I’ll try to keep this concise and relevant.
I’m struggling with whether to stay in my relationship or not. I posted recently asking for advice on how to leave, as I thought I made my mind up. But now I just don’t know.
We have been together 4 years, have DS 15m and partner has DD5 from previous relationship. We also run a business together.
We are very different people. He is very laid back, easy going, likes to go with the flow. Im pretty much the opposite. Opinionated, fiery and probably uptight/like things to be a certain way.
There have been issues since the start of our relationship. DP has always lied to me. White lies and some bigger things. He told me he had to go to court for getting in a fight on a night out. Some months later I found out from a friend of a friend that actually he got caught up with the wrong group of people doing something to do with money and there was a 50/50 chance he would go to jail. When I confronted him about lying to me he said he was embarrassed because it happened years ago when he was young and stupid and didn’t want me to judge him. This broke my trust, but I was conflicted by his reasoning as I understood.
White lies continued after that. He lied to me on/off about his contact with his DD BM. I found myself going through his phone to see if what he was saying to me was true and often times wasn’t, which further damaged our trust.
He finds it difficult to talk about things. Anything.
He once asked me to come up to his parents house the next day because he and his brothers were all going with their children. So the next morning I got ready and was sitting waiting, he had been weird all morning and as we were about to leave he asked me if I would just drop him off and go back home as he changed his mind. I was shocked, embarrassed and found this very hard to swallow whereas he didn’t see it as a big deal.
Another example, last year DP, DS and I all caught covid. DP was first to get it, recovered quickly and returned to work. I was also battling PPD at the time which made looking after a very sick child while I was sick myself all the more difficult. He was supposed to be seeing his DD at his parents house where she was staying that night as me and DS had covid, I’d assumed he would be coming home afterward. 7pm hit and I got a text to say he would just be coming home after work the following day instead. I had no food in the house. Unable to go and get anything. Sitting with our sick child feeling so utterly depressed. This tipped me over the edge and the more upset I was the more flippant he became, as if it was no big deal. We separated for a short time, 10 days maybe and he maintained the whole time he hadn’t done anything wrong and he needed to make time for his daughter too, couldn’t understand my point that he could of seen her until she went to bed and allowed his mother to take her home the next day (she stays there often so not unusual) and came home to help me with our sick child. He refused to apologise and eventually he was faced with me ending the relationship. Suddenly then he was sorry and I was so tired of fighting and struggling myself I said ok and we reconciled, but I never felt his apology was genuine.
Our sex life is non existent. He recently told me that he has been having a problem where sex has been causing him extreme pain and discomfort. He first mentioned this to me around 2 years ago and apparently has been going on ever since but he didn’t want to talk to me about it. He’s now needing surgery to resolve it. To me this is a prime example of his inability to communicate.
All this has made it very difficult for me to trust him although I believe they don’t come from a place of malice, rather an avoidance of difficult conversation. I’m very reactive and I think my extreme emotional reactions have probably made him draw further away from me too although I’ve been working hard on this through therapy during our relationship.
I should say he’s a good person, very generous and we have had some very happy times. He does a lot for me and enabled me to take a full year off with DS as I wasn’t ready to go back to work. He’s a good dad and definitely not a bad person. We have a lot of common interests, shared sense of humour. It’s our communication that fails us. I feel like I don’t really know him because he rarely voices his opinions. The lack of physical and emotional intimacy is killing me. I’ve felt depressed for sometime and thought there was something wrong with me but now I can see I’m just not fulfilled in my relationship. I think he’s somewhat emotionally unavailable and I’m definitely emotionally dysregulated thanks to childhood trauma.
We’ve discussed therapy but the issue is that he’s indifferent to changing. I asked him would he like to be a more open person and he said he just doesn’t think he’s that type of person, he likes to be easy going and not think too deep, but that he’ll try. I’m just unsure if our relationship can be saved as we do love each other and want a family life for our son, or if we are just too different from one another and there’s too much water under the bridge. Thanks if you got this far