Hello, I haven't posted much on MN yet but have been lurking and reading threads for a while and now am asking for a bit of advice or support with my relationship. Apologies if this ends up being a long post - I'm not very good at condensing!
My partner and I have been together for just over 5 years now and the relationship has almost always been up and down since the beginning. We get on well together on many levels and on the surface things would appear fine. We have one DS together and another baby on the way in around 6 weeks time.
The thing is, the main issue that often crops up is that our needs don't match up and I often feel undervalued and uncared for and he doesn't feel he can offer me the level of emotional support that I need. He can be quite insensitive and I often feel ignored and disrespected. He has the masculine tendency to not be very good with emotions and affection etc which can be frustrating but I try to be patient as I know it doesn't come naturally to him. However, it hurts me when he completely disregards my feelings altogether. For example he has a habit of contradicting me and disagreeing with everything I say, just for the sake of it. He will do this in private but also in front of other people which is very humiliating. He snaps at me in front of his family and mine over trivial things and if I try to talk to him about it afterwards and explain that it hurts me he says I am being too sensitive. This is just one example of the sort of thing he does on top of just being generally emotionally available.
Anyway these things come up now and then in our relationship and for a little while it seems like things improve but then gradually it goes back to how it was before. When I got pregnant this time around we were in a really good place but more recently the cracks have started to show again. I have had quite a difficult pregnancy and am suffering with severe SPD and awful sickness etc so am quite dependent on him at the moment to help me with things, as well as needing him for emotional support. But for the past month or so I have felt more disconnected than ever. I feel like we are just existing alongside each other rather than a team or a partnership. He pretty much ignores me when I am feeling particularly low - as in he literally just stood in the room and watched me crying the other day when I couldn't get up from a chair because I was in so much pain and was just generally feeling shit. He stood awkwardly watching me try and struggle to get up, didn't help or offer a hug or anything, and then said he had to go and do some work. After our DS goes to bed he'll spend all evening glued to his phone on the sofa and doesn't make an effort to really engage with me.
Basically this all culminated the other day in me asking him if there was something wrong because I was picking up on something. Initially he denied (as he usually does) and said I must be imagining it but a few days later I asked him again and he said he was feeling uncertain about us and some of our old feelings issues were reoccuring for him: e.g. feeling more like friends than a couple, feeling like we're not compatible, not sure how much he can envision a future etc. But he also said these feelings are fleeting and he is mostly happy. This came as a bit of a blow and we had a long chat that evening where we talking about our expectations and areas where we maybe need to compromise etc. It felt good to get it all out in the open but one thing that is niggling me is that his attitude is more like 'lets just see how things go and if we decide to split up then we'll deal with that when it happens' but I don't really want to just wait around and see what happens. I want us to either make a commitment to fixing the relationship and feel like thats what we both really want, or I would rather admit defeat and decide to go our separate ways. I can't help feeling like he just wants to keep plodding on for the sake of our DS and new baby. I don't want to be in an unhappy relationship and I don't think that's healthy for DC to be around. But I can't be solely responsible for trying to solve the problems in the relationship. However I also don't want to have to deal with a difficult break up when I am also about to have a baby! So I suppose my problem is I don't know where to go from here. I feel like I'm in limbo. Has anyone been in a similar situation - where the relationship isn't horrendous but it just doesn't feel particularly satisfying or supportive? Is there anything I/we can do to improve things for good or are we just not right for each other? Is anyone in a relationship with someone who is very emotionally unavailable and how do you cope with that? Does anyone else struggle with feeling generally 'disconnected' in their relationship? Basically I would just appreciate any words of wisdom. Leaving is not an easy option for me right now because I depend on him financially, have nowhere to go and am worried about splitting up the family - not to mention the fact that I am due to give birth so soon. I suppose I just want to know if anyone has been through something similar?