I've been in a relationship with my DP for almost 2 years now and while things started out brilliantly between us, I'm beginning to feel like we have too many differences to make things work.
There have been some minor issues throughout - we live a 90 minute drive apart and he has a teenage boy with some learning difficulties. This has meant that I spend every weekend at his house and he very rarely (3 times so far in 2024) visits my house. I live in a rural area and my DP (understandably) worries that his boy will get bored here - he has an XBox etc at home and that seems to keep him happy. I'd be lying if I said I didn't find the travelling and being away from my home difficult - I'm relatively new to my area (2.5 years here now) and not being here at weekends has made it difficult to form any real friendships. It also means I have to do all my chores and housework in the week after work (and sometimes end up helping him with his at weekends). But although it's occasionally frustrating for me, my DP was upfront about his situation from the off, so any resentment has mostly been swallowed and we make it work.
However, my DP has a very short fuse and over the last year or so has started to get angry, snappy and impatient with me a lot. This can happen when it's something contentious such as me raising an issue within the relationship. But he can also be triggered by the most trivial things: I didn't give him an instant yes or no opinion on an outfit he was thinking of wearing to the pub last weekend and I got my head bitten off. He says it's 'infuriating' when I don't answer a straight question - I'm quite a considered and sometimes indecisive person and am not always quick to provide an answer or an opinion on things because I like to allow myself time to think and respond. His impatience makes me feel quite bad about myself.
I strongly believe that two people can experience the same thing differently and feel opposite emotions in response to the same situation. But I feel that my DP often dismisses my feelings out of hand, is very quick to raise his voice, and tends to invalidate my point of view often. He's told me on more than one occasion that I'm 'being oversensitive'.
To be clear, I'm not afraid of my DP hurting me and there's never been any indication of physical anger. But I've increasingly found that I only have the confidence to challenge things within the relationship after a couple of glasses of wine - which is not a healthy way of dealing with things and leads to arguments and fall outs. Sometimes, because I've had a drink, I get frustrated at the reaction I get and I end up saying horrible things that I regret (which is also completely unacceptable).
I've had several months of therapy to try and improve my methods of communication. But the more therapy I've had, the more I'm coming to realise that his anger and invalidation is a barrier to me tackling my problems. I've tried to discuss this with him on several occasions but I sometimes feel that while I'm prepared to take accountability for my bad communication skills, he isn't. Whenever we have an argument, it's usually me that ends up apologising even if he's yelled at me.
We had a discussion at the beginning of this week where I laid all my cards on the table and he agreed to work on his temper and impatience issues too.
There are also quite a few other problems/things of concern:
Our sex life is pretty much a non-starter as my DP feels weird about being sexually active while the boy is in the neighbouring bedroom.
My DP recently complained during an argument that I don't contribute enough to group conversations when we're out with his friends. (My counter to this would be that he's told me that I'm 'just not very funny' in front of his friends when I've made a joke in the past and often seems to sneer at my contributions generally (he has a very sarcastic sense of humour and would say that this is just him joking around - but hardly a confidence boost or incentive to join in).
He can be quite thoughtless sometimes. To give an example of this, we recently couldn't go to a concert we'd booked tickets for because his childcare fell through at the last minute. I offered to try and sell the tickets on my social media, but he said he would do it himself. He only managed to sell one ticket and kept all the money for himself even though we'd each paid separately for our own tickets. AIBU to think that an offer of splitting the recouped money (and both of us being a little out of pocket rather than him getting his money back and me losing all of mine) would have been the kindest thing to do?
The difficulty is that there are strong feelings there. I do love him and he says he loves me (for all our faults). And my decision whether or not to call it quits is clouded by my having formed a good relationship with his boy. I'm also turning 40 soon and hate the thought of starting back on the dating scene all over again!
Am I just being naïve to think (hope?) that with a bit of work we might be able to turn this around? What has prompted you to finish a relationship in the past?