u/Ice_trey32

My boyfriend and I have been together for 3 1/2 years. We started dating when I was in the middle of a PhD program, and I moved in with him after about a year. He already had a dog when I met him, and he got another dog in the first few months of knowing each other. I love both animals and we had a very idyllic life, living in a California beach town and spending almost all of our time together when I wasn’t working in the lab for school. I was hoping to get a job nearby where we lived in my field, but we discussed many times the possibility of me doing a postdoctoral fellowship or getting a job in another city. In science as in many other fields, jobs are very competitive and it’s not always easy to predict where opportunities will arise. He expressed many times his preference for staying in our town, but also told me he was open to relocating “as long as we’re near a body of water”. He works in finance, fully remote.

I graduated at the end of last year and struggled to find a job, applying constantly and networking, but not applying outside of our city because that’s what he wanted. There were many layoffs in my specific field due to government funding disruptions with the Trump admin, and entry-level tech adjacent jobs in general have become impossible (if you’re unemployed right now, my heart goes out to you). Ultimately after months of unemployment, through one of my networking meetings, I got connected with a professor in NYC who offered me a postdoctoral fellowship to work on a project I found extremely scientifically exciting. I’ll be honest - I wasn’t just professionally excited about NYC. I’m from a small town in the interior of the US and the idea of spending a few years in the big city (with housing in manhattan subsidized by the university) sounded extremely fun to me. But again, even then, I had only applied in our town and hadn’t been trying to leave. Before I even accepted, my boyfriend threw a complete fit and said many horrible things to me, including that I was abandoning him, that I was easily replaceable, etc. and told me he wanted to break up with me. He told me I was abandoning our dogs and our life together, and that I was ruining our shared vision for our future.

A bit embittered by the experience, I decided to take the opportunity and plan to move. We spent a couple months after that living together before I moved out, and during that time, he slowly came to terms with what was happening and, on many occasions (including during a drunken sobbing where he profusely apologized for everything he said to me about moving) has now said that he will move in with me by the end of the year. But he’s very back-and-forth about it; sometimes it’s that he’s “maybe” moving, sometimes it’s “if you still like me by then”, or “if I’m too lonely and can’t handle it”. I really want him to come, but he hates the idea of NYC: too crowded, “all there is to do there is get a drink or go to a restaurant”, and (he’s very right about this one) not a great place to have two big dogs. For what it’s worth, I don’t really want to be in NYC long term either - I’d prefer to move back to California - but my fellowship will probably be at least 2-3 years.

Leaving him and our dogs was very difficult. I’ve been enjoying the new job, and it’s turned out to be everything I hoped it would be. I am also having fun in NYC. But I miss him desperately. On the other hand, I’m a little worried about him moving here after how much he’s expressed that he hates the idea of the city. And now that we’re apart, he can’t stop saying resentful things to me about my having abandoned him.

Will he come around? Can I keep encouraging him to move knowing he might hate it here and resent me for it? How do I talk to him when he keeps blaming me for the situation and twisting the knife?