TL;DR : I'm deeply in love with my girlfriend, but despite my major investment and expressions of love, i rarely feel loved or seen in return. She struggles with understanding and expressing love due to emotional neglect in her childhood and is now seeking therapy, and is now asking for space to figure herself out. I'm seeking for advice because I feel terribly torn between giving her that space and fearing the relationship won’t improve, and just breaking up because I'm getting exhausted and resentful.
I have been with my girlfriend for a year and a half. She's my first girlfriend, but I had some (kinda) serious relationships with men in the past, few of them and with large period of time between them where I had the chance to be alone, to work on myself in therapy and just to discover myself trough time and various experiences. I should also mention that I am studying psychology, and am a very soon to be clinical psychologist. Good way to introduce how I met my now girlfriend, in uni. We were friends for a while before it became romantic. She, on her side, didn't get any time alone between her relationships, as she went from one long term relationship to another very quickly.
Since the beginning, ive been head over heels for her. I love her so much, and I am a very romantic person so I tend to express it verbally, physically, trough gifts, and other acts of love especially cooking since that's what she loves the most. I've been very invested in her wellbeing, I've supported her and helped her and she even said to me that she "has never done that much for herself than during this relationship".
She has a very complicated relationship with her family, and as an (almost) professional, I think that I can confidently say that she was terribly emotionally neglected as a child. Love was never expressed, she never had warmth, affection, care and has never really been "seen" by her parents.
I love LOVE. In every shape or form. Imo, it's one of the greatest things we get to experience in life, and it is free ?? How wonderful is that.
Over the course of our relationship, it has been very hard for me to feel seen by her. I know she loves me to the best of her abilities but I rarely felt loved. I always feel like the one who loves the most. She even says herself that she doesn't know what love is or should feel like. And we've had numerous conversations about this topic, I expressed my needs, she expressed hers (kind of) etc. And over the last few months, it went down the hill. I honestly feel like I'm living in a nightmare sometimes. She felt more and more pressured when I asked for some reassurance and when I expressed the fact that I felt taken for granted and overlooked, and did less and less.
She's been seeking professionnel help from a licensed therapist for about a month now, and she wants to get better for herself and for our relationship. We love each other and last month we already went through a crisis and almost broke up/considered doing a break. She expressed the need to have some space to heal, to take the time understand herself, to define what love is to her, to build her personal representation of relationships and love. The thing is, I physically feel ill even thinking about breaking up and I don't think that highly of breaks (like what's the point, everyone ends up separating afterwards in my experience). I am so so so lost. On the one hand I love her enough to leave her the space and alone time she requests and needs. On the other hand I don't know if it will ever get better, even with some work and I progressively lose hope because it does not seem like she wants to fight for me, this lack of investment is making me resentful which I absolutely hate. And in a way, she's right to fight for herself. But where does that leave me. I feel very alone, and extremely sad. I've given so much love and energy for this relationship (without requesting it in return ofc, but it would be nice to feel really loved and cared for sometimes) and it doesn't even matter.
To make things even easier, I fear that she won't be able to make the final decision herself, she's too afraid to hurt me and already feels very guilty about everything, so that leaves me with no choice but to decide what we're gonna do myself.
So, any ideas or advice on how to navigate through this awful situation ? How can I stop bawling my eyes out every minute of the day ?
I am very sorry about this long rant but I have no one to talk about this since times are already very tough on my friends. Also, English isn't my first language so I apologise for any mistake I made !