Dear Lily27:

You met your boyfriend Sept 2018: he was about 19 or 20, you were 21 or 22 . He later got a job offer in another country, 7 hours away by plane, and the two of you moved together to the new country in Sept 2019, a year into your relationship. At first the two of you stayed in an Airbnb studio while you looked for a job and the two of you looked for an apartment.

During that time you were alone in the studio a lot because he worked. You looked for a job and found two, the first you hated so you quit it. You were fired from the second because of the pandemic. Spending a lot of time alone, you missed your family and friends in your home country. The two of you didn’t get along, you brought up issues that were never resolved, “until things exploded again to do the whole thing over”.

You currently feel demotivated, like a failure, doubting that you want to be with your boyfriend, not feeling for him what you felt before, not feeling close to him -“The closer we are (or have to be because of the quarantine) the further we stray from each other”, and you blame and “resent him for everything.. missing my friends and family, not having a good job while he does, just being unhappy.. He never cooks, never cleans up, never does the washing… it feels like I’ve put my life on hold to take care of him here… he will never realise how much I truly love him”.

And now,  my input: the title of your thread is “Let go or keep  going?”- I vote for letting go. Seems to me that he is a nice guy, a hard working man (and this is impressive considering he is only 21!), an honest man who doesn’t like a complicated type relationship: not willing or  not equipped to dive into what he can’t fix. And he can’t fix your unhappiness or the fact that you didn’t get the job you wanted, or that you hated the job you did get.. or the pandemic, he can’t fix the pandemic.

For as long as you blame and resent him for your choice to leave your home country and move to a new country, for as long as you blame him for what is out of his control, better for his sake, that you leave him.

I am wondering: were you really happy with your family and friends back in your home country?

anita

Dear Lily27:

You are very welcome.

“for the first time it doesn’t feel like me against him, it feels like us against the situation”- this is the hallmark of a healthy, loving relationship.

“It was always due to circumstances that I felt like I couldn’t be fully happy”- people who experience unhappy childhoods, carry that early life unhappiness throughout their adult lives: all through changing locations/ people/ jobs/financial circumstances, etc.  There are moments of getting high on life, when experiences are new (ex., the honeymoon phase you mentioned), but that newness dies out and we are back to experiencing that early childhood experience.

“deep down I always feel like something is missing”- this is what I believe you experienced as a child, for years. I wonder what it was.

If your guy is an honest, trustworthy, decent, hard working person, then don’t leave him just yet. The something that is missing is not in him or in the relationship, it is within you. In the future, you can evaluate the relationship and figure out if there is something significantly missing in it. But so far, seems to me that you projected that early life something-is-missing into him and the relationship with him.

– And don’t rush to go back to your family where .. something is still significantly missing and where you were unhappy.

What do you think?

anita

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by .

Dear Lily27:

I think that you were very unhappy as a child, understandably. I think that that something-missing that you currently feel (“I always feel like something is missing”) is the same thing that was missing for you when you were a child: a stable loving home with two happy parents, happy to be with each other and with their children- a happy family unit. What you had instead was a divided family and lots of moving around: “moved houses often.. pack bags all the time to go  spend the weekend at my dad’s house or living at my grandparents for a while”.

You perceive your boyfriend to never had that missing-piece in his life: his “parents are still together and he has  lived with them in the same house his entire life.. His entire life has seemed the same up to now and he never had to deal with drastic changes.. never having dealt with divorce”

Your anger at your boyfriend is palpable: “I resent him for everything. Missing my friends and family, not having a good job while he does.. I basically don’t feel appreciated at all, he takes me and everything for granted. He never cooks.. He takes it for granted that I moved here with him.. it feels like I’ve put my life on hold to take care of him here. I don’t feel  like he wants to invest in me emotionally… And now I don’t know if I still love him”.

I think that as a child you were angry that you didn’t get to have the lives of other, fortunate children.

An unhappy and angry child turned an unhappy and angry young teenager and now, young adult: “I have been feeling unhappy since we got here.. it is not just our circumstances.. the quarantine.. .. The truth is that I was never really 100% happy.. I either was doing well in school but I was missing a boyfriend. Or either in a relationship while not doing well in other fields of my life.. deep down I always feel like something is missing. Because even if I am with a good guy, I still think it could be better”.

“I’ve always thought that I was okay with my childhood as nothing majorly tramatising happened”- we often think of trauma as having to do with blood and broken bones, starvation or incest. But it takes way less than those things to traumatize a child. A child is a very vulnerable little person.

Your experience was traumatizing enough, so much so that you wrote: “I don’t think that I’ll ever feel  ready to marry a guy and have children because of my parents… I don’t want to put them in the same situation as me”.

“But I don’t know how to recover from this childhood, if that’s even possible.. You have advice on how to truly dealt with it?”-

– it will take a combination of things:

1. More emotional understanding of your childhood; deep hurt and anger need to be expressed and processed so that they lose their intensity, be contained in the past, in the there-and-then, and no  longer project themselves into the here-and now.

2. Emotional regulation: you will need to further develop your ability to experience painful emotions and not get overwhelmed by them. This is necessary for #1 above, to be done, and it is also necessary as you control your anger from being projected at your boyfriend, that is, you learn to endure feeling angry at your boyfriend without turning that anger against him in covert or overt ways.

3. Understanding that the children of parents who did not divorce, such as your boyfriend when he was a child, didn’t have it that good. We only imagine that other people have great lives because they didn’t experience our specific challenge. But there are many ways to mess up a child in a home where married parents living together, even living in the same house and never leaving. Seeing that reality will help you feel less anger at your boyfriend.

There is more, but I will wait for your response and we can communicate further, take your time.

anita

Dear Lily27:

You are welcome and thank you for your expressed appreciation and for telling me to take my time.

“I feel like I shouldn’t be ‘whining'”- talking about the most powerful experiences in your life (your childhood) is not whining. Some people will tell you  it’s whining because that’s what their parents told them when they expressed any dissatisfaction: stop whining!

Sometimes people whine, as in going on and on about the same thing while not being willing to resolve anything. But this is not true to who are: “I am ready to do what it takes, because I owe it to my future children and myself”.

“it is happening inside of me. Nobody can see what my mind is doing to me”- this is why it is important that you let people know what’s inside you. It is not whining- it is part of healing. But you have to be selective as to who you talk  to. Lots of people don’t want to hear what triggers their own unresolved issues.

“People often tell me that I’m actually lucky because I was so  young when they divorced and I don’t remember them fighting”- like I wrote to you in my earlier post, people think that because you didn’t experience the very same bad experience they had, that you are lucky, not realizing that you too had bad experiences.

Here is one bad experience you had, repeatedly: “My mom would start dating somebody and I would meet them and their kids and then I never saw them again”-

I imagine you sensed that your mother was hopeful regarding this or that man, hopeful to get married and have a combined family, and you hoped for that too. Every time the hoped-for family disappeared, she was terribly disappointed and so were you. You experienced your mother’s dating relationship by proxy.

“So in that way I am used to seeing and kind of always expecting relationships to fail”- your mother’s relationships= your relationships by proxy. Only you had no say in them, no power, which causes anxiety: “I never got a choice what my circumstances looked like. Which has given me anxiety”.

You didn’t have a say in anything much as a child: no say in who your mother dates and brings home for you to meet, no say in how she interacts with said men, no say in where you live at any one time (your mother’s, your father’s, grandparents), no say in whether to move to a new place or not, etc.

“One of my biggest fears is that my boyfriend is all of a sudden going to decide he doesn’t want to be with me anymore”- at one time it was good between you and him, but you are used to good things being taken away from you suddenly, without a warning or an explanation: “I often wake up and believe everything good is just going to be taken away from me without an explanation… I was always feeling like oh yes of course this happens, because that’s how it goes.. I am used to having things not going my way and seeing people leave my life”.

You know that your mother didn’t have to date while you were a child, and dating, she didn’t have to bring the men and their children home to meet you. What she did is part of the trauma we mentioned, your trauma. Don’t underestimate it because it is not the same as some other people’s traumas. It is worthy of the word trauma because how negatively it affected you, and still does.

You are welcome to share more about that experience, your mother’s dating life when you were a child, if you want to. Remember, it’s not whining; it’s part of healing. If you feel guilty sharing anything that makes your mother look bad (that’s how children think and feel), then remind yourself that you are here to heal, and what you share here does not affect your mother in any way.

anita