Me (24F) and my boyfriend (32M) have been together for about 6 months now and I am feeling distant lately and we are going through a rough patch. A lot of it seems tied to financial stress, physical exhaustion, and grief related to losing his dad about 10 years ago, and I’m struggling to understand how to support him without neglecting my own emotional needs.
For context, on November 19th he was let go from his second job, which was his main source of income. He already had a new job lined up, but it didn’t start until December 9th, and he had already given his smaller job his two weeks’ notice. This left him unable to make money for about a week or two. On top of that, he currently owns a car that isn’t very reliable and still owes money from a car accident years ago involving a car that wasn’t his.
Since around November 22nd, he’s been having a really hard time mentally and emotionally.
We did have an argument one night about money. He feels a strong need to provide for me, even though we don’t live together and I make my own money. That argument has been resolved, but I can tell money is still weighing heavily on him.
This time of year is also especially difficult for him because he lost his father about 10 years ago, just a couple of days before Christmas. Recently, he’s been opening up more about how that loss still affects him, especially the feeling of lost time and memories.
His new job has been extremely physically demanding. Almost every night after work he tells me how sore and exhausted he is. We’ve made several plans over the past couple of weeks, but he’s had to cancel some of them because of how tired he is. We also live in the Midwest, and the cold weather makes it harder to come up with easy, low-effort date ideas.
I sometimes feel like he cancels because he’s worried we’ll spend money if we hang out, even though I’ve reassured him multiple times that we don’t need to spend money. We can stay in, play video games, or watch movies.
Tonight we’re supposed to hang out and go to a small local concert. He had seemed excited about it recently, but today he’s been a bit vague about timing, saying he’s sore and running errands and is gonna chill after errands. He said he was not sure when and it would probably be later. I’m scared he’s going to flake, and it’s bringing up a lot of anxiety for me. I’m also anxious that he’s not going to want to stay the night either.
Another layer to this is timing, our 6-month anniversary is tomorrow. The emotional closeness around that milestone matters to me, especially given how distant we’ve been lately.
I know a lot of this likely has to do with grief, stress, and exhaustion, and I truly empathize with what he’s going through. At the same time, I’ve been feeling emotionally disconnected from him for about a month now, and it’s been really hard. We had sex for the first time in early November (it was my first time ever), and the emotional distance afterward has been especially difficult for me to process.
I don’t want to pressure him or make his grief or stress worse, but I also don’t want to ignore my own feelings.
My questions are:
How can I support my boyfriend who is grieving?
Is it reasonable to feel hurt by the distance even knowing everything he’s dealing with?
How would you approach communicating this without making him feel guilty or inadequate? I have communicated with him about it a little bit but not enough i fear.
Any advice or perspective would really be appreciated.