I’ll try and keep it brief!
My fiancé and I have been together several years, was very serious from the very start, as we’d been friends for around 10 years beforehand. We have a DS who’s almost 2, and for the last 10/12 months, I’ll admit we’ve had some rough patches (mental health struggles for both, money worries, communication not being what it should), but I thought we’d worked really hard to overcome all of our issues, which he agreed with.
Mental health is back on track for both of us, we’d recently been talking about when to begin ttc, and all conversations surrounding our relationship have been positive (he’s very happy, he can’t wait to grow our family, etc), up until a few weeks ago when he sat me down and told me that he doesn’t want me to worry about it yet, but he’s concerned that partly due to a period of what he feels was a lack of affection and some guardedness from me a couple of months ago (he’s right that there was a week or two like this due to something I found out he’d done. Nothing awful or relevant but I just wasn’t feeling as cuddly as I usually am!), he has subconsciously put up a bit of a wall between us, and whenever he’s experienced this in a past relationship, he’s never been able to recover it.
He was very reassuring during the conversation, and life continued as normal, including physical affection, he said he felt much better just from having spoken about it etc. But then fast forward about a week later and he’s started to withdraw, telling me he needed time to think.
We’ve now come to a bit of an impasse where he feels as though there’s nothing he can do to change the way he feels, though he’s devastated about it, and is repeatedly stating that the spark is ‘not going to come back’ because he’s been through this before. Which I find incredibly frustrating and hurtful, that he can make that assumption purely on comparing previous relationships to ours (has always said he never truly loved someone until me, and doesn’t have any DC with anyone else, both of which significantly change things even aside from the fact that every relationship is of course different).
He said he would love to try and still be a family because he still adores my company, still loves me and always will, and obviously doesn’t want a ‘broken home’ for our DS, but doesn’t want to risk hurting me down the line if he’s right that nothing changes and he then decides he wants to see other people.
I’m completely heartbroken. I don’t know how he can have been telling me he’s so happy etc less than 2 months ago, and now not even want to try and fix this together. I just can’t imagine giving up on him so easily if the situation was reversed. And the thought of being a single parent and our DS never knowing his parents together, having step parents, half siblings, is just utterly devastating me and I don’t know how to cope with any of this. We’re each other’s best friends, I miss him already and he hasn’t even gone anywhere yet.
Does anyone have any advice? Aside from time is a healer, because I think if I hear that it might tip me over the edge into a full blown anxiety attack. (But genuinely, thanks in advance for any guidance and kind words)