Dear Dr. Chloe,
I am writing to you because I am in a difficult situation and I need your help. I am a 25-year-old woman who has been in a relationship with my boyfriend for 5 years. We are very much in love, but we have been having some problems lately. My boyfriend has been working long hours, and he is stressed out about his job. He has been taking it out on me—snapping at me and being critical of everything I do. I have tried to talk to him about it, but he just gets defensive and says that I’m being too sensitive.
I am at my wit’s end. I don’t know what to do. I love my boyfriend and I always imagined we’d be together forever with marriage, kids, and a white picket fence—but I can’t take the way he is treating me anymore. I need your advice on how to talk to him about this and how to get him to see that he is hurting me.
I am also worried about his mental health. He has always been a bit of a worrier, but lately, he’s been even more anxious than usual. He is having trouble sleeping, and he’s always stressed out. I’m afraid he’s going to have a breakdown.
I am really at a loss, and I don’t know what to do.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Girlfriend
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Dear Concerned Girlfriend,
I’m so glad you decided to write. There are two issues here: The first is your boyfriend’s stress, and the second is the way it’s impacting your relationship. Let’s unpack them both.
You are wise to be concerned about his trouble sleeping—along with his irritability and overall anxiety. It sounds like you’ve tried talking to him about it, and he has indicated that your efforts are unwelcome. Since you’re not married, he is entitled to a higher level of independence regarding how he wants to live his life. However, you’re not obligated to stick around and tolerate it—in fact, you’d be wise to take careful notice of how he handles stress as you evaluate what level of commitment makes sense for you moving forward.
You may want to make an effort at resolution by enlisting a friend or family member that he trusts to join you for a structured conversation where you both express that you care about him and you’re concerned about his current state. Another idea is to put your thoughts and feelings down in a letter. Either way, be sure to emphasize how much you love him, how much you’d like to “be there” for him, and how you feel when he shuts you out and/or expresses such broad-based criticism of you. Pepper the communication with kindness, and make it clear that you’re communicating this out of love for him and a desire to have closeness despite life’s hardships.
If he remains standoffish about accepting support and continues to treat you harshly, you may want to explain to him that although you want to be there for him like partners should, you may need to re-evaluate if you’re really suited to each other if he continues to push you away. Partners need to support each other during life’s ups and downs—they have to be open to receiving support as well as giving it.
Five years is a long time for a relationship, and you mentioned that you’re interested in a long-term relationship potentially leading to marriage. Your particular five-year window has spanned the transition from the very end of your adolescence into young adulthood—you’re now at a point where you see how he handles adulthood and the stressors that accompany it. You would be wise to course-correct and reconsider the relationship if you’re realizing you’re with someone who is unable or unwilling to treat you decently when faced with realities of adult life, such as job stress. This is especially true if you’re considering a future that involves children—how would you feel watching him behave this way towards your future children? Even regardless of children, how would you feel if he were behaving this way if you were going through a difficult chapter of life yourself?
Husbands and wives (or long-term partners) have an obligation to take care of themselves for their partners as well as for themselves and to treat each other kindly even when life is hard. The chances that your boyfriend is in the most difficult chapter of life that he’ll ever experience are pretty low, he’s a young man just getting started—so if he’s already buckling under the current situation while rejecting your efforts to be supportive, and he’s already “criticizing everything you do” because of stress for which he’s unwilling to accept support, then you may want to do some serious reflection about moving forward.
If you’re worried about hurting him, consider that allowing someone to treat you and themselves poorly for long periods of time is not kind or helpful—sometimes honest feedback and hard limits are the very wake-up call that catalyzes healthy changes. You are young and your life is ahead of you—make sure you choose your partner carefully. We don’t want to abandon someone in his or her hour of need, but moving on from someone who roundly rejects your help and pushes you away is not abandonment—it’s simply noticing that he doesn’t seem to want a supportive partner and then responding accordingly.
Wishing you all the best, Concerned Girlfriend!
Warmly,
Dr. Chloe
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