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So I've been with my girlfriend for 2 years now and I'd like some advice.
First some context.
When we first got together, we both had the classic puppy dog infatuation phase with each other. Absolutely head over heels with one another and I never wanted to stop being around her. But as time went on I discovered some pretty major red flags about her, for example she had (emphasis on the past tense here) a VERY extreme response to stress and had full meltdowns in ways that were incredibly hard for me to emotionally handle. And this led me to what I've been defining as the paradox of relationship advice, stemming from the tension of two common pieces of relationship advice:
But ultimately tl;dr. What do people think here about the paradox that I've laid out.
Bonus context: To her credit, she made real results here. She did some serious self-reflection, and we did couples counseling together and really made an improvement.
My issue now is that I'm noticing more and more deal-breaking issues that I feel like really need to be addressed, and she does keep trying to make improvements, and really does improve. But I feel stuck feeling like things still feel wrong, and I can't tell if this is due to:
Bail. Can't handle stress well / you can't handle the way she handles stress well, is a recipe for disaster in a lifelong commitment. It will explode on you.
Second, I think the most basic rule of thumb should be if you need counciling while you're still dating, break up. You should have a relatively low 'fix it' tolerance while you're just dating something. That shit is for after the lifelong commitment has been made.
If you tough it out, you will spend the rest of your life resenting the possibility that there might have been someone out there who you would have fit like a glove with, and all those couples around that do have that.
Onto the paradox - #2 is stuff and nonsense. Yes you both need to grow; but not grow into a fit for eachother. You need to start as a fit and grow from there.
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First bullet says don't try change the other person, the second bullet says try to change yourself. A characteristic of someone is their willingness or desire to change in order to help their relationship with you; this is something you shouldn't go into a relationship expecting to change about them. They either will or won't change themselves to help the relationship they have with you, and your efforts to influence that will have minimal effect at best. So find someone who is willing to change for you (rather than someone you find attractive that you believe you can change into the kind of person who would change for you) and change yourself to help your relationship with them. This doesn't seem paradoxical.
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My answer to your paradox is that claim #2 is false, thus there is no paradox. I also suspect that it's different people giving advice #1 and 2, which again means there really isn't a paradox.
I think that point #1 is completely correct. You can't go into a relationship expecting you will change that person. My wife (11 years after we met) is still very much the same person she always was. Her flaws are something she works on, but they are still there and most likely always will be. Committing to someone, then, cannot come with the expectation of "that drives me crazy but it'll change". You must be willing to accept the person as she is, not as you hope she will become.
To the extent that two people "grow into" each other, it's not because a person changes his flaws for his spouse. It's because as you share a life, you build on the foundation you have in common, and as you do those things are shared, until most of your self is the history you have built up with this person over the years and you can't imagine yourselves apart. But I don't think that means that you can expect that each of you will be able to set aside your deep flaws (which we all have) out of love for the other person. You can mitigate those things out of love, certainly. But they won't disappear.
On your questions about your situation, it's hard to get a good read without knowing you more. But it sounds like you are focusing a bit too much on the negatives. It is hard to strike a balance between ignoring all the red flags and being overly critical, but it sounds to me like right now you're a touch on the latter side. I also don't think that being apart and spending all your time dealing with these issues is helping. Perhaps that can't be helped in your respective circumstances right now, but I suggest trying to consciously focus on having good times for a little while. It's important to discuss serious things, but it's important to take breaks from that and work on being in love. If you guys do marry, you'll find that even in marriage you'll have seasons when you are both busy and stressed out with life and need to make a conscious effort to reconnect. Best to start developing that skill now.
Lastly, don't be too worried about what you think your relationship should be like. You guys aren't in trouble because you're having a rough go of it lately, that happens to everyone. When my wife and I got married, we didn't go through a "honeymoon" phase where everything was sunshine and rainbows. On the contrary, we fought a lot when we first got married, almost from the time we got back from our honeymoon. At the time I worried about what that meant, and if we were doing something wrong in our marriage. But looking back now I see that it was just a season, that we had lots of lovey dovey time before we got married and had more after that season was over, and that we were doing just fine. There isn't a benchmark you have to meet for how easy or hard your relationship is at the moment, just take the seasons as they come and work through them as best you can.
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I think those are good things to think about, but it’s genuinely hard to give advice when all we know is generalities.
I don’t know what you mean by “meltdowns”, but sometimes people do have an extreme reaction to stress. How much of a dealbreaker that is depends on how serious the stress was — if your young child is brutally murdered and you writhe in fits of anguish, I don’t know that many people are going to say that’s unexpected. It depends on what the stress was, what the meltdown was, and exactly how that interfaces with your own emotional resilience. That was probably the topic of the couples’ counseling.
It’s highly common for men dating women to struggle with her emotional reactions to stress, because the way women deal with and externalize stress is just different from the way men tend to (but not always). Keeping up with the basics like engaging in active listening, supportive communication, and distinguishing venting from solutions-focused conversation is good. But you have to couple that with a sense of internal stability: often what women want from their man in an emotional crisis is a feeling of protection, reassurance, stability, and steadfastness. And knowing how to respectfully listen while guiding her away from the feeling of stress and towards that feeling of protection and reassurance is a very helpful relationship skill. You have to lead and stabilize without being domineering.
What does stand out to me in your description is that you live separately, and in fact an hour away — LDRs are always, always hard. It’s especially hard when you’re dealing with emotional struggles, because one of the selling points of a relationship is that they’re a person who provides physical affection when you’re struggling.
We talk about women getting physical affection from their girlfriends, but it is extremely common, almost ubiquitous, for women to find being held and embraced by their man extremely calming and protective in a special way, for reasons we could write evopsych stories about until the cows come home. What I’ve found in relationships is that talking helps, but only to a point, and often finding a way to laugh, a distraction, a comforting presence, is more helpful to a partner in distress. So the struggle with your LDR may be that the most helpful element of a relationship is denied you most of the time, and that degrades things over time. Relationships are fundamentally about physical touch.
Do you video chat frequently? Sometimes just seeing your beau’s face, their smile, their eyes, can help you feel more connected. If you’re both part of the blue bubble master race, you can use SharePlay to do things like watch YouTube or short videos together, which might give you an opportunity to laugh together. That’s powerful.
But the most important thing you can do is work to make this LDR into a short-distance relationship. Getting yourselves closer together in whatever way you can is extremely important. A relationship where you can just be together, casually, without counting the minutes, is a massive quality of life increase.
Another thing that I see is that you talked only in generalities about your connection, your intimacy — what brought you two together? What drew you to her? What kinds of things do you do, when you’re in that fun and playful mood? When you’re together, what makes you inseparable? Being able to understand what you like about the relationship, and what’s unique about your bond compared to other bonds you’ve had, is absolutely essential to answering the question about whether you want to move forward with the relationship or not.
I hope this helps.
First, thank you for the thoughtful response, I really appreciate it :)
First, on the topic of meltdowns. At the beginning they were primarily about her visa status, she is in the US from Canada on a work visa, and when I met her she had a few months to get a job or she would be overstaying her visa. And given we met each other and fell for each other pretty instantly, that meant the penalty for both of us if that happened would be losing this great relationship we just started. So at the start I gave her a lot of slack at the start. But she eventually did find a job (As expected, she is basically a genius and had a killer resume), but where it started getting taxing was she continued to be terrified of then losing her job. and it felt like every week I had to calm her down about her getting deported, and this kind of reaction was eventually the meltdowns that had us want to go to couples counseling, and she did get a lot better coping mechanisms and ways of thinking about it.
On LDR. This has been something I've been feeling more and more, both for the calming element you are bringing up to being playful. I feel like our playful and fun sides are way more apparent to each other when we are together in person, and I'd say the last mew months has been sorely lacking in the fun department as we've been dealing with some other emotional / connection issues recently that I do think would be much better if we lived together. But one of the big problems for me here is that I don't want to leave the city (SF). I really love the car-free lifestyle and its really hard to give that up. And she works out in the burbs and that is what keeps her in that area. I WFH so practically if either of us was to move it would be me, but there is a part of me that doesn't want to give up the lifestyle I want when we have these other issues we are dealing with and I'm unsure about us. Although I often wonder if this is a big chicken and egg problem to some degree, "I don't want to move in because we have relationship problems, but we have relationship problems because we haven't moved in".
On our connection.
And we still do those things, but our relationship simply feels a lot less secure and we both know it. So those moments don't feel as joyful as they once did. She knows I've been having a lot of second thoughts and I am increasingly worried that this isn't working out. But I then second guess my own judgement, is this still a chicken and egg problem? Are we not working because we haven't moved in and made that commitment? Or are we not moving in and making a commitment because we aren't working out?
And there is one part of me that thinks breaking up is the right move. That I'm not happy, and I no longer feel like my needs are being met and I feel myself disconnecting**. But the other part of me remembers how happy we were in the beginning, and how right everything felt and I wonder if maybe the problem is me not being willing to commit?
**I've definitely been starting to feel neglected in some regards. The main one is her overall lack of social graces. She is someone who grew up in a family where people never really asked each other questions, and then in college she studied pure math with the autistic geniusestm who simply info dumped and never asked questions. And its becoming more and more clear that her ability to have a smooth conversation is just lacking, and I feel like I've been having to teach her how to have conversations which has been making me feel more like her parent than her partner. And this extends to meeting my friends, where it feels like she is awkward and it seems like she doesn't want to be there. Which really hurts me because I don't get to see my friends often and I get worried both that she and my friends are uncomfortable when I want to have a lovely time with them both.
And I have talked about this with her in all of this. And she always agrees to work on it and to try to get better, which is encouraging! I would break up with her if she wasn't willing to work on it, because basic communication is important. But this is where it goes back to my original query, should I really be with someone I'm trying to change? As it does make me feel more like a parent, and it also makes her feel less secure, like my love is conditional. And I know that must hurt like hell for her. But she is committed to making it work, and I see her putting in so much effort. But the work is genuinely draining and the wear on me has really started to show in the last couple of months.
The "don't try to change your partner" advice is more about not making your love conditional upon them changing, than it is about not encouraging them to improve. If you guys marry, it will be your duty to try to point out when she has serious deficiencies, and to try to help her work on those things. But you need to be willing to accept the fact that she may not change, and love her regardless.
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The capstone marriage vs. the cornerstone marriage, as I have heard it. Do you only get into relationships as a reward for putting in the hard work of becoming a person worthy of a relationship, or is the relationship the firm foundation the rest of your life is built on?
If you both view the relationship as "the firm foundation the rest of your life is built on" and you are both committed to giving 100% to each other regardless of if it feels like you are getting 100% back (because sometimes one person's 100% only feels like 50% to the other person), then you will be fine. If that level of commitment is the thing you are hoping changes, then run away screaming.
So using your definition of a capstone marriage, that definitely isn't my view, I firmly believe that relationship should be the bedrock the rest of your life is built on. And I actually am 100% certain that she is someone who will give me 100% commitment to the relationship.
I think the issues I'm having now is more about wondering if she is someone, who at her baseline, is someone who is compatable with me. The kinds of issues we are now dealing with feel more fundamental about ourselves.
Stuff about how we communicate our feelings and issues, how we like to interact in social settings, etc.
I think this is something where it is good to have differences. One partner more gregarious, one partner more reserved. The reserved partner makes sure the gregarious partner gets rest and gives them an excuse to bow out of social gatherings. The gregarious partner makes sure the reserved partner gets to escape their own head from time to time.
How men and women communicate will always be different. The question isn't if you can learn to communicate the same way. The question is can you learn how to understand and respect each other even when you communicate your feelings differently.
But of course, I'm just a stranger on the internet spitballing based on key phrases you throw my way. I don't really know what you and your partner are like. My sole credentials are that I'm happily married after ten years and four kids, and my parents were miserably married and I got to see that up front and personal because my mom saw me as her confidante.
That's tough. I'm sorry to hear that. I've had the same thing with my parents a bit, and have had to gently remind them that I (as a very not neutral party) can't really be there for them as a shoulder to cry on when they have issues with each other.
I was around five years old when my mom first told me, "I love your father, I just don't like him very much." I wasn't really great at setting firm boundaries at the time.
Yeah, that's fair. Fortunately, when my parents tried to talk to me about their marriage woes I was in my twenties so I had more ability to push back. I sympathize that you had to deal with that from a young age; I know it couldn't have been easy.
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