Yeah, it’s tough to get out of a rut. I’ve been in relationships like that. Ultimately what it takes is one person recognizing that they’re unhappy, honestly evaluating and accepting the source of that unhappiness, and taking actions to fix it.
By way of example, several years ago I was in a long-term relationship with zydee. After about seven years together, she’d done a hell of a lot of growing up, and I’d done… well… some. Some of the relationship habits I’d grown into were charming at first, but as we grew, they started to annoy the hell out of her. She took stock of why she was unhappy and recognized those problems. She pointed them out and told me they were becoming a problem for her.
They were hard, though, and certainly not what had been seemingly working for the previous several years, so I didn’t do anything about it. I took the easy route, assuming it’d blow over. It didn’t blow over, though: these were things that in time were really frustrating and hurting her, and since I wasn’t fixing them, she eventually realized she had to be responsible to her own happiness and left. It hurt for both of us, but in retrospect in needed to happen.
I like to think that her leaving was a big wake-up call for me to grow up and work through those issues. It helped a lot that radiantbaby (whom I got with shortly after) had the patience to deal with those issues and stick with me as I worked them out. But it certainly wasn’t happening in the rut I was in before, and my issues weren’t going to get fixed until something made me stand up and fix them.
I’m not saying you and Steve need to break up. I hope you don’t have to. Breakups suck, and you’re both completely awesome people who deserve nothing but happiness. I’m saying that you need to respect that happiness and figure out what’s making you sad. And if you find that it’s your relationship with him that’s stressing you out, then out of respect for your own happiness, you need to either work with him to fix it or else accept that you can’t.
By way of example, several years ago I was in a long-term relationship with zydee. After about seven years together, she’d done a hell of a lot of growing up, and I’d done… well… some. Some of the relationship habits I’d grown into were charming at first, but as we grew, they started to annoy the hell out of her. She took stock of why she was unhappy and recognized those problems. She pointed them out and told me they were becoming a problem for her.
They were hard, though, and certainly not what had been seemingly working for the previous several years, so I didn’t do anything about it. I took the easy route, assuming it’d blow over. It didn’t blow over, though: these were things that in time were really frustrating and hurting her, and since I wasn’t fixing them, she eventually realized she had to be responsible to her own happiness and left. It hurt for both of us, but in retrospect in needed to happen.
I like to think that her leaving was a big wake-up call for me to grow up and work through those issues. It helped a lot that radiantbaby (whom I got with shortly after) had the patience to deal with those issues and stick with me as I worked them out. But it certainly wasn’t happening in the rut I was in before, and my issues weren’t going to get fixed until something made me stand up and fix them.
I’m not saying you and Steve need to break up. I hope you don’t have to. Breakups suck, and you’re both completely awesome people who deserve nothing but happiness. I’m saying that you need to respect that happiness and figure out what’s making you sad. And if you find that it’s your relationship with him that’s stressing you out, then out of respect for your own happiness, you need to either work with him to fix it or else accept that you can’t.
*hug*
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