We’ve been together ~3 years and it has been incredible. We have told ourselves we want to spend the rest of our lives together and we’ve been living together for a year and a half.
For the past year though I’ve been questioning everything and especially for around 3 months I’ve been seriously unhappy and struggling to find enough reasons to stay with her.
The dilemma comes from the fact that the girl I knew when we met for the first time and for the first 2 years is not the same as what she’s been like for a while now. I’d happily spend my life and make an amazing family with that girl, wherever she went. The issues are basically:
– She studies law and stresses over it too much, while her classmates put in minimal effort and get higher grades
– She has no self-confidence despite my efforts to boost it DAILY. She thanks me, she appreciates what I do for her and say to her but she keeps on hating her looks and smarts (she’s a 10/10 hottie and way more intelligent than most people our age I know)
– A consequence of the above issue – she has barely any social media presence, posting twice a year, which in my opinion contributes to her having confidence issues and she won’t go out of her bubble
– She sees herself as her 15-year0old self, having been constantly ridiculed for being chubby and other reasons kids/teens make fun of others for. This makes it so that she puts every single interaction through that prism and can’t come to terms with the fact that she has become a wonderful woman in her 20s with her chubbiness!
– My “love language” is hugging, kissing, just 24/7 touching, while hers is gift-giving and acts of service so I don’t receive what I give out and she prefers small gifts to hugs and whatever and I suppose this is a big incompatibility
– Her libido went from high to almost nonexistent, while mine has consistently remained high as hell. I don’t make her get intimate when she doesn’t want it of course and I keep waiting for her to initiate because I’ve tried too many times and failed. I crave intimacy, yet she pushes even that away, despite me not wanting it to lead to “erhem” most of the time – I always want ample foreplay but we can’t even get to that point at all anymore
– She’s in a constant state of not knowing what the hell is happening around her, she’s very uncoordinated and this is true for conversations as well – despite her amazing sense of humor she gets too nervous and anxious when we’re with other people and she says stupid/banal stuff and can’t participate well in most flows of conversation at parties/etc.
A lot of these issues she says are due to the stress from university and I get that, but she barely studies throughout the semester and she crams 10-day 24/7 study sessions before exams in which she is in a nonstop crisis and then somehow her knowledge doesn’t get appreciated and she gets lower marks than her dumber colleagues.
I’ve communicated my issues and she says she hates that she’s like this, but she says I just need to wait until things get more calm in her life until she can be the confident, sunny, strong woman she was…. but in my opinion her life is TOO calm and she’s just using the university as an excuse.
Since her constant crises with whatever prevents us from living normal early-20s lives and I’m the only one who makes money in the relationship (she doesn’t work because of uni, although if she worked part-time or even full-time – she’d still have enough time for studying because she crams it in the evening anyway and does nothing all day)
I’m feeling unhappy, unloved, unfulfilled. I would never cheat, but I’ve been having these intrusive thoughts about girls who have what my GF is lacking in terms of confidence, freedom to do anything and LIVE life, healthy social life and etc.
I have reached the point where I am tempted, what should I do.