My relationship with my boyfriend of 4 years has been a very rocky one from well, the beginning. I love him but we are constantly fighting and going back in forth over the same issues. I didn’t enter this relationship insecure, but it seems the relationship brought out all my flaws and insecurities. One of his biggest problems with me, is that I’m not affectionate “enough”. He expects for me to hug him and kiss him as soon as I see him. He always wants me to grab his hand, and really just be all over him. He’s admitted that he likes clingy girls, and that his exes were all VERY affectionate. He’s always telling me to let my emotions take over me and not hold back, but I can’t even make sense of that. I will admit that my perception of a relationship is pretty skewed seeing how my dad left when I was only 8. He would cheat on my mom, and leave me in the car for hours while he was at some woman’s house and keep me quiet with candy, (shady I know). When my dad left for good, he told my family he was going on a business trip, and he never came back. For the first three years, he would call and make me all kinds of promises, how he would buy me a car for my 16th birthday and how when he came back we would basically be a family again. Wrong. Eventually the calls stopped. Me and my mom never heard from, and ended up moving because she couldn’t afford the house we lived in by herself. We later learned that my dad had remarried in Africa to a younger woman and had two kids with her. And since then I’ve grew up thinking that all men were the scum of the earth. My mom raised me to be very independent. She raised me to be a survivor. To take care of myself so that when my boyfriend or husband leaves me, (which he will do) I will be financially stable. My mom is more realistic than anything. She never sugar coated anything and she wasn’t particularly overly affectionate. So naturally I grew up very very bitter towards men. Rewind a few years, I have major trust issues. I got into this relationship ALREADY not trusting him, but I was 17 at the time, I honestly didn’t think it would have even gotten this far. I never expected to love him and want him the way I did, and still do. But I feel like he isn’t really in love with me anymore because lately all he can do is tell me how much of a woman I’m not. He tells me how un-affectionate I am and justifies his claim with using other woman as an example, (which has made me VERY jealous). He tells me he’s trying to help me become a woman because I don’t have anyone else in my life showing me how to be one. But I feel like he is just trying to mold me into this perfect dream girl. I don’t really feel like he truly loves me as a person and just wants me to change. He just doesn’t understand that being affectionate doesn’t come easy for me. It just doesn’t feel natural to me. I’m not a hugger. And I never really knew how much me not kissing him as soon as i saw him bothered him. I can make him dinner, give him a massage or other things to show I love him, but if I forget to hug him or kiss him as SOON as I see him, the rest of our time spent together will be hell. I truly feel like he is always attacking my character, and I tell him this. I tell him that maybe he just really isn’t in love with me the way he says he is. Or that we may not be meant for each other, we may have just been meant to create our 1 year old son and thats it. But that theory does not sit right with him. He thinks that he’s just prepping me to be better with some other man, and that just doesn’t work for him. But he doesn’t see how his approach with me is bringing me down, it makes me feel like a complete failure. And that if I’m not this perfect hug and kiss you out the door, and in the door, with dinner on the table and sex and massage after work type of girl that no man would ever be happy with me. I just want to be understood. I can’t use my dad, and my past as an excuse for how I am forever, I know that. But I wish he could see how much I just try to make him happy, I wish he could recognize the other things. I willing to compromise and work on certain areas but I feel as if FOR HIM, for him to be happy with me I would truly be compromising my entirety. That I wouldn’t be me anymore, I’m just out of ideas, I’m out of options I’m not sure what to do because I do love him we have a child and I want this to work, but I don’t know what else to say to him. I came here just looking from insight from other men and women, who are older and wiser than myself. I would like to hear from other people the truth about relationships. What they’re REALLY like, what it really takes. Advice, thoughts, anything.