u/Blind-Anon

Hi, this is a secondary account so my boyfriend doesn’t find this, as he frequents Reddit and knows my usual account. I am really, really stuck, and I feel like the biggest jerk on the planet right now. My friends have told me I’m not and that what I want to do is the right thing, but I can’t help but feel this enormous amount of guilt and despair at the thought of doing it. I think advice from strangers and outsiders is what I really need right now. Also, I am a girl, we are both in our mid twenties.

Now, a bit of background on my boyfriend, let’s call him Ethan (I’ll be using he/him and saying “boyfriend” for this story to make it less confusing, and because I’m really not sure what he wants to be called anymore after this?). Ethan and I have been in a long distance relationship for 6 years, I am in America and he is in Canada. We’re on opposites sides of North America, so I’ve only got to visit him a half dozen times in the span of our relationship. We met online on a PlayStation game and hit it off.

We’ve had our ups and downs, been on the brink of breakup twice because of the hardships of being so far away from each other, but we came back stronger each time. I was in it for the long haul, and I know he is too. We were even beginning to make plans for me possibly moving to Canada, before I unfortunately suffered a bad accident last year that left me partially blind and unable to work for long periods of time. There’s no way in hell he wants to move to the US, so we’re stuck where we are.

About a month ago, Ethan started floating the idea of gender identity and thinking he might want to try female pronouns. I said sure let’s test it out, I have no problem with you exploring. I want to make this very clear: I am very accepting and welcoming of LGBTQ+. Most of the people in my life are under that umbrella, and I fully back and support them. From my best friends to my relatives, I love them all for who they are.

So we try using a different name and pronouns for a bit. It makes him happy, we pass around ideas for androgyny or gender fluidness, things seem to be going well. Then, he shaves his huge beard. He already had nice long hair, so making himself look feminine for a photo wasn’t hard.

This is where I feel extremely guilty and awful. I looked at the picture, and felt this immediate ick. I felt absolutely no attraction or anything, and it really hit me that I don’t know if I could date him as a woman. I have identified as bisexual for years, I’ve dated women and trans people, but I was not attracted to him looking feminine at all.

After that I spent a couple days not responding much to his messages (I know, another asshole move), just thinking and reflecting about what this meant for us going forward. I want him to get the gender affirmation he so desperately wants, I want him to feel comfortable in his own skin, but I couldn’t be with him when he was doing it.

So we talked. I told him I would support him through his transition if that’s what he wanted, but I wasn’t sure if I could do it as a romantic partner. Ethan instantly backtracked on everything and said “I would rather be with you and experience gender dysphoria than lose you.” Of course that brings me absolutely no joy whatsoever. Every single day we’re together, and I say “he” or his birth name, I would feel like the biggest jerk on the planet. It would be my fault, and I would be the reason he couldn’t be who he really was.

At this moment we are still together and he insists I go back to he/him pronouns. A breakup seems like the best course of action, he luckily just got a therapist 2 months ago, but he hints about possibly hurting himself if I were to leave. I just hope his therapist and family step up when I’m gone.

But there’s another issue.

We are going on vacation in a month. He is flying down to my city, and my family is driving us down to the beach for a week (I can’t travel by plane anymore because of the accident). I don’t know if his ticket is refundable, and with how far the flight is and because it’s across borders, the price for it is usually around a thousand dollars. There’s no way in hell I can afford to pay him back for the ticket if he can’t cancel it, but I don’t want to go on this vacation with him. It wouldn’t be good for either of us, this whole relationship isn’t good for either of us anymore.

The more I think about the picture and how it turned me off of him, the more I start thinking about other red flags I have completely swept under the rug. I won’t get into it all, but there has been a lot of really bad things he has done in the past that I have looked past for him, and so many people have pointed out how bad these things really are, but I was so blinded by love. It’s like I’ve finally taken the blinders off and seen when he’s really like, and that scares me even more than everything else.

Writing this all down has really helped me get my feelings together, but I still really need advice on if I should break up with him now, or wait until after the vacation? I am still scared shitless about breaking up with him, I’m not good at confrontation at all and every time I bring up anything that upsets him, like boundaries or just simply saying no, he has a week long meltdown. The thought of how he will react to this gives me massive amounts of anxiety. And really at the end of the day, I don’t think this breakup is fully because of his desire to transition, that was just the gateway that made me open my eyes to how bad things had gotten. Thanks, Reddit, please feel free to ask me any questions.