Member- juliana192
- 7 years ago
This is a general post asking for some input and others’ experiences. I’ve been with my SO for a year and some change, and we got serious really early on, talking about the future seriously 4-5 months in. He’s not anyone I thought I would ever be with, but we work really well. We balance each other out, and it’s very stable. He just feels like someone I can spend my life with, and we have all the same life goals.
But I’ve been confused a lot. I can’t help but compare this to my last relationship. It was my first love, high school thing that lasted for 5 years and ended very shortly before I met my current SO. I was obsessed with this guy and was emotionally dependent on him. In my current relationship, we are both pretty independent and it’s a healthy relationship. But it’s not the same (for obvious reasons) and it makes me wonder. I have my own life, and we spend a decent amount of time apart but still love to be together. But sometimes it feels like there’s something missing, and I think it’s because we are stable and healthy and I’m not used to that. I’m just realizing this now.
I had a revelation lately that the “absence of feelings” I worry about is actually the absence of anxiety I had during 5 years of my last relationship. I was always thinking about him and was often anxious to some degree about what he was doing and why he didn’t answer my texts right away, etc. I very rarely feel any anxiety in my current relationship, and I think that not thinking about it all the time makes me feel like this relationship is lesser, that it’s boring or something. There have been a ton of relationship behaviors I was so used to that I’ve had to move past, and I feel like this is one of the bigger ones. I worry that I don’t love him enough or that I’m settling because I don’t have those same feelings that I used to.
But at the same time, I do love him so much. I do have those passionate feelings and get excited to see him. I don’t think about him 24/7, but I don’t want to be with anyone else. Sure, he drives me crazy sometimes, but he thanks me for putting up with him (I often say the same to him). The only thing I feel I may be settling with is that he’s less ambitious than me, but I have to realize that I started dating him at the lowest point of his academic career. It was a rough couple of months, and it’s still not going great but he’s trying a lot harder and I can see that he’s pulling himself back up. I get frustrated that he doesn’t seem to have anything together, but when I hang out with a lot of my recently graduated friends, very few of them seem to have their life together. So it’s not just him. When I see posts of bees who wonder if they are settling, they always say that the guy is nice and they are good together but that the feelings just aren’t there. My feelings aren’t as strong all the time as they were with my ex (given that this is actually a healthy relationship), but they are certainly there.
This is a huge mind dump, and if anyone has read this far, thank you!! Has anyone else had this confusion and figured it out or have any general advice? Sometimes I worry so much, and I think I may be worrying that we have such a healthy relationship!
