I had therapy a few years ago and she said I needed to take focus away from seeing the value in what I do to see the value in who I am instead.
I've been seeing someone for a while. He very rarely compliments me. He will comment positively on things I've done (eg food tastes nice, candles look good, I bought a nice dress) but not on who I am.
He says things like "girls look pretty/sexy/cute" when they [insert whatever I'm doing] but never tells me that i do. It just feels really cold and impersonal. He claims these are compliments. To me it feels I have just prompted him to tell me what he finds desirable in women in general. Nothing about me.
For example, we went away at the weekend. I was siting partially clothed on the window seat in the hotel room. He came over and 're-positioned' me into a pose he finds sexually alluring (not explicit, just a pose he likes) including making minor adjustments to the direction my feet were pointing and how my clothes were draped. Then he said "you look sexy like that."
He claims it was a compliment. It makes me feel cheap. I reads to me like "I want to fuck women when I see them sitting like that. And now I've made you look as though I want to fuck you too".
There's just nothing about me in that at all. He could have positioned the woman next door like that and she'd have looked equally sexy.
AIBU?