My girlfriend (27F) is increasingly unhappy with my long time dream/new hobby and has given me (25M) an ultimatum

Using a throwaway account because I know she knows my username and looks it up once in a while. I've been dating "Jenna" for 3 years, she's my first serious relationship, I can see us getting married in the future, all that good stuff. Even considering how much our relationship has been strained recently, she really is the best thing that's ever happened to me and I'd be devastated if I lost her, which is why "just break up" doesn't really seem like a viable option to me.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with movies. My dream was to one day write and direct a movie myself, and being the nerd I was I spent pretty much all my time writing screenplays and doing research on my favorite movie directors and screenplay writers. This was heavily discouraged by my family and eventually when I was 15 I was forced to give up all my hobbies related to movies when my parents threatened to cut off all support. This left me with a pretty big emotional wound, and even after I became able to financially support myself and move out after college I couldn't really bring myself to pick up screenplay writing as a hobby again. Jenna was the one who encouraged me to look into it again, as she could very clearly see my passion whenever we went out to watch movies or talked about directors, and thanks to her support I was able to reclaim my hobby. So far it's only been a year, but I write pretty fast and already have several screenplays in their fourth and fifth revisions, and I've received many very positive reviews from both friends and professionals. My quality of life has honestly soared ever since and I'm honestly so happy.

Now onto the juicy relationship drama. About half a year ago I noticed that Jenna didn't seem as enthusiastic about my screenplays as she used to be in the beginning. She's a brilliant artist herself and I very much consider her a huge part in my creative process. When I first started writing, she sometimes seemed even more involved in my stories than I was, and we used to stay up all night discussing the characters, which background scores I should use, and reviewing what I had written down so far. Now she never brought up my scripts unless I did, gave canned generic responses when I asked her for her opinions, and seemed almost bored when I sent her my screenplays for review. I worried that maybe in my excitement I had neglected our relationship in favor of talking about movies and screenplays, so I cut back on how much I talked about my hobby with her and made a huge effort to concentrate on her interests (which honestly overlapped a lot with my hobby), take her out on more dates, and generally focus on her.

While all this was happening, I made a few friends through my hobby and somehow got in touch with a couple of professionals who apparently really liked my screenplays. Suddenly my world was flipped upside down and I found myself on the phone discussing localizing one of my favorite screenplays to possibly be produced by a fairly large company outside the US. I was of course ecstatic, after all this had been my biggest dream since I was 7 and it was so close to actually happening. Jenna, on the other hand, almost seemed irritated. When our friends congratulated me, she always made a point to add a snarky comment about how cheesy the company's other movies were (they kinda do have a reputation for that at least in the states). She started completely ignoring anything I said that was remotely related to movies or screenplays, immediately changing the topic or just pretending she didn't hear me. At the same time she made a point to fawn over famous movie directors or writers on her social media, sometimes going as far as to tag me in posts with comments like "you wish haha." (I actually took that straight from her twitter, and yes it hurt.) I straight out asked her multiple times if she was unhappy with my hobby, and she replied every single time that no, she was very interested, she was as passionate about my scripts as I was, and even seemed upset that I would even ask that. If I talked about her behavior and how I interpreted it as her being annoyed at my hobby, she immediately became defensive and told me I was overreacting and that she was hurt that I'd ever think she would be unsupportive. I left these conversations feeling even more confused than before.

This all came to a head a couple days ago. We had a few friends over and were having a pretty good time when one of our friends brought up my "movie deal of the century" in a joking manner. This devolved into our friends taking jabs at me saying stuff like how I better not forget them when I became famous or if I'd add a song and dance segment to my movie script, so basically we were all being immature and silly. At this point Jenna abruptly got up saying she was sick of all the movie talk and left to make a phone call, which promptly shut everyone up. It was bad enough that after she left, our friends actually started talking about how it was obvious that Jenna hated my hobby. After they left I tried to talk to Jenna about what had happened, and apologized for the conversation just suddenly becoming all about my hobby. This did not go well. She blew up, saying she was sick and tired of trying to be supportive, but she just didn't think my screenplays were any good and it frustrated her to see that everyone else was coddling my delusions of success. She was especially angry about my most recent screenplay, which is actually very personal to me as it's sort of autobiographical about growing up in an extremely fascist country with very outdated views on human rights. She accused me of being unprofessional because I was too attached to my characters, since "real" screenplay writers should only view characters as tools to tell a story, told me nobody wants to hear about any of the depressing shit I had to witness growing up in said country, and finally claimed that the only reason I was writing it was because I just wanted everyone to wallow in my own pity party about not being born in the US. This, well, stunned me, because her accusations were just so bizarre and far from the truth. I don't have any delusions of grandeur or success, I just really like writing. I asked her what she wanted me to do, and she stormed off saying that if I kept this ("this" presumably being continuing to write screenplays as a hobby) up, I'd soon have to choose between having her in my life and surrounding myself with scripts nobody wanted to read. I've never seen her this angry, or this vicious, in the entire duration of our relationship.

Currently I've completely withdrawn from talking about anything related to movies around her, and that seems to please her somewhat. But now I don't know what to do. I don't know where that outburst came from, and if there's anything I could have done to prevent it. I thought I'd done a good enough job focusing on her and her interests, and the past half year or so I've barely even mentioned anything about my scripts to her. But now it seems I can't even talk about them to friends or acquaintances if there's any chance of it coming back to her in any shape or form. I don't want to lose her, but I also really don't want to lose this hobby. How should I move on from this if she refuses to have any sort of conversation about it? It honestly feels like I'm walking on eggshells. I could really use some outside perspective.

tl;dr: I really like writing screenplays, and my girlfriend encouraged me to get back into the hobby of writing them about a year ago. She has slowly become less and less happy about my hobby, and basically told me a few days ago that either I stop writing screenplays or she leaves. I don't want to lose either.

Submitted November 14, 2018 at 12:31PM by throwaway03192 https://ift.tt/2PWRROP