Hello!
Boyfriend and I have been in a relationship for 3 years in December. We live 1 hour and 30 minutes apart and meet as often as we can, usually that‘s once or twice a week.
My boyfriend has changed a lot this year and it has sent me down a spiral. We barely talk, even if he is home all day. When we do talk, it‘s me doing the talking. He responds to my texts maybe 2-3 hours later which usually wouldn‘t be an issue but i‘ve been with this man for 3 years and he was NEVER like this. He told me that sometimes he just doesn’t feel like responding to me anymore, which again i understand but with everything else it just bugs me. The last time we spent quality time together was maybe a month ago? when we meet we don‘t talk much and we don‘t go outside either because he doesn‘t feel like it. I feel used and i feel like my emotional needs are not being met. I asked him many times if he is okay and what‘s wrong but there is never anything wrong. He doesn‘t seem depressed either. He seems okay with all of this. I am very confused and i communicated my confusion so many times, i feel like my tongue will fall off if i do it again. When we do go outside or when we are in the car, i want to use that opportunity to talk to him because i feel so disconnected from him but he always listens to loud music in his earbuds and it makes me feel like he doesn‘t really want to speak to me anymore. It was my birthday a while back and he had nothing planned, which made me really sad because i planned so much for him. He didn‘t even get me a small cake or a muffin, nothing. He also, and i know this doesn‘t matter but it just upset me, he makes 4x as much money as me because i am a college student with a part-time job and he works full time. I got him a gift over 150 bucks and his gift was maybe 30 max? not even what i wanted and he didn‘t have it ready on my birthday.
2 weeks ago we had an argument. I was at Uni and i had a terrible day and was crying on the train back home and he wasn‘t responding to me the whole day, so i texted my friend and she comforted me and offered to watch a movie online together when i am home. So i did that. My boyfriend was upset that i didn‘t call him when i got home and didn‘t want to speak to him after. I was hurt, because i really was struggling and i don‘t ask for help often but he wasn‘t there even though i know he was on his phone because i kept seeing his reposts.
I really don‘t know what to do anymore. When i try to communicate he really seems like there is no issue at all and he is okay with not speaking to me. He also told me that he is tired from work and can‘t help it but i just don‘t understand. He talks to other friends but having a conversation with me is too much for him.
Does this sound like he doesn‘t love me anymore?
Sounds almost exactly how I treated some of my past partners at the worst of my depression. All of them said in one way or another “you don’t seem depressed,” too. It’s worth noting for you that the symptoms of depression between men and women are pretty different and most popular media projects the “woman” symptoms onto men with depression.
All of them eventually broke up with me and I’d have done the same thing in their shoes.
i understand this but he talks to his friends all the time. He will watch movies with them and play games with them, just not with me. sometimes when we call for 20-30 minutes he will be texting his friend back and forth and will respond right away when he lets me wait hours. I have experienced him depressed and i know symptoms change all the time but it was completely different. It seems like IF this is depression, i am the only person he is too depressed to interact with
I’m just playing devil’s advocate here but yeah, that does sound pretty similar to my experience. The closer people were to me, the harder it was to speak with them, open up, etc. I never really found myself having a hard time speaking with my coworkers or random people I’d see, but would go weeks on end sending only a few texts a day to my partner because I knew that they knew that something was up and I didn’t want to be confronted. Male-male friendships are a lot more transactional and less personal than female-female friendships. I knew, for the most part, that none of my friends would say anything about how depressed I seemed as long as I filled my role in the group, so it was a lot easier to be around them than my partner.
I could be entirely wrong and am probably being way too sympathetic to your BF and projecting my own past onto the situation, though. No advice on moving forward to you though. I’ll say again that I burned through many partners during that decade of my life and don’t blame them a bit for it.