment about it. This same night she also said she was going to take an Uber “somewhere” and couldn’t deal with me. When I pulled up to our apt, sure enough she was standing outside with a bag waiting for an uber. My heart was crushed. I’d been feeling she was slightly pulling away lately but now I could tell she was primed for another fight. She got in my car, we pulled into our shared garage and the yelling started. Neighbors stared. She told me she was done and even if I did propose now, she wouldn’t accept because she was sick of waiting. I’d shown her my priorities and it wasn’t her. She talked about how she would be moving her stuff out and how much it would hurt to tell our families we broke up. I looked in her eyes, she wasn’t there – she was done with me.
The next day, she went back to acting like everything was normal. I couldn’t do it. I keep going back to the look in her eyes and how she said we were done. How can she act like nothing happened? This was by far the worst fight yet, and our lease is up. I just got a new dream job and rather than being happy, I’m just stressed out with everything at home. I tried to keep my feelings bottled up but I ended up writing a super long email, detailing how I felt about everything. In looking at it, the email did seem like I may be ready to break up so she came home early that day and we had a (sober) heart to heart. I told her that these fights make me not want to propose, and after this one – I couldn’t see myself doing it anytime soon. She cried, I cried but at the end of it – I could tell she didn’t want to let me go. We didn’t end with any actual closure and now she is being nicer to me than she has been in years. She sends me texts just to say she loves me, and she kisses me all the time. But I can’t help it, part of me is now sad and I don’t know what to do. I keep seeing images of the way she was Friday and I’m just so torn on what to do next. Do I bring back up our conversation and let her know I don’t know if this is working? Or do I go on with business as usual, we sign another lease and wait for either the next fight to happen or for my (now unromantic and forced) proposal to make our problems go away? I feel she is clinging to this relationship right because she doesn’t want to lose me, but I just feel like I may not even be sure if I want to marry someone who acts this way. Am I an asshole for not having proposed yet? Marriage is such a big deal, it was never something I planned to jump into.. Am I overthinking things or am I right to be hurt by all this?
Also, I am a DJ and do podcasts and the new job I just got is even deeper into this field, I know it bothers her when I stay out late and I know that will increase as well with this new gig. I love her and I don’t want to hurt her, but I also know now I will not be proposing anytime soon and since our talk – so does she. Can anyone give me any advice? Do I end this 4 year relationship? My head and my heart are in knots because I know she is doing these things only because she loves me but I don’t know if I can do this forever. If we do get married, are we still going to have these issues?
Confused. Sad. Help!
TL;DR: My GF of 4 years wants to get married bad enough that we have been having blowout fights about it since 2 years into our relationship. Our families are intertwined. Everything else between us is fine but this can't continue.. She is acting like everything is fine now, and I don't feel that way. What do I do?
[link] [comments]
from Relationships https://ift.tt/2IzdzVr
No comments:
Post a Comment