My [31f] partner [32m] has an obsession with online stores and it's hurting our relationship.
We've been together for more than a decade and this issue was always there, but now it's just intolerable. He would insist on discussing Chrismas presents in March, literally, pretty much daily.
He would spend hours browsing online stores and save many literal gigabites of images on his hard drive. The images would be of pretty much any random product he liked, and didn't even need, like toys (we don't have kids), pans, chairs, pots, sofas, shoes, cutlery, lamps, board games.
He would pressure me to accept gifts I didn't need: like he would see a pair of sports shoes and go on a tirade about how I need new shoes for the gym (I haven't been to the gym since March!), and would go on like a broken record until I accept. If I don't, he would say mean things.
He would insist on being the one to pick gifts for my family and argue with me about it, even though I would obviously know what my own parents would rather get. Again, many long months before the actual occassion.
He would show off his online store finds to me, and if I said I'm not interested, he would go "I just wanted to show you this" and keep going. If I spaced out and stopped listening he would be offended.
I don't even like having many things. To me it's materialistic and causes clutter. I am also a very frugal person, who values her health and experiences over trinkets. I also would rather have us save for our own place, and every board game we play just once and every overly expensive gift for grandma moves us further.
I have tried talking to him about it many times and it's hopeless. He would promise to tone it down and I would wake up in the night to him scrolling. He would wait for an opening in my boundaries to go back to his usual ways. My therapist seems to have given up, because instead of suggesting new communication strategies she just asks me to picture my life in five years if he doesn't change.
To me it looks like addiction but he refused to aknowledge that. Everytime I try to address this, he treats me like a critical parent who is just never happy about how he is.
I don't know how I can make him stop. He did start therapy recently but it feels like it's just so that I give him a break. We also had a couples therapy at some point but the therapist was clearly running a script and after wasting so much money we stopped going.
Tl;dr of all things, my partner seems to be addicted to online stores.
Submitted November 22, 2020 at 10:15AM by throwawayaddictskid https://ift.tt/3kV0sgD
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