We started dating long back, went through a 3-year long-distance phase, but stayed connected. We talked every day, shared everything with each other, and honestly, things were going really well. Back then, it genuinely felt like I had found the one, and I felt incredibly lucky knowing I wouldn’t have to worry about finding the right person for marriage anymore.
About my boyfriend: He is genuinely a very nice person with a good heart. He is very caring, understanding, and well I can make him listen to me (no he is really nice). He might take a little time to act on what I tell him, but he does take it in and makes an effort. He is also very patient with my emotions. So, no red flags; he is actually amazing.
The problems in our relationship started surfacing when, after a few years of long distance, we finally decided to move in together. That decision completely turned my world upside down. Within the first few months, I started realizing just how different we really are. It’s not that he suddenly became a different person, or that he had been hiding who he was. But I began noticing that our ideas of fun, and some basic expectations from a relationship were quite different. So, I felt very alone while living together, and this feeling continued for almost a year. I did communicate some of these things to him from time to time, but maybe not to the full extent of what I was feeling, more like I was annoyed.
Eventually, I started thinking that maybe moving in together had been the wrong decision, and that perhaps we should take a step back and live separately. But when I communicated this to him, he took it very hard. We ended up having several long conversations about what was going wrong, and he told me that what I was asking for, mainly spending more intentional time on the relationship, was actually very manageable for him; he just genuinely had no idea. At that point, I thought maybe this was something we could work through, so we decided to continue living together.
He did make a lot of changes after our conversations. Even so, during the time we lived together, I was constantly overthinking. He genuinely put in effort and changed in many ways, but for some reason, it still hasn’t stopped my overthinking. Sometimes, I even feel like I may have lost some of my romantic feelings in the process. I have become so used to scrutinizing him and looking for signs of his old behavior that I really don’t like this side of myself. I did talk to him about some of my concerns, but nothing ever seemed to quiet my thoughts, so eventually I stopped bringing everything up because I didn’t want to keep burdening him. Apart from my constant overthinking, things have been quite smoothly, but I am not sure about how to get out of this loop.
I know I want to get married someday (he did propose to me while randomly talking and I always tell him that I am not ready, I know it must be exhausting for him), and objectively, I am with a genuinely kind, caring, and good person. But ever since I had made up my mind, months after we first moved in together, that maybe this relationship couldn’t work because we are fundamentally too different, I haven’t really been able to come back from that thought.
A part of me really, really wants this to work, not just because I care about him, but also because I don’t want us to go through the pain of a breakup and then start over again with the exhausting process of finding another partner. I keep wondering what is wrong with me, and why I cannot feel certain about someone I feel like I have known forever and who is, in so many ways, genuinely a good person.
TL;DR: Just want to hear your stories, if you ever experienced something similar, what did you do, and did you regret your decision