Girlfriend overly dependant on me emotionally, becomes very angry.
Let me start by saying that I don't want to disparage her, make light of her trauma, or hurt her in any way. I feel terrible for posting this, but I need help.
She is a genuinely caring and understanding person - when she's not angry at me. She gives me gifts, thinks of me all the time, makes me laugh and whether or not it matters, the sex is great. She drives a long way to see me, and I drive a long way to see her. We live about 3 hours apart and the commute from my work is about 1.5hr to either house.
But I've come to realize she may be unhealthy in a way that i cannot help and I would like others here to chime in. Ultimately, I love her and want to help her in any way possible - I'm not staying with her out of some perverse fear of being alone. Sorry for the long intro - here we go.
My main problem is that she seems to use me like a crutch. She will have a bad dream and I will say "I'm so sorry that happened, that sounds really scary, I'll fight those bullies for you, I really hate waking up like that". The length of my responses vary but generally those are things I feel would work to calm me down some. Some days, that helps her or she does not press the issue further.
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
In my personal opinion, she has not had anyone to rely on emotionally in the past and that means she's overcompensating by relying on me too much. We text more than once every 20-30 minutes throughout most days if she's not mad and if I lower the amount of effort because I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
It seems like the fights start when she detects a small reduction in effort or attention - a lot of the time they seem to happen right when I'm going to go to bed or about to leave for work. In my personal opinion, her responses are somewhat disproportionate. In the dream example she responded with
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious. Your response was literally "**** that's terrible!" And nothing else about how I felt or any comfort whatsoever. I've told you how it bothers me when I say how I feel and people just say "dang that sucks" and you're literally doing it."
I do plainly ask her how I could've helped and she does say "I've already told you i'm not going to do all the work for you in this relationship"
The other fight I mentioned started with her actually being polite-ish and saying "I feel like you could've put in more effort in responding to me though, because you didn't even notice when I stopped putting in effort and I respond the way you respind. It's pretty rude when I'm putting in effort to ask about your day and make convo but you're just responding like that"
I apologized, saying I see what she means and I could've put more effort in. Eventually she says 'are you bothered or something? Try to start asking yourself questions when you feel off and try to determine what it might be, don't ignore it.
This of course resulted in me deciding to be honest with her, which was apparently unacceptable, exact quote:
"think I'm still not used to talking to someone this much. To be clear, that's not to say I dislike it or I don't love you, just that I spent a long time alone and I felt like nobody cared so I kept to myself. I'm sorry it effects you and I'll try my best to be fair to you. I think sometime I just get all talked out temporarily, I think you've noticed that the amount I talk waxes and wanes. But I love you so much and I love talking to you."
Here's her response:
"But the thing is, I was alone, I felt no one cared for me and I spoke to no one too, yet I care about you enough to want to talk to you every chance I get. so that makes me question why you don't feel the same. If you can go days without talking to me then tell me now because I really don't think that's truthfully caring about someone and I don't want to be with someone who could ignore me for days and I'm not going to do it again. There's a difference between needing alone time and communicating that; and just ignoring me and dropping off completely every time I go home. That's why you feel weird every time you wake up when I'm gone right? Because you don't want to be around me that much. You just feel better when I'm gone? Ask yourself the important questions or else you're just wasting time."
I have never gone days without talking to her and I feel that I've put in a tremendous amount of effort to trying to realize that I connect with her deeply on an intellectual level and that compromise is good. That being said, I don't know if we can reconcile these differences. I cannot figure out if what she wants is reasonable. I have not been perfect. I have said "You are incapable of admitting any fault".
I have thought about breaking up with her because of these issues, but I want to try to help her. I initially thought I could help through sheer willpower which didn't work (being everything she needed and taking nothing personally).
When she started getting meaner I began to suspect that she was intentionally abusing/manipulating me, but if this is abusive/manipulative I don't think it's intentional. Her family was signifcantly worse in pretty much every way and she has made an absolute **** ton of progress in the last few years toward being more healthy. She also uses chatgpt to address our arguments which seems to entirely agree with her, telling me to apologize repeatedly and 'actually change' - but she doesn't seem aware that chatgpt is not really a therapist nor is it perfect. I have worked greatly on acknowleding her emotions and not dismissing them even if I don't agree, but she tends to take it out on me as far as I can tell
Thank you for any help, I hope my post wasn't insanely long. My head hurts from arguing and it's late. My uni professors cannot stand my writing style haha. Also, if anyone knows how to color text on here to make this more readable i'd appreciate it.
This post is a very similar situation: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3252747
She is a genuinely caring and understanding person - when she's not angry at me. She gives me gifts, thinks of me all the time, makes me laugh and whether or not it matters, the sex is great. She drives a long way to see me, and I drive a long way to see her. We live about 3 hours apart and the commute from my work is about 1.5hr to either house.
But I've come to realize she may be unhealthy in a way that i cannot help and I would like others here to chime in. Ultimately, I love her and want to help her in any way possible - I'm not staying with her out of some perverse fear of being alone. Sorry for the long intro - here we go.
My main problem is that she seems to use me like a crutch. She will have a bad dream and I will say "I'm so sorry that happened, that sounds really scary, I'll fight those bullies for you, I really hate waking up like that". The length of my responses vary but generally those are things I feel would work to calm me down some. Some days, that helps her or she does not press the issue further.
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
In my personal opinion, she has not had anyone to rely on emotionally in the past and that means she's overcompensating by relying on me too much. We text more than once every 20-30 minutes throughout most days if she's not mad and if I lower the amount of effort because I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
It seems like the fights start when she detects a small reduction in effort or attention - a lot of the time they seem to happen right when I'm going to go to bed or about to leave for work. In my personal opinion, her responses are somewhat disproportionate. In the dream example she responded with
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious. Your response was literally "**** that's terrible!" And nothing else about how I felt or any comfort whatsoever. I've told you how it bothers me when I say how I feel and people just say "dang that sucks" and you're literally doing it."
I do plainly ask her how I could've helped and she does say "I've already told you i'm not going to do all the work for you in this relationship"
The other fight I mentioned started with her actually being polite-ish and saying "I feel like you could've put in more effort in responding to me though, because you didn't even notice when I stopped putting in effort and I respond the way you respind. It's pretty rude when I'm putting in effort to ask about your day and make convo but you're just responding like that"
I apologized, saying I see what she means and I could've put more effort in. Eventually she says 'are you bothered or something? Try to start asking yourself questions when you feel off and try to determine what it might be, don't ignore it.
This of course resulted in me deciding to be honest with her, which was apparently unacceptable, exact quote:
"think I'm still not used to talking to someone this much. To be clear, that's not to say I dislike it or I don't love you, just that I spent a long time alone and I felt like nobody cared so I kept to myself. I'm sorry it effects you and I'll try my best to be fair to you. I think sometime I just get all talked out temporarily, I think you've noticed that the amount I talk waxes and wanes. But I love you so much and I love talking to you."
Here's her response:
"But the thing is, I was alone, I felt no one cared for me and I spoke to no one too, yet I care about you enough to want to talk to you every chance I get. so that makes me question why you don't feel the same. If you can go days without talking to me then tell me now because I really don't think that's truthfully caring about someone and I don't want to be with someone who could ignore me for days and I'm not going to do it again. There's a difference between needing alone time and communicating that; and just ignoring me and dropping off completely every time I go home. That's why you feel weird every time you wake up when I'm gone right? Because you don't want to be around me that much. You just feel better when I'm gone? Ask yourself the important questions or else you're just wasting time."
I have never gone days without talking to her and I feel that I've put in a tremendous amount of effort to trying to realize that I connect with her deeply on an intellectual level and that compromise is good. That being said, I don't know if we can reconcile these differences. I cannot figure out if what she wants is reasonable. I have not been perfect. I have said "You are incapable of admitting any fault".
I have thought about breaking up with her because of these issues, but I want to try to help her. I initially thought I could help through sheer willpower which didn't work (being everything she needed and taking nothing personally).
When she started getting meaner I began to suspect that she was intentionally abusing/manipulating me, but if this is abusive/manipulative I don't think it's intentional. Her family was signifcantly worse in pretty much every way and she has made an absolute **** ton of progress in the last few years toward being more healthy. She also uses chatgpt to address our arguments which seems to entirely agree with her, telling me to apologize repeatedly and 'actually change' - but she doesn't seem aware that chatgpt is not really a therapist nor is it perfect. I have worked greatly on acknowleding her emotions and not dismissing them even if I don't agree, but she tends to take it out on me as far as I can tell
Thank you for any help, I hope my post wasn't insanely long. My head hurts from arguing and it's late. My uni professors cannot stand my writing style haha. Also, if anyone knows how to color text on here to make this more readable i'd appreciate it.
This post is a very similar situation: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3252747
Scroll to see replies
Reply 1
Wow that's insanely long.
PS.
Her overreliance on me has left me emotionally drained and guarded in a way that makes it hard to be emotionally available to her. I am 100% sure she would be ****ed to see this post, regardless of how respectful I feel I've been. She'd say I'm making her look like a monster, get mad at where I pointed out things that hurt or frustrated me, and ignore where I said I love her and want to help her.
PS.
Her overreliance on me has left me emotionally drained and guarded in a way that makes it hard to be emotionally available to her. I am 100% sure she would be ****ed to see this post, regardless of how respectful I feel I've been. She'd say I'm making her look like a monster, get mad at where I pointed out things that hurt or frustrated me, and ignore where I said I love her and want to help her.
Reply 2
PPS: I am remembering things one at a time. She will also say "your feelings are not my responsibility" if I tell her I feel bad about how i'm being spoken to, or she will say "that's just how you feel but that doesn't mean it's my fault". She has been diagnosed with BPD so maybe not saying those things are very difficult, but it's still very frustrating and hurtful. Any criticism is seen as an attempt to deflect blame or manipulate her, even if phrased as gently as I can muster.
Reply 3
Imagine your favourite weekly TV programme. Imagine if during the week you were bombarded with trailers for that programme. So many so often that the trailers showed you everything you'd see in the forthcoming programme, as well as a lot of clips that were edited out of the programme.
When it came time for you to watch the programme, how entertained would you be?
How much more entertained would you be if you'd seen no trailers? And all you seen was one or two reminders of the time the programme would be broadcast?
You are bombarding your girlfriend with trailers of your next date with her.
Doing this will in the medium to long term take away the magic of your dates with her.
You will be more attractive - to any woman worth having as a girlfriend - if you cut out almost all contact between dates. And if you're great company when you're with her in person.
You're also white-knighting too much. It's not your job to fix any girlfriend that you have. It's hers. By all means be supportive, positive and encouraging when she wants to change and is trying to change. But when she doesn't want to change, or can't change either accept her as she is or dump her and get someone else.
You will be more attractive to the women in your life if you're a "positive challenge" in that you never let her conquer your time, your reactions nor your humour. You seem to be doing OKish at maintaining your good mood. I'm not sure about your humour as you've not told us about that. But you've let her totally conquer your time.
Although it does seem to be that you're getting sucked into her "let's have an argument" frame too much. When it'd be better to just laugh at her chatgpt stuff, or simply ignore it.
And it does seem that you have been telling her too much about how you're upset by her behaviour or what she's said to you. When you should instead treat her negativity like water off a duck's back.
For the time thing, simply tell her that you've thought about things and decided that from now on you're not going to message her nor call her when you're apart from her. And that you love her very much and will be happy to talk about anything when you're together. Although you'd rather go on adventures and mini-adventures with her than talk talk talk about stuff. But anyway, any calls or messages from her will go unanswered, unless they're for the specific purpose of firming up your next adventure together.
Let her have a tantrum when you tell her this and put your foot down on this.
Love is better when it's light. Fun, laughter, adventures.
Dates are better when both people have been looking forward to it as their highlight of the week. And when they feel that they can't get enough of the other person.
When it came time for you to watch the programme, how entertained would you be?
How much more entertained would you be if you'd seen no trailers? And all you seen was one or two reminders of the time the programme would be broadcast?
You are bombarding your girlfriend with trailers of your next date with her.
Doing this will in the medium to long term take away the magic of your dates with her.
You will be more attractive - to any woman worth having as a girlfriend - if you cut out almost all contact between dates. And if you're great company when you're with her in person.
You're also white-knighting too much. It's not your job to fix any girlfriend that you have. It's hers. By all means be supportive, positive and encouraging when she wants to change and is trying to change. But when she doesn't want to change, or can't change either accept her as she is or dump her and get someone else.
You will be more attractive to the women in your life if you're a "positive challenge" in that you never let her conquer your time, your reactions nor your humour. You seem to be doing OKish at maintaining your good mood. I'm not sure about your humour as you've not told us about that. But you've let her totally conquer your time.
Although it does seem to be that you're getting sucked into her "let's have an argument" frame too much. When it'd be better to just laugh at her chatgpt stuff, or simply ignore it.
And it does seem that you have been telling her too much about how you're upset by her behaviour or what she's said to you. When you should instead treat her negativity like water off a duck's back.
For the time thing, simply tell her that you've thought about things and decided that from now on you're not going to message her nor call her when you're apart from her. And that you love her very much and will be happy to talk about anything when you're together. Although you'd rather go on adventures and mini-adventures with her than talk talk talk about stuff. But anyway, any calls or messages from her will go unanswered, unless they're for the specific purpose of firming up your next adventure together.
Let her have a tantrum when you tell her this and put your foot down on this.
Love is better when it's light. Fun, laughter, adventures.
Dates are better when both people have been looking forward to it as their highlight of the week. And when they feel that they can't get enough of the other person.
Reply 4
Original post by Anonymous
Let me start by saying that I don't want to disparage her, make light of her trauma, or hurt her in any way. I feel terrible for posting this, but I need help.
She is a genuinely caring and understanding person - when she's not angry at me. She gives me gifts, thinks of me all the time, makes me laugh and whether or not it matters, the sex is great. She drives a long way to see me, and I drive a long way to see her. We live about 3 hours apart and the commute from my work is about 1.5hr to either house.
But I've come to realize she may be unhealthy in a way that i cannot help and I would like others here to chime in. Ultimately, I love her and want to help her in any way possible - I'm not staying with her out of some perverse fear of being alone. Sorry for the long intro - here we go.
My main problem is that she seems to use me like a crutch. She will have a bad dream and I will say "I'm so sorry that happened, that sounds really scary, I'll fight those bullies for you, I really hate waking up like that". The length of my responses vary but generally those are things I feel would work to calm me down some. Some days, that helps her or she does not press the issue further.
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
In my personal opinion, she has not had anyone to rely on emotionally in the past and that means she's overcompensating by relying on me too much. We text more than once every 20-30 minutes throughout most days if she's not mad and if I lower the amount of effort because I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
It seems like the fights start when she detects a small reduction in effort or attention - a lot of the time they seem to happen right when I'm going to go to bed or about to leave for work. In my personal opinion, her responses are somewhat disproportionate. In the dream example she responded with
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious. Your response was literally "**** that's terrible!" And nothing else about how I felt or any comfort whatsoever. I've told you how it bothers me when I say how I feel and people just say "dang that sucks" and you're literally doing it."
I do plainly ask her how I could've helped and she does say "I've already told you i'm not going to do all the work for you in this relationship"
The other fight I mentioned started with her actually being polite-ish and saying "I feel like you could've put in more effort in responding to me though, because you didn't even notice when I stopped putting in effort and I respond the way you respind. It's pretty rude when I'm putting in effort to ask about your day and make convo but you're just responding like that"
I apologized, saying I see what she means and I could've put more effort in. Eventually she says 'are you bothered or something? Try to start asking yourself questions when you feel off and try to determine what it might be, don't ignore it.
This of course resulted in me deciding to be honest with her, which was apparently unacceptable, exact quote:
"think I'm still not used to talking to someone this much. To be clear, that's not to say I dislike it or I don't love you, just that I spent a long time alone and I felt like nobody cared so I kept to myself. I'm sorry it effects you and I'll try my best to be fair to you. I think sometime I just get all talked out temporarily, I think you've noticed that the amount I talk waxes and wanes. But I love you so much and I love talking to you."
Here's her response:
"But the thing is, I was alone, I felt no one cared for me and I spoke to no one too, yet I care about you enough to want to talk to you every chance I get. so that makes me question why you don't feel the same. If you can go days without talking to me then tell me now because I really don't think that's truthfully caring about someone and I don't want to be with someone who could ignore me for days and I'm not going to do it again. There's a difference between needing alone time and communicating that; and just ignoring me and dropping off completely every time I go home. That's why you feel weird every time you wake up when I'm gone right? Because you don't want to be around me that much. You just feel better when I'm gone? Ask yourself the important questions or else you're just wasting time."
I have never gone days without talking to her and I feel that I've put in a tremendous amount of effort to trying to realize that I connect with her deeply on an intellectual level and that compromise is good. That being said, I don't know if we can reconcile these differences. I cannot figure out if what she wants is reasonable. I have not been perfect. I have said "You are incapable of admitting any fault".
I have thought about breaking up with her because of these issues, but I want to try to help her. I initially thought I could help through sheer willpower which didn't work (being everything she needed and taking nothing personally).
When she started getting meaner I began to suspect that she was intentionally abusing/manipulating me, but if this is abusive/manipulative I don't think it's intentional. Her family was signifcantly worse in pretty much every way and she has made an absolute **** ton of progress in the last few years toward being more healthy. She also uses chatgpt to address our arguments which seems to entirely agree with her, telling me to apologize repeatedly and 'actually change' - but she doesn't seem aware that chatgpt is not really a therapist nor is it perfect. I have worked greatly on acknowleding her emotions and not dismissing them even if I don't agree, but she tends to take it out on me as far as I can tell
Thank you for any help, I hope my post wasn't insanely long. My head hurts from arguing and it's late. My uni professors cannot stand my writing style haha. Also, if anyone knows how to color text on here to make this more readable i'd appreciate it.
This post is a very similar situation: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3252747
She is a genuinely caring and understanding person - when she's not angry at me. She gives me gifts, thinks of me all the time, makes me laugh and whether or not it matters, the sex is great. She drives a long way to see me, and I drive a long way to see her. We live about 3 hours apart and the commute from my work is about 1.5hr to either house.
But I've come to realize she may be unhealthy in a way that i cannot help and I would like others here to chime in. Ultimately, I love her and want to help her in any way possible - I'm not staying with her out of some perverse fear of being alone. Sorry for the long intro - here we go.
My main problem is that she seems to use me like a crutch. She will have a bad dream and I will say "I'm so sorry that happened, that sounds really scary, I'll fight those bullies for you, I really hate waking up like that". The length of my responses vary but generally those are things I feel would work to calm me down some. Some days, that helps her or she does not press the issue further.
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
In my personal opinion, she has not had anyone to rely on emotionally in the past and that means she's overcompensating by relying on me too much. We text more than once every 20-30 minutes throughout most days if she's not mad and if I lower the amount of effort because I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
It seems like the fights start when she detects a small reduction in effort or attention - a lot of the time they seem to happen right when I'm going to go to bed or about to leave for work. In my personal opinion, her responses are somewhat disproportionate. In the dream example she responded with
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious. Your response was literally "**** that's terrible!" And nothing else about how I felt or any comfort whatsoever. I've told you how it bothers me when I say how I feel and people just say "dang that sucks" and you're literally doing it."
I do plainly ask her how I could've helped and she does say "I've already told you i'm not going to do all the work for you in this relationship"
The other fight I mentioned started with her actually being polite-ish and saying "I feel like you could've put in more effort in responding to me though, because you didn't even notice when I stopped putting in effort and I respond the way you respind. It's pretty rude when I'm putting in effort to ask about your day and make convo but you're just responding like that"
I apologized, saying I see what she means and I could've put more effort in. Eventually she says 'are you bothered or something? Try to start asking yourself questions when you feel off and try to determine what it might be, don't ignore it.
This of course resulted in me deciding to be honest with her, which was apparently unacceptable, exact quote:
"think I'm still not used to talking to someone this much. To be clear, that's not to say I dislike it or I don't love you, just that I spent a long time alone and I felt like nobody cared so I kept to myself. I'm sorry it effects you and I'll try my best to be fair to you. I think sometime I just get all talked out temporarily, I think you've noticed that the amount I talk waxes and wanes. But I love you so much and I love talking to you."
Here's her response:
"But the thing is, I was alone, I felt no one cared for me and I spoke to no one too, yet I care about you enough to want to talk to you every chance I get. so that makes me question why you don't feel the same. If you can go days without talking to me then tell me now because I really don't think that's truthfully caring about someone and I don't want to be with someone who could ignore me for days and I'm not going to do it again. There's a difference between needing alone time and communicating that; and just ignoring me and dropping off completely every time I go home. That's why you feel weird every time you wake up when I'm gone right? Because you don't want to be around me that much. You just feel better when I'm gone? Ask yourself the important questions or else you're just wasting time."
I have never gone days without talking to her and I feel that I've put in a tremendous amount of effort to trying to realize that I connect with her deeply on an intellectual level and that compromise is good. That being said, I don't know if we can reconcile these differences. I cannot figure out if what she wants is reasonable. I have not been perfect. I have said "You are incapable of admitting any fault".
I have thought about breaking up with her because of these issues, but I want to try to help her. I initially thought I could help through sheer willpower which didn't work (being everything she needed and taking nothing personally).
When she started getting meaner I began to suspect that she was intentionally abusing/manipulating me, but if this is abusive/manipulative I don't think it's intentional. Her family was signifcantly worse in pretty much every way and she has made an absolute **** ton of progress in the last few years toward being more healthy. She also uses chatgpt to address our arguments which seems to entirely agree with her, telling me to apologize repeatedly and 'actually change' - but she doesn't seem aware that chatgpt is not really a therapist nor is it perfect. I have worked greatly on acknowleding her emotions and not dismissing them even if I don't agree, but she tends to take it out on me as far as I can tell
Thank you for any help, I hope my post wasn't insanely long. My head hurts from arguing and it's late. My uni professors cannot stand my writing style haha. Also, if anyone knows how to color text on here to make this more readable i'd appreciate it.
This post is a very similar situation: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3252747
Hiya,
You clearly love your girlfriend, from what you’ve said here and the fact you’re asking for help. It sounds like she could be showing an anxious relationship attachment style, it’s worth having a look into this (avoidance/anxious/secure).
I have been anxious in past relationships, but this was because the person I was with gave me reason to be, and did not support my concerns. This doesn’t sound like the case for you.
I think you need to ask yourself is this making you happy? Longterm, if nothing changed, would you be happy? The thing I would suggest is to talk to your girlfriend about this and suggests she talks to someone (therapist etc.) to explore her insecurities and anxieties. And see if she can find a way to healthily process them which doesn’t involve expecting everything from you, and being angry if you don’t meet her expectations.
Hope you find the answer you’re looking for!
Reply 5
Original post by Anonymous
Let me start by saying that I don't want to disparage her, make light of her trauma, or hurt her in any way. I feel terrible for posting this, but I need help.
She is a genuinely caring and understanding person - when she's not angry at me. She gives me gifts, thinks of me all the time, makes me laugh and whether or not it matters, the sex is great. She drives a long way to see me, and I drive a long way to see her. We live about 3 hours apart and the commute from my work is about 1.5hr to either house.
But I've come to realize she may be unhealthy in a way that i cannot help and I would like others here to chime in. Ultimately, I love her and want to help her in any way possible - I'm not staying with her out of some perverse fear of being alone. Sorry for the long intro - here we go.
My main problem is that she seems to use me like a crutch. She will have a bad dream and I will say "I'm so sorry that happened, that sounds really scary, I'll fight those bullies for you, I really hate waking up like that". The length of my responses vary but generally those are things I feel would work to calm me down some. Some days, that helps her or she does not press the issue further.
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
In my personal opinion, she has not had anyone to rely on emotionally in the past and that means she's overcompensating by relying on me too much. We text more than once every 20-30 minutes throughout most days if she's not mad and if I lower the amount of effort because I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
It seems like the fights start when she detects a small reduction in effort or attention - a lot of the time they seem to happen right when I'm going to go to bed or about to leave for work. In my personal opinion, her responses are somewhat disproportionate. In the dream example she responded with
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious. Your response was literally "**** that's terrible!" And nothing else about how I felt or any comfort whatsoever. I've told you how it bothers me when I say how I feel and people just say "dang that sucks" and you're literally doing it."
I do plainly ask her how I could've helped and she does say "I've already told you i'm not going to do all the work for you in this relationship"
The other fight I mentioned started with her actually being polite-ish and saying "I feel like you could've put in more effort in responding to me though, because you didn't even notice when I stopped putting in effort and I respond the way you respind. It's pretty rude when I'm putting in effort to ask about your day and make convo but you're just responding like that"
I apologized, saying I see what she means and I could've put more effort in. Eventually she says 'are you bothered or something? Try to start asking yourself questions when you feel off and try to determine what it might be, don't ignore it.
This of course resulted in me deciding to be honest with her, which was apparently unacceptable, exact quote:
"think I'm still not used to talking to someone this much. To be clear, that's not to say I dislike it or I don't love you, just that I spent a long time alone and I felt like nobody cared so I kept to myself. I'm sorry it effects you and I'll try my best to be fair to you. I think sometime I just get all talked out temporarily, I think you've noticed that the amount I talk waxes and wanes. But I love you so much and I love talking to you."
Here's her response:
"But the thing is, I was alone, I felt no one cared for me and I spoke to no one too, yet I care about you enough to want to talk to you every chance I get. so that makes me question why you don't feel the same. If you can go days without talking to me then tell me now because I really don't think that's truthfully caring about someone and I don't want to be with someone who could ignore me for days and I'm not going to do it again. There's a difference between needing alone time and communicating that; and just ignoring me and dropping off completely every time I go home. That's why you feel weird every time you wake up when I'm gone right? Because you don't want to be around me that much. You just feel better when I'm gone? Ask yourself the important questions or else you're just wasting time."
I have never gone days without talking to her and I feel that I've put in a tremendous amount of effort to trying to realize that I connect with her deeply on an intellectual level and that compromise is good. That being said, I don't know if we can reconcile these differences. I cannot figure out if what she wants is reasonable. I have not been perfect. I have said "You are incapable of admitting any fault".
I have thought about breaking up with her because of these issues, but I want to try to help her. I initially thought I could help through sheer willpower which didn't work (being everything she needed and taking nothing personally).
When she started getting meaner I began to suspect that she was intentionally abusing/manipulating me, but if this is abusive/manipulative I don't think it's intentional. Her family was signifcantly worse in pretty much every way and she has made an absolute **** ton of progress in the last few years toward being more healthy. She also uses chatgpt to address our arguments which seems to entirely agree with her, telling me to apologize repeatedly and 'actually change' - but she doesn't seem aware that chatgpt is not really a therapist nor is it perfect. I have worked greatly on acknowleding her emotions and not dismissing them even if I don't agree, but she tends to take it out on me as far as I can tell
Thank you for any help, I hope my post wasn't insanely long. My head hurts from arguing and it's late. My uni professors cannot stand my writing style haha. Also, if anyone knows how to color text on here to make this more readable i'd appreciate it.
This post is a very similar situation: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3252747
She is a genuinely caring and understanding person - when she's not angry at me. She gives me gifts, thinks of me all the time, makes me laugh and whether or not it matters, the sex is great. She drives a long way to see me, and I drive a long way to see her. We live about 3 hours apart and the commute from my work is about 1.5hr to either house.
But I've come to realize she may be unhealthy in a way that i cannot help and I would like others here to chime in. Ultimately, I love her and want to help her in any way possible - I'm not staying with her out of some perverse fear of being alone. Sorry for the long intro - here we go.
My main problem is that she seems to use me like a crutch. She will have a bad dream and I will say "I'm so sorry that happened, that sounds really scary, I'll fight those bullies for you, I really hate waking up like that". The length of my responses vary but generally those are things I feel would work to calm me down some. Some days, that helps her or she does not press the issue further.
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
In my personal opinion, she has not had anyone to rely on emotionally in the past and that means she's overcompensating by relying on me too much. We text more than once every 20-30 minutes throughout most days if she's not mad and if I lower the amount of effort because I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
It seems like the fights start when she detects a small reduction in effort or attention - a lot of the time they seem to happen right when I'm going to go to bed or about to leave for work. In my personal opinion, her responses are somewhat disproportionate. In the dream example she responded with
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious. Your response was literally "**** that's terrible!" And nothing else about how I felt or any comfort whatsoever. I've told you how it bothers me when I say how I feel and people just say "dang that sucks" and you're literally doing it."
I do plainly ask her how I could've helped and she does say "I've already told you i'm not going to do all the work for you in this relationship"
The other fight I mentioned started with her actually being polite-ish and saying "I feel like you could've put in more effort in responding to me though, because you didn't even notice when I stopped putting in effort and I respond the way you respind. It's pretty rude when I'm putting in effort to ask about your day and make convo but you're just responding like that"
I apologized, saying I see what she means and I could've put more effort in. Eventually she says 'are you bothered or something? Try to start asking yourself questions when you feel off and try to determine what it might be, don't ignore it.
This of course resulted in me deciding to be honest with her, which was apparently unacceptable, exact quote:
"think I'm still not used to talking to someone this much. To be clear, that's not to say I dislike it or I don't love you, just that I spent a long time alone and I felt like nobody cared so I kept to myself. I'm sorry it effects you and I'll try my best to be fair to you. I think sometime I just get all talked out temporarily, I think you've noticed that the amount I talk waxes and wanes. But I love you so much and I love talking to you."
Here's her response:
"But the thing is, I was alone, I felt no one cared for me and I spoke to no one too, yet I care about you enough to want to talk to you every chance I get. so that makes me question why you don't feel the same. If you can go days without talking to me then tell me now because I really don't think that's truthfully caring about someone and I don't want to be with someone who could ignore me for days and I'm not going to do it again. There's a difference between needing alone time and communicating that; and just ignoring me and dropping off completely every time I go home. That's why you feel weird every time you wake up when I'm gone right? Because you don't want to be around me that much. You just feel better when I'm gone? Ask yourself the important questions or else you're just wasting time."
I have never gone days without talking to her and I feel that I've put in a tremendous amount of effort to trying to realize that I connect with her deeply on an intellectual level and that compromise is good. That being said, I don't know if we can reconcile these differences. I cannot figure out if what she wants is reasonable. I have not been perfect. I have said "You are incapable of admitting any fault".
I have thought about breaking up with her because of these issues, but I want to try to help her. I initially thought I could help through sheer willpower which didn't work (being everything she needed and taking nothing personally).
When she started getting meaner I began to suspect that she was intentionally abusing/manipulating me, but if this is abusive/manipulative I don't think it's intentional. Her family was signifcantly worse in pretty much every way and she has made an absolute **** ton of progress in the last few years toward being more healthy. She also uses chatgpt to address our arguments which seems to entirely agree with her, telling me to apologize repeatedly and 'actually change' - but she doesn't seem aware that chatgpt is not really a therapist nor is it perfect. I have worked greatly on acknowleding her emotions and not dismissing them even if I don't agree, but she tends to take it out on me as far as I can tell
Thank you for any help, I hope my post wasn't insanely long. My head hurts from arguing and it's late. My uni professors cannot stand my writing style haha. Also, if anyone knows how to color text on here to make this more readable i'd appreciate it.
This post is a very similar situation: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3252747
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious.
---
All these are signs of emotional abuse
Men can be victims too
She is controlling
You are allowed to have time to relax for yourself
She is not allowing you to have a life of her own
If she expects you to apologise for her having a bad dream, she needs serious help
And you need to help yourself and get out of that relationship
Reply 6
Original post by Forlornsoul
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious.
---
All these are signs of emotional abuse
Men can be victims too
She is controlling
You are allowed to have time to relax for yourself
She is not allowing you to have a life of her own
If she expects you to apologise for her having a bad dream, she needs serious help
And you need to help yourself and get out of that relationship
I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious.
---
All these are signs of emotional abuse
Men can be victims too
She is controlling
You are allowed to have time to relax for yourself
She is not allowing you to have a life of her own
If she expects you to apologise for her having a bad dream, she needs serious help
And you need to help yourself and get out of that relationship
To be fair, her expectation is that I apologize for only saying the following: "****, that's terrible!! Don't worry my love I'd fight your bullies I promise.
I hate waking up like that
" And then later: "I'm genuinely sorry your dream was so bad, my love. They sound terrifying and I absolutely would defend you from anything in that dream given the chance. I'm happy you're here with me, and safe."
The second one was after she was mad already, of course.
Thanks for the replies, guys.
Reply 7
Original post by Anonymous
To be fair, her expectation is that I apologize for only saying the following: "****, that's terrible!! Don't worry my love I'd fight your bullies I promise.
I hate waking up like that "
And then later: "I'm genuinely sorry your dream was so bad, my love. They sound terrifying and I absolutely would defend you from anything in that dream given the chance. I'm happy you're here with me, and safe."
The second one was after she was mad already, of course.
Thanks for the replies, guys.
I hate waking up like that
" And then later: "I'm genuinely sorry your dream was so bad, my love. They sound terrifying and I absolutely would defend you from anything in that dream given the chance. I'm happy you're here with me, and safe."
The second one was after she was mad already, of course.
Thanks for the replies, guys.
My suggestion would be to look on HypnoTherapy Directory (Google it) and find therapist for her who may be able to help. Or perhaps even you take a session with them, good for relaxation at very least. Go and meet the Therapists for Free 1/2 hr consultation first see what they are like.
Reply 8
19
ok, the apology stuff... reminds me of my ex, i would *run*, however also i (a girl) always strongly believe that in relationships their emotions are *not* my problem to deal with. but she seems controlling, manipulative and emotionally abusive. honestly reading this reminded me of my ex in a few ways 😭
in my opinion, you should leave her in a very gentle way and block her
when somebody has issues in a relationship they can take it out on the other person. while their problems are bad ofc, it is not ur place to deal with the issues or any abuse.
wishing u well
in my opinion, you should leave her in a very gentle way and block her
when somebody has issues in a relationship they can take it out on the other person. while their problems are bad ofc, it is not ur place to deal with the issues or any abuse.
wishing u well
Reply 9
20
Help her getting proper help, a good therapist, support her during the therapy start and leave her gently.
I do believe she could get better, but your relationship is based on her reliance on you and it is toxic. It doesn't seem to change even if she learns to control it. I do also agree with @elareare about blocking her and cutting off all contacts with her.
It is very hard, but it is essential for your mental health. A relationship like this will drive you crazy.
She needs help for her BPD and probably post trauma, but you are not the one who supposed to do that. If she is not ready to help herself you can't do anything. If she doesn't want help, you should leave her ASAP.
I do believe she could get better, but your relationship is based on her reliance on you and it is toxic. It doesn't seem to change even if she learns to control it. I do also agree with @elareare about blocking her and cutting off all contacts with her.
It is very hard, but it is essential for your mental health. A relationship like this will drive you crazy.
She needs help for her BPD and probably post trauma, but you are not the one who supposed to do that. If she is not ready to help herself you can't do anything. If she doesn't want help, you should leave her ASAP.
Reply 10
19
I have a similar friendship where my friend is very extroverted and I am somewhere in the middle. This means I like my alone time and she wants to talk and call everyday. At the start we had similar issues where she would say I’m not putting in enough effort and also that my responses to certains things would not be “the right thing to say” but that’s just because I don’t really know what to say in certain situations like I’d say “I’m sorry that happened that’s sounds horrible” and instead she would want me to write or say something very emotional but that’s just not how my brain words. Some people might say why are we friends but she is the sweetest, most thoughtful and kind person. But she also had this weird emotional manipulation behaviour at the start, and it took me a while to call her out for it. if I didn’t and she didn’t realise what she was doing and made changes to become better, i might not have still been friends with her. It was a bumpy first year but we got past it mostly because we both made concessions in order to keep our friendship, I explained to her that yeah sometimes I won’t want to talk everyday but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, sometimes I get home from work and I just want to watch a tv show, read a book and got to sleep. And I made effort to be more emotionally open.
It seems that your girlfriend is emotionally manipulating you, she does not understand healthy relationship boundaries and worst of all, instead of communicating these thing in a normal way she is essentially “telling you off” whenever you mess her in her eyes, but also it seems she unwilling to see where you are coming from and make compromises. If whenever you bring up an issue you have, she makes it about herself, that’s a big red flag. The fact that she is also always mentioning leaving the relationship is also a way to essentially give you a “soft” ultimatum and pressure you into giving her what she wants. I would honestly post this on Reddit too if you want bc you are definitely NTA
It seems that your girlfriend is emotionally manipulating you, she does not understand healthy relationship boundaries and worst of all, instead of communicating these thing in a normal way she is essentially “telling you off” whenever you mess her in her eyes, but also it seems she unwilling to see where you are coming from and make compromises. If whenever you bring up an issue you have, she makes it about herself, that’s a big red flag. The fact that she is also always mentioning leaving the relationship is also a way to essentially give you a “soft” ultimatum and pressure you into giving her what she wants. I would honestly post this on Reddit too if you want bc you are definitely NTA
Reply 11
Original post by Anonymous
Let me start by saying that I don't want to disparage her, make light of her trauma, or hurt her in any way. I feel terrible for posting this, but I need help.
She is a genuinely caring and understanding person - when she's not angry at me. She gives me gifts, thinks of me all the time, makes me laugh and whether or not it matters, the sex is great. She drives a long way to see me, and I drive a long way to see her. We live about 3 hours apart and the commute from my work is about 1.5hr to either house.
But I've come to realize she may be unhealthy in a way that i cannot help and I would like others here to chime in. Ultimately, I love her and want to help her in any way possible - I'm not staying with her out of some perverse fear of being alone. Sorry for the long intro - here we go.
My main problem is that she seems to use me like a crutch. She will have a bad dream and I will say "I'm so sorry that happened, that sounds really scary, I'll fight those bullies for you, I really hate waking up like that". The length of my responses vary but generally those are things I feel would work to calm me down some. Some days, that helps her or she does not press the issue further.
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
In my personal opinion, she has not had anyone to rely on emotionally in the past and that means she's overcompensating by relying on me too much. We text more than once every 20-30 minutes throughout most days if she's not mad and if I lower the amount of effort because I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
It seems like the fights start when she detects a small reduction in effort or attention - a lot of the time they seem to happen right when I'm going to go to bed or about to leave for work. In my personal opinion, her responses are somewhat disproportionate. In the dream example she responded with
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious. Your response was literally "**** that's terrible!" And nothing else about how I felt or any comfort whatsoever. I've told you how it bothers me when I say how I feel and people just say "dang that sucks" and you're literally doing it."
I do plainly ask her how I could've helped and she does say "I've already told you i'm not going to do all the work for you in this relationship"
The other fight I mentioned started with her actually being polite-ish and saying "I feel like you could've put in more effort in responding to me though, because you didn't even notice when I stopped putting in effort and I respond the way you respind. It's pretty rude when I'm putting in effort to ask about your day and make convo but you're just responding like that"
I apologized, saying I see what she means and I could've put more effort in. Eventually she says 'are you bothered or something? Try to start asking yourself questions when you feel off and try to determine what it might be, don't ignore it.
This of course resulted in me deciding to be honest with her, which was apparently unacceptable, exact quote:
"think I'm still not used to talking to someone this much. To be clear, that's not to say I dislike it or I don't love you, just that I spent a long time alone and I felt like nobody cared so I kept to myself. I'm sorry it effects you and I'll try my best to be fair to you. I think sometime I just get all talked out temporarily, I think you've noticed that the amount I talk waxes and wanes. But I love you so much and I love talking to you."
Here's her response:
"But the thing is, I was alone, I felt no one cared for me and I spoke to no one too, yet I care about you enough to want to talk to you every chance I get. so that makes me question why you don't feel the same. If you can go days without talking to me then tell me now because I really don't think that's truthfully caring about someone and I don't want to be with someone who could ignore me for days and I'm not going to do it again. There's a difference between needing alone time and communicating that; and just ignoring me and dropping off completely every time I go home. That's why you feel weird every time you wake up when I'm gone right? Because you don't want to be around me that much. You just feel better when I'm gone? Ask yourself the important questions or else you're just wasting time."
I have never gone days without talking to her and I feel that I've put in a tremendous amount of effort to trying to realize that I connect with her deeply on an intellectual level and that compromise is good. That being said, I don't know if we can reconcile these differences. I cannot figure out if what she wants is reasonable. I have not been perfect. I have said "You are incapable of admitting any fault".
I have thought about breaking up with her because of these issues, but I want to try to help her. I initially thought I could help through sheer willpower which didn't work (being everything she needed and taking nothing personally).
When she started getting meaner I began to suspect that she was intentionally abusing/manipulating me, but if this is abusive/manipulative I don't think it's intentional. Her family was signifcantly worse in pretty much every way and she has made an absolute **** ton of progress in the last few years toward being more healthy. She also uses chatgpt to address our arguments which seems to entirely agree with her, telling me to apologize repeatedly and 'actually change' - but she doesn't seem aware that chatgpt is not really a therapist nor is it perfect. I have worked greatly on acknowleding her emotions and not dismissing them even if I don't agree, but she tends to take it out on me as far as I can tell
Thank you for any help, I hope my post wasn't insanely long. My head hurts from arguing and it's late. My uni professors cannot stand my writing style haha. Also, if anyone knows how to color text on here to make this more readable i'd appreciate it.
This post is a very similar situation: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3252747
She is a genuinely caring and understanding person - when she's not angry at me. She gives me gifts, thinks of me all the time, makes me laugh and whether or not it matters, the sex is great. She drives a long way to see me, and I drive a long way to see her. We live about 3 hours apart and the commute from my work is about 1.5hr to either house.
But I've come to realize she may be unhealthy in a way that i cannot help and I would like others here to chime in. Ultimately, I love her and want to help her in any way possible - I'm not staying with her out of some perverse fear of being alone. Sorry for the long intro - here we go.
My main problem is that she seems to use me like a crutch. She will have a bad dream and I will say "I'm so sorry that happened, that sounds really scary, I'll fight those bullies for you, I really hate waking up like that". The length of my responses vary but generally those are things I feel would work to calm me down some. Some days, that helps her or she does not press the issue further.
Other days, she will become frustrated and later hostile if I do not apologize greatly and in the correct way. This hostility does nothing to make me want to talk to her further and pushes me away.
In my personal opinion, she has not had anyone to rely on emotionally in the past and that means she's overcompensating by relying on me too much. We text more than once every 20-30 minutes throughout most days if she's not mad and if I lower the amount of effort because I'm 'all texted out for a bit' as I put it, she becomes agitated and tells me I should tell her if I would be comfortable ignoring her for weeks so she can leave me.
It seems like the fights start when she detects a small reduction in effort or attention - a lot of the time they seem to happen right when I'm going to go to bed or about to leave for work. In my personal opinion, her responses are somewhat disproportionate. In the dream example she responded with
"I don't need you to say you'll defend me. I'm scared and bothered and I want to cry and you don't feel the need to console me or support me at all and you're not having conversations with me like you did yesterday and it's obvious. Your response was literally "**** that's terrible!" And nothing else about how I felt or any comfort whatsoever. I've told you how it bothers me when I say how I feel and people just say "dang that sucks" and you're literally doing it."
I do plainly ask her how I could've helped and she does say "I've already told you i'm not going to do all the work for you in this relationship"
The other fight I mentioned started with her actually being polite-ish and saying "I feel like you could've put in more effort in responding to me though, because you didn't even notice when I stopped putting in effort and I respond the way you respind. It's pretty rude when I'm putting in effort to ask about your day and make convo but you're just responding like that"
I apologized, saying I see what she means and I could've put more effort in. Eventually she says 'are you bothered or something? Try to start asking yourself questions when you feel off and try to determine what it might be, don't ignore it.
This of course resulted in me deciding to be honest with her, which was apparently unacceptable, exact quote:
"think I'm still not used to talking to someone this much. To be clear, that's not to say I dislike it or I don't love you, just that I spent a long time alone and I felt like nobody cared so I kept to myself. I'm sorry it effects you and I'll try my best to be fair to you. I think sometime I just get all talked out temporarily, I think you've noticed that the amount I talk waxes and wanes. But I love you so much and I love talking to you."
Here's her response:
"But the thing is, I was alone, I felt no one cared for me and I spoke to no one too, yet I care about you enough to want to talk to you every chance I get. so that makes me question why you don't feel the same. If you can go days without talking to me then tell me now because I really don't think that's truthfully caring about someone and I don't want to be with someone who could ignore me for days and I'm not going to do it again. There's a difference between needing alone time and communicating that; and just ignoring me and dropping off completely every time I go home. That's why you feel weird every time you wake up when I'm gone right? Because you don't want to be around me that much. You just feel better when I'm gone? Ask yourself the important questions or else you're just wasting time."
I have never gone days without talking to her and I feel that I've put in a tremendous amount of effort to trying to realize that I connect with her deeply on an intellectual level and that compromise is good. That being said, I don't know if we can reconcile these differences. I cannot figure out if what she wants is reasonable. I have not been perfect. I have said "You are incapable of admitting any fault".
I have thought about breaking up with her because of these issues, but I want to try to help her. I initially thought I could help through sheer willpower which didn't work (being everything she needed and taking nothing personally).
When she started getting meaner I began to suspect that she was intentionally abusing/manipulating me, but if this is abusive/manipulative I don't think it's intentional. Her family was signifcantly worse in pretty much every way and she has made an absolute **** ton of progress in the last few years toward being more healthy. She also uses chatgpt to address our arguments which seems to entirely agree with her, telling me to apologize repeatedly and 'actually change' - but she doesn't seem aware that chatgpt is not really a therapist nor is it perfect. I have worked greatly on acknowleding her emotions and not dismissing them even if I don't agree, but she tends to take it out on me as far as I can tell
Thank you for any help, I hope my post wasn't insanely long. My head hurts from arguing and it's late. My uni professors cannot stand my writing style haha. Also, if anyone knows how to color text on here to make this more readable i'd appreciate it.
This post is a very similar situation: https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=3252747
Reply 12
20
Original post by bimbibap
I have a similar friendship where my friend is very extroverted and I am somewhere in the middle. This means I like my alone time and she wants to talk and call everyday. At the start we had similar issues where she would say I’m not putting in enough effort and also that my responses to certains things would not be “the right thing to say” but that’s just because I don’t really know what to say in certain situations like I’d say “I’m sorry that happened that’s sounds horrible” and instead she would want me to write or say something very emotional but that’s just not how my brain words. Some people might say why are we friends but she is the sweetest, most thoughtful and kind person. But she also had this weird emotional manipulation behaviour at the start, and it took me a while to call her out for it. if I didn’t and she didn’t realise what she was doing and made changes to become better, i might not have still been friends with her. It was a bumpy first year but we got past it mostly because we both made concessions in order to keep our friendship, I explained to her that yeah sometimes I won’t want to talk everyday but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, sometimes I get home from work and I just want to watch a tv show, read a book and got to sleep. And I made effort to be more emotionally open.
It seems that your girlfriend is emotionally manipulating you, she does not understand healthy relationship boundaries and worst of all, instead of communicating these thing in a normal way she is essentially “telling you off” whenever you mess her in her eyes, but also it seems she unwilling to see where you are coming from and make compromises. If whenever you bring up an issue you have, she makes it about herself, that’s a big red flag. The fact that she is also always mentioning leaving the relationship is also a way to essentially give you a “soft” ultimatum and pressure you into giving her what she wants. I would honestly post this on Reddit too if you want bc you are definitely NTA
It seems that your girlfriend is emotionally manipulating you, she does not understand healthy relationship boundaries and worst of all, instead of communicating these thing in a normal way she is essentially “telling you off” whenever you mess her in her eyes, but also it seems she unwilling to see where you are coming from and make compromises. If whenever you bring up an issue you have, she makes it about herself, that’s a big red flag. The fact that she is also always mentioning leaving the relationship is also a way to essentially give you a “soft” ultimatum and pressure you into giving her what she wants. I would honestly post this on Reddit too if you want bc you are definitely NTA
Interesting point actually. However, I still don't see how it could work as partners relationship, especially long distance, I'm pretty sure the OP tried communicating about it... at least what I understood from the posts.
Reply 13
Original post by bimbibap
I have a similar friendship where my friend is very extroverted and I am somewhere in the middle. This means I like my alone time and she wants to talk and call everyday. At the start we had similar issues where she would say I’m not putting in enough effort and also that my responses to certains things would not be “the right thing to say” but that’s just because I don’t really know what to say in certain situations like I’d say “I’m sorry that happened that’s sounds horrible” and instead she would want me to write or say something very emotional but that’s just not how my brain words. Some people might say why are we friends but she is the sweetest, most thoughtful and kind person. But she also had this weird emotional manipulation behaviour at the start, and it took me a while to call her out for it. if I didn’t and she didn’t realise what she was doing and made changes to become better, i might not have still been friends with her. It was a bumpy first year but we got past it mostly because we both made concessions in order to keep our friendship, I explained to her that yeah sometimes I won’t want to talk everyday but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you, sometimes I get home from work and I just want to watch a tv show, read a book and got to sleep. And I made effort to be more emotionally open.
It seems that your girlfriend is emotionally manipulating you, she does not understand healthy relationship boundaries and worst of all, instead of communicating these thing in a normal way she is essentially “telling you off” whenever you mess her in her eyes, but also it seems she unwilling to see where you are coming from and make compromises. If whenever you bring up an issue you have, she makes it about herself, that’s a big red flag. The fact that she is also always mentioning leaving the relationship is also a way to essentially give you a “soft” ultimatum and pressure you into giving her what she wants. I would honestly post this on Reddit too if you want bc you are definitely NTA
It seems that your girlfriend is emotionally manipulating you, she does not understand healthy relationship boundaries and worst of all, instead of communicating these thing in a normal way she is essentially “telling you off” whenever you mess her in her eyes, but also it seems she unwilling to see where you are coming from and make compromises. If whenever you bring up an issue you have, she makes it about herself, that’s a big red flag. The fact that she is also always mentioning leaving the relationship is also a way to essentially give you a “soft” ultimatum and pressure you into giving her what she wants. I would honestly post this on Reddit too if you want bc you are definitely NTA
Unfortunately I've been watching for the signs of a narcissist and I think she may be one.
I can't really post to reddit because she's on there like... 24/7. I posted direct quotes so that I couldn't bias the conversation and she definitely would recognize them.
I wish I could call her out without getting shut down, she always makes it about herself.
Every time I ask for alone time she gets offended and angry, even if it's just a day. 'you should've planned this in advance' 'you didn't give me enough time to prepare for being without you' etc.
Reply 14
Original post by Anonymous
Unfortunately I've been watching for the signs of a narcissist and I think she may be one.
I can't really post to reddit because she's on there like... 24/7. I posted direct quotes so that I couldn't bias the conversation and she definitely would recognize them.
I wish I could call her out without getting shut down, she always makes it about herself.
Every time I ask for alone time she gets offended and angry, even if it's just a day. 'you should've planned this in advance' 'you didn't give me enough time to prepare for being without you' etc.
I can't really post to reddit because she's on there like... 24/7. I posted direct quotes so that I couldn't bias the conversation and she definitely would recognize them.
I wish I could call her out without getting shut down, she always makes it about herself.
Every time I ask for alone time she gets offended and angry, even if it's just a day. 'you should've planned this in advance' 'you didn't give me enough time to prepare for being without you' etc.
If having an open conversation, going to therapy and working on herself/taking some ownership is not an option for her…then ending it something you really need to consider. This is for your happiness in the long term. It’s not a healthy way to live, and if you get out sooner, you’ll be so thankful in the future.
Reply 15
19
Original post by Anonymous
Unfortunately I've been watching for the signs of a narcissist and I think she may be one.
I can't really post to reddit because she's on there like... 24/7. I posted direct quotes so that I couldn't bias the conversation and she definitely would recognize them.
I wish I could call her out without getting shut down, she always makes it about herself.
Every time I ask for alone time she gets offended and angry, even if it's just a day. 'you should've planned this in advance' 'you didn't give me enough time to prepare for being without you' etc.
I can't really post to reddit because she's on there like... 24/7. I posted direct quotes so that I couldn't bias the conversation and she definitely would recognize them.
I wish I could call her out without getting shut down, she always makes it about herself.
Every time I ask for alone time she gets offended and angry, even if it's just a day. 'you should've planned this in advance' 'you didn't give me enough time to prepare for being without you' etc.
It’s clear she has some serious problems, you need to ask you self if you can deal with these problems with her, but she has to be open to or else she’ll never change. And honestly, based on how she takes everything as a personal attack, even when it isn’t, even when it’s you talking about your feelings, it’s unlikely that change is coming anytime soon or maybe ever. The fact that she doesn’t feel responsible for how you feel but expects you to feel responsible for how she does, all the time, every time, well… it’s not good. It’s gaslighting x100.
What I do know is that right now she has no reason to change, clearly her love for you isn’t enough to make her want to comprise in the way it is for you, she has probably been around ppl who have always excused this behaviour so it’s only developed further. This kind of behaviour would personally drive me up the wall, having to constantly check that you are enough/ doing enough, worried that she’s going to start something again bc you forgot to text her or call. It’s unhealthy. Somethings got to change.
Reply 16
19
And also the way she waits until you are going to work or sleep to call or text even when she knows that’s probably when your least available is diabolical. It’s like she’s trying to find a reason to start something and then she’ll get upset, you try and explain where ur coming from, she ofc takes it as a personal attack and victimises herself, and lastly she’ll talk abt incompatibility if you can’t meet her insane expectations/ breaking off with each other (her last resort to get you in line) and the cycle repeats over and over again.
Reply 17
Seems very toxic and unsustainable.
I did assume she may have a borderline personality or an anxious attachment and then I read about her BPD diagnosis.
Also seems as though she victimises herself easily and struggles to understand your view point at times. In addition to not being able to self regulate.
If you feel this drained and are unable to have alone time now, it will be detrimental for you in the future.
Personally I suggest breaking up and distancing yourself.
I did assume she may have a borderline personality or an anxious attachment and then I read about her BPD diagnosis.
Also seems as though she victimises herself easily and struggles to understand your view point at times. In addition to not being able to self regulate.
If you feel this drained and are unable to have alone time now, it will be detrimental for you in the future.
Personally I suggest breaking up and distancing yourself.
Reply 18
Original post by Anonymous
Unfortunately I've been watching for the signs of a narcissist and I think she may be one.
I can't really post to reddit because she's on there like... 24/7. I posted direct quotes so that I couldn't bias the conversation and she definitely would recognize them.
I wish I could call her out without getting shut down, she always makes it about herself.
Every time I ask for alone time she gets offended and angry, even if it's just a day. 'you should've planned this in advance' 'you didn't give me enough time to prepare for being without you' etc.
I can't really post to reddit because she's on there like... 24/7. I posted direct quotes so that I couldn't bias the conversation and she definitely would recognize them.
I wish I could call her out without getting shut down, she always makes it about herself.
Every time I ask for alone time she gets offended and angry, even if it's just a day. 'you should've planned this in advance' 'you didn't give me enough time to prepare for being without you' etc.
this kind of reminds me of my mum i just want to say please get her help before you lot have kids
Reply 19
So, I just got fired from work yesterday because I was late so many times from capitulating to her.
My coworker offered to let me come over and hang out for 30-40m to cheer me up. On my way to his house I texted her 'I told my coworker I wanted to stay friends and he offered to let me come hang out for 30-40m to cheer me up, is that alright?'
Of course she texted me like 5 times and then called me crying and screaming and telling me I'm a piece of **** narcissist and I never consider her and I NEVER communicate.
She told me she was going to leave me and leave my house because' a true boyfriend and man would understand I'm upset and want to help me'
After about an hour and a half of this I told her I'm breaking up with her, to go home and leave me alone. I told her she's not incapable of being better but it's not my responsibility to make her better.
Of course after that she called me 30+ times and sent a wall of messages trying to convince me she really does care about my feelings and was wrong.
My coworker offered to let me come over and hang out for 30-40m to cheer me up. On my way to his house I texted her 'I told my coworker I wanted to stay friends and he offered to let me come hang out for 30-40m to cheer me up, is that alright?'
Of course she texted me like 5 times and then called me crying and screaming and telling me I'm a piece of **** narcissist and I never consider her and I NEVER communicate.
She told me she was going to leave me and leave my house because' a true boyfriend and man would understand I'm upset and want to help me'
After about an hour and a half of this I told her I'm breaking up with her, to go home and leave me alone. I told her she's not incapable of being better but it's not my responsibility to make her better.
Of course after that she called me 30+ times and sent a wall of messages trying to convince me she really does care about my feelings and was wrong.
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