Why is my partner pushing me away?

[Monster616]

For context my girlfriend has a history of anxiety and depression but recently I feel like she’s trying really hard to push me away.
She says she really wants everything to work and that she loves me, so I can’t understand why she’s doing this.

I don’t feel as close to her as I used to.

I’m starting to feel like I can’t be natural in our relationship. Everything I say has to be corrected or questioned. One example is, she apologised for calling me at a bad time and I said “it’s fine”. Apparently I used to always say I wanted to talk to her and that I love it. She can’t understand that these terms are interchangeable. “It’s fine” means exactly the same thing.
I then said I like speaking to her, of course I do, and she said “not love?!”

I feel I can’t talk to her about things. She takes everything the wrong way and gets upset.

A lot of the time, the conversation turns into her. I’ll be trying to talk about my day and she’ll end up ranting about hers.

She encourages me to go out with my friends, but when I do so, she then says she’s upset and feels I don’t want to spend time with her.

She asked if I was going to text her today, I said “I have a lot to do, a lot to get done”. She then attacked me for not giving a straight answer and I should have directly said “I don’t know”.

Also, I can’t do anything right. If I don’t text her when out with friends, I don’t love her anymore. If I am a bit quiet, I’m going off her.

The last few days she’s been extremely snappy, everything has been a nitpick or correcting me.

I love her to bits she has so many other amazing qualities which is why I want this to work. But it’s starting to pull us apart and I feel so distant from her.

I second what @meganorks said. It might be that your girlfriend has an anxious attachment style. She perhaps has low self esteem and feels undeserving of love on some level. Therefore she keeps pushing boundaries to ‘test’ your love for her. Unfortunately, this is often a self fulfilling prophecy and pushes the other partner away.

There are lots of good therapy accounts on social media that talk about this. ‘@thesecurerelationship’ is a good one for explaining why this occurs and tips for how to work on it. (Nb. I’m not affiliated to that account in any way, just think it might be a helpful one, but there are lots of others!)

It's because that poster has assumed the OP is male. Which they may well be..

Your girlfriend sounds like a very difficult person to be with and you must feel like you’re constantly walking on eggshells trying not to upset her. The emotional blackmail of the “If you loved me, you’d want to talk to me at any time” stuff is basically psychological abuse/control.

She may well be anxious and depressed, but it is perfectly possible to be anxious and depressed AND be a controlling, self-absorbed manipulator. Which is what she sounds like to me.

She’s using her anxiety as an excuse to be emotionally abusive. It’s not OK.

It must be hard read responses that describe your girlfriend's behaviour as abusive (unless you already suspected that yourself).

One thing I will say is something that ex husband used to say.

You know that if you get into a lion enclosure, the lion is going to kill you. It's not because it's a bad lion and it wants to hurt you. It's just the nature of lions. But knowing that, you still wouldnt go into its enclosure because you'd still be dead.

The point being that it doesn't matter whether the behaviour is intentionally abusive or not, the outcome for the person on the receiving end is the same.

Thanks all, hard to read because I know she’s really not trying to but she is