Almost-4-year relationship has become draining to me and I don't know how to work it out. Should we move on?

tl;dr: My girlfriend is a "bad roommate" and this has been creating a lot of friction that has worn me down physically, mentally, and emotionally over the course of several months. I feel trapped and know neither how best to try and work things out with her, or how to move out and move on (largely due to finances).

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I (35m) have been dating the same girl (30f) since July 2016. Things have mostly gone well - *very* well - until maybe this past year.

We moved in together into an apartment we picked together in February 2018. We stayed there a year, and with a few bumps in the road that came from moving all of our everything into a shared space, things went well - just not with that apartment. We loved the space, but the complex was not secure and had shady management.

While living together, I sort of went all-in; I bought new furniture on credit, took out/back many of my things that I'd been storing with family across the country, and...for lack of a better way to put it, went "full domestic." I nested, basically. While I realized that things like the furniture put me in to credit debt, my job allowed me to pay that off pretty regularly, and since I tend to take care of expensive stuff that I buy, I fully intended for it to last for years.

This is not going well.

Despite solutions and proposed fixes, the furniture (which cost thousands) has been mistreated. Our nice coffee table has become my girlfriend's crafting workbench (despite having built a desk for this), and declawing our cats/buying more scratching posts has been veto'd.

In February 2019, we rented a house together. We love this place, but our landlord already raised our rent so we had to take on a roommate to reasonably afford it. Our roommate is overall pretty good; she's a good friend of my girlfriend and HER former roommate before we dated, and we're all friends, even if our schedules don't really line up and we really only see each other on weekends.

I'm the only person who cooks (she doesn't like to, and I like cooking very much) or cleans (including the roommate, but she mostly keeps to herself and doesn't make a mess); the latter, she loosely blames on her upbringing of having moved so many times and having a large, busy family living in trailers where is was never expected for them to clean up their things. After some months of this bothering me, we agreed to make a weekly/as-needed "chore" list to check off together (which I generally dislike, as it seems more "college-roommate-y," but we thought it's help; it hasn't). However, after three months of this, nothing has improved; I am regularly the only person doing most of these tasks, and when she does them, it's few and far between and often only partial. When this is brought up, we get in a tiff about how she's not used to doing all these things and she feels inadequate. If I leave things undone to show how bad it gets without my own effort, it either a) just doesn't get done at all, or b) is seen as passive-aggressive and frustrates her, and so back to square one.

There are more than a few other things that have suffered, too. Her physical health (and mine) has suffered despite promises to ourselves and each other to practice self-care. Her mental health (and mine) has declined and while I have seen doctors and therapists several times and have made efforts to change some unhealthy patterns in my life, she has not (since her physical health has worsened, she is now afraid to see most doctors because she believes that they will "fat-shame" her; this *did* happen once last year, to her credit, so I suppose this has some foundation to it).

Perhaps most frustratingly, we don't really do anything together anymore, either, unless it's her call. We used to go running or biking or work out together, but now she stays home and reads. We used to read together, and now we don't. We used to watch each other play games, now we don't. We used to go to the movies, but now we don't.

She wants to travel; so do I. But I can't afford it, because of the debt I've incurred. She is upset by this, but she would also be upset if we didn't have the furniture. I'm frustrated because the furniture is being ruined. I want to protect and refinish the furniture, but she wants to save money for us to go on vacation. So it goes.

For months, I have felt that I have no recourse anymore. It's like our lifestyles are now incompatible. I...I feel like I want to leave? Maybe not actually, but I at least feel like I am under enough pressure to want to run away, at least for a while. Financially, I cannot. I have enough debt currently and not-enough-saved to be able to afford/be approved to rent an apartment basically anywhere in a 30-mile radius. I have no family on this side of the country, and a great job that I do not want to leave.

I don't know what to do and I feel trapped.

(I wrote this intermittently between tasks at work, so I apologize if it seems super-disjointed and doesn't make a ton of sense.)

Submitted January 31, 2020 at 08:53AM by TinManJoe https://ift.tt/2Oh9pTT