My boyfriend treats me well, gets along with the family, and has a lot of kindness and enthusiasm for me and our relationship.
I struggle with the fact that my life has been a bit... difficult. Mental illness, addiction (sober 5 years), childhood bullshit, all plays a role in how I manage my life today. I am very treated, but I still struggle. I feel like I don't have any of that struggle in common with him, in any capacity, and it leads to some awkward interactions with a lot of blank staring and uncomfortable silence. He really tries to understand, but he doesn't fully get it at any level. I know I have more shit going on than an average person and I don't expect things to match up and just make sense all the time, but he doesn't get any part of it.
His mother prides herself on keeping her family in a "happy bubble" for their entire lives, and he has always gotten along with people in school, been successful, and has zero hangups or general life problems that many people experience at some point.
I know that it might sound a bit unhealthy or bizarre, but I wish at times that he had more emotional nuance. His upbeat and constantly surface-level understanding of my feelings is not ill-intentioned on his part, but it makes it hard for me to be open, and harder for me to want to discuss his own feelings when usually those feelings are "great day, I don't think about things that stink, hooray!"
It's just getting old for me, and I feel some level of envy at his life experience. I am happy for him that he's had an easy path, and I don't wish negative experiences on him, but I just want more genuine empathy rather than grasping at ways to understand. It takes away from a lot of my feelings on him as it comes across as emotional immaturity, and I'm not sure that it should.
Am I thinking about this all wrong? Am I being an asshole worrying about this?
TL;DR: I have not had an easy road, boyfriend has had the easiest road I could think of, and we struggle to find common ground on life experience. I don't know if I'm the one who is the problem.
Submitted November 28, 2019 at 09:20PM by confusdthrowaway1 https://ift.tt/34DcOmg
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