Unsure how to feel about my (32M) girlfriend (28F) having very high standards about life in general. She seems to tie her self esteem to her image as a girl who 'has it all', and I don't think its healthy for her.

We've been dating since april 2019. We had very different upbringings. I grew up in a cramped apartment in Queens with 4 siblings in a working class neighborhood, she grew up in a nice suburb in a nice house. I started working at my uncles store at 15 and have mostly been consistently working since then, her first job was at 24 at an office, where she still works. She was pretty popular apparently in high school, and her parents sort of have treated her very much like a special princess. I think that her mindset is very, very high standards, for both herself and her lifestyle. She wants to balance everything for maximum responsibility and enjoyment, equally. I don't know entirely how to describe it, she just has incredibly high standards for her life. She fine-tunes aspects of her life to fit this image of 'her having it all'. She gets on trends a lot, she is on social media a lot, she sometimes comes off a bit obsessed with portraying this sort of modern chic highly-motivated productive health-oriented young person lifestyle.

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I mean, don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot of the stuff she does, but to me this stuff comes off as luxuries, and often a bit silly, whereas to her it almost comes off as a necessity. She HAS to do yoga at a dojo 4 times a week, she HAS to try out the new expensive yogurt place, she HAS to go to some weird winter spa in Colorado. She links this sort of stuff heavily to her self esteem, and when she doesn't get it, she gets upset, at mostly herself. It comes off a bit baffling to me, and this stuff isn't always a side of her that she shows me 24/7, she knows I find it silly, she sometimes teases me for being much more 'chill' than she is about life. But really I think she is kind of jealous and a bit desperate to not be the way she is about this stuff. She will go through phases where she sort of chills out a bit and just stops caring as much about her whole lifestyle... and its during those phases when she seems the happiest, and then she sort of relapses back into it. Her very high maintenance, high standards lifestyle, where she feels this constant need to be doing something productive, interesting, or as my cousin put it, 'self actualizing'. Not entirely sure what she meant by that but she basically was saying she constantly feels the need to maximize her potential in her life, socially and mentally, or else she feels she is missing out. It really does not help that her friends are very much like this to, a lot of them are also very heavily into social media and that whole entire lifestyle.

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Financially we can barely maintain this. She relies a lot on her parents money. When I go with her to do stuff though I am astounded at how expensive some of it is, and I cant always go with her. I suppose part of the perks of growing up very frugal in an apartment is that your brain automatically screams "NOOOOO" when someone asks you to come to an expensive weekend relaxation center in long island.

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The thing is, she is a very chill person socially. I think that she very much does a lot of this stuff for her social image and that is heavily tied to her self esteem, and the sort of world she lives in enables that. But I don't think she actually likes being this way, I mean, she has said about as much that she understands its ridiculous and that she knows its over the top and she finds it stressful. And with the pandemic, she has been just generally more chill about that stuff, especially considering she cant engage with it as much. But she still is somewhat of the same person in many ways. Its very little, subtle things which sort of give it away, like when she starts posting about a new book she reads or starts a new diet or she orders from some quirky little expensive hipster shop instead of the typical places we order food from. These things wouldn't be weird to anyone else, but with her its a part of a bigger trend.

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Anyways, does this seem like something she would 'get over' necessarily? Should she be going to therapy? Should I help? Should I tell her my feelings about it? Besides all of this, we get along really well, I mean we just very much click with each other despite being very different people. I've known her since she moved here, and I never thought we would end up dating but I am very glad we did.

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Tl;DR - - Girlfriend has a very high maintenance lifestyle and I don't really think its healthy for her.

Submitted January 31, 2021 at 08:00PM by kuikm157 https://ift.tt/3terpRw