“Am I Too Selfish to Ever Have a Relationship?”
Unfortunately, we missed the connecting flight on our vacation and had to each pay several hundred dollars to book another flight to leave the next day. That meant we missed the first night at our resort. We both were angry and frustrated, but she thinks I went on about it for the first four days. I can’t remember if I did although I may have mentioned it once or twice. According to her, I was breathing deeply and exhaling often after this incident. She found this irritating and selfish. I wasn’t even aware I was doing this, but I am an anxious person by nature.
The other night we had a chat on the phone and she revealed she wasn’t entirely happy with how things went. It was a polite and civil conversation. It wasn’t in an “I think you’re an idiot” kind of way.
-She couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to use the pool at the resort. I explained to her that people urinate in the pool and don’t shower before jumping. No thanks.
-She couldn’t understand why I was hesitant to walk along the sand. I explained to her that I hate sand getting on my feet unless I go for a swim. (I did end up going go for a walk along the sand.)
-She said I never held her hand, never hugged her, and wasn’t affectionate enough. That is true. I’m not very romantic. But I did place my hand on her back many times and on her shoulder.
-She said I never smile and never laugh. I’m an introvert. I’m a brooding sort of guy, but I can have a laugh and smile.
-She said we didn’t talk a lot during the holiday and she thought we would become closer. I dispute this. We went to dinner several times and we did talk. Does she mean future plans? Then the answer is no.
-She said that I never asked her if she needed help with her luggage. From memory, I did ask her, but she said she was fine. Maybe she can’t remember this. Admittedly, I can be thoughtless at times.
-She questioned why I cut my napkin in half during dinner and wiped the table in front of me. Who does that sort of thing she asked. What is wrong with doing that anyway? Why is she nit-picking?
In general, she thinks I’m cheap. That’s somewhat true. I am careful with my money, but I have to be. I have paid for meals at restaurants, but she likes fancy restaurants and they’re expensive. I like routine whereas she’s more spontaneous and wants someone who can make plans out of the blue. We’ve decided to stay as friends for now, and she wants me to think about what she said. She told me she cares about me, and I care about her too.
I do want a relationship and I’m looking for friendship and companionship, but clearly this isn’t enough for her. I’m not sure I can be the man she wants me to be. I would love to be that man, but I’m not confident and I don’t feel I have enough relationship experience. It feels like a big mountain to climb. I like this woman, but is it possible I may not be into her enough?? Am I too closed-off, selfish, and unromantic? Am I just a lazy coward?
This has been happening for the last twenty years and it’s the same old pattern. I date a woman for three to six months, anxiety sets in, relationship ends, and anxiety dissipates. I’m sick of it.
I’m even beginning to question myself as to whether I truly want a relationship and whether, perhaps, I secretly want to remain on my own and avoid the challenges that relationships bring. Can you help? — Sick of the Pattern
I think the best help I can give you is to encourage you to work through these big questions with the professional guidance of a good counselor. Clearly, you WANT a relationship, you acknowledge that there are challenges standing in your way, you acknowledge a twenty-year pattern in which YOU are the common denominator and in which being in a relationship seems to cause anxiety for you.
You talk about being an anxious person by nature. You describe behavior that sounds potentially nuero-divergent. I’m certainly not in a position to make any diagnosis, but I can tell you that there are tools that can allow you to exist and function and thrive in this world while reducing the level of anxiety you feel.
I’m glad you and Louise plan to remain friends because I think she’s already proven to be a good person to you. Taking the time to compassionately tell you some of the issues she has and the ways she felt hurt or disappointed on your vacation gives you a chance to address those issues. It’s true that you may not ever be the man Louise needs and wants — and not being a match is much different than not “being enough”; I hope that you can see and appreciate that. You can’t change your personality or who you are, nor should you. But you can work with a therapist to pinpoint areas in your life that you’d like to change and focus on strategies that would support this pursuit.
With guidance, you can learn how to recognize and interpret social cues and how to react to them appropriately. You can learn to express yourself and show your desire to connect in ways that will be more clearly perceived by others. You can learn to bend a little and meet the needs of others in a way that may occasionally compromise your comfort but never your values or your intent.
In short, you can learn to be a better partner and a better friend. There’s a future for you in which you can be happy and in love and enjoy the companionship of another. You have to decide whether you’re willing to put in the work to have that and whether it’s worth the effort. (For what it’s worth: I think it is, and I think you can.)
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If you have a relationship/dating question I can help answer, you can send me your letters at [email protected].
I read this letter a few times. My impression is that the struggles your girlfriend is having is not about the sand, the water, breathing heavily when you missed your connection. It is, as Wendy pointed out, a bigger, more general issue about what she feels is a lack of emotional connection. Maybe she chose these smaller examples as ways to try to explain it. This certainly seems like the kind of letter that makes me want to hear from your girlfriend. I get a strange sense her take on the entire thing would be quite different.
That was a good letter with a lot of self-reflection and a good answer. This work on yourself could be great for you. But I doubt this specific relationship can get on again. At some point, one has to accept the other the way he is. But yes, work on your anxieties and your ambivalences, this can open new insights in relationships. Do it for yourself.
As a 47 year old in a serious relationship for the first time due to some major health ailments, some of this sounds familiar. I agree with Wendy that a counselor could probably help you with a lot of this but some of the little things are also just habit. For example, my boyfriend and I had a lot of discussions about me checking in more. I was used to my routine where I didn’t have to let anyone know that I’d made it to work in the snow or I didn’t call to check in on someone when they were sick. It was an adjustment for me to learn these patterns which I probably had when I was younger and lived with my family but I didn’t anymore after living alone for so long.
What worked for us was to come up with a list of expectations. I kept it on my phone and I used the reminders on my calendar to help me out. It’s been three years and now I do these things automatically but I think going that long without a serious partner, I just forgot what “common courtesies” are expected. For example, we have a “Wine and Charity Knitting” group once a month until midnight. I never thought to call and let him know I was home ok. In fact, I thought it would be rude because it was so late. But he would worry if he didn’t hear that I was home safe after driving that late at night so I put a reminder on my phone to call when I got home.
Again, I do think counseling will help. Some of the issues you describe are different than the common courtesy type. But at least with those, you can use technology to help you regain the skills that you lost or maybe never had. It can be done and you’ve taken the first step by asking for help.
Hey LW, I’m seeing a lot of this in your letter: “Louise said she was unhappy about X, but X makes sense because of Y reason.” Or this: “Louise was unhappy about Z, but Z isn’t true.”
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees here. What she’s saying is that she didn’t have fun. Even if you’re right about the urine in the pool, does that automatically mean the vacation was fun for Louise? If you went back and tested the water and found urine, and she said “yes, you’re right”, she still won’t remember the vacation being fun.
Don’t focus so much on whether you’re right or whether your reasons are right. Women will go out with you if they enjoy hanging out with you. And if you’re frequently worrying about germs, acting “brooding”, not talking much, and not wanting to do activities with her, well, it may be just how you are, and it’s not “bad” or “wrong”, and it’s not a character or moral failing, but it also means she won’t enjoy spending time with you. Being right doesn’t automatically make you fun to be around.
It sounds like a beach vacation isn’t the right type of vacation for you. Louise had ideas/expectations about how a beach vacation should be and you ended up not fitting in with her ideas. Did it occur to you that people walk on the beach at a beach? What did you think the two of you would be doing during your stay? I personally find it boring to lay out in the sun and never do anything like that. I would want to wander the area to see it. If there was a local town I would wander all over it. I would walk on the beach in the morning and evening but skip it when it was hot and sunny because I burn easily and hate being out in the heat. I’d skip the pool entirely. Not because people pee in it but just because I would be bored with it. If I went on a trip with Louise, just as friends, we wouldn’t match up and we wouldn’t have fun because we wouldn’t want to do the same things. I think that some of your issues were because the two of you weren’t a good match for a beach vacation. You need to know yourself enough to know what you would like to do for a vacation and then discuss with the other person your ideas so that you don’t end up on a mismatched vacation. There was probably no way the two of you were going to have a good vacation together at a beach.
As for the rest of it. If Louise wanted help with her luggage she could have asked. You don’t read minds. Asking if she needed help is nice but also asking when you need help is also nice.
Expecting you to pay more than you feel you can afford for meals is selfish. Louise can spring for expensive meals too if that is what she wants.
After six months of dating Louise should have known whether you smile or laugh. She didn’t need to go to the beach to figure that one out.
Talking is sort of the same. She should know whether the two of you talk in the way she wants. I’m not saying that talking either more or less is better just that she should have known after six months whether you met her need for conversation. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to her when you didn’t talk as much as she wanted while on vacation.
I would personally find the cutting the napkin in half and cleaning the table a bit weird but I also wouldn’t mind if I liked the person. Everyone is going to have some quirks and you have to decide whether the quirks bug you enough that they get in the way of the relationship. I work with a number of women who seem to compulsively wipe surfaces and it doesn’t stop us from being friends.
You do sound like you have some sensory issues and maybe some OCD. If I was you I’d work on those for my own comfort but not to try to change yourself into a different person to please Louise. In the end you need a partner who likes you as you are and who doesn’t have a long list of changes you need to make to be okay to them. Louise is probably a very nice woman but not a good match for you. Maybe you need an introvert who would be more hands off than hands on when it comes to physical touch. Someone who is more quiet and reserved. Someone with a sense of humor closer to your own.
very good points
Wendy’s reply was great, and I do think that working with a counselor might be helpful for you as you learn to navigate potential future relationships. In addition to places where you might become a bit more flexible, a counselor might also help you see that others may just approach or see things differently than you do- and that’s ok! Finding the right match is partly about being compatible and being able to meet one another’s needs- but a big part is also about being able to communicate and understand those needs, even when they differ. So I think working with a counselor is less about changing your behavior as much as it is about learning to see another person’s perspective and see it as valid- even if your own perspective doesn’t change.
I’m struck by a number of things you said in your letter because it correlates to something going on my life. I’m probably going to say this rudely (for which I do not mean to) but have you ever been tested for, or thought you might be, on the autism spectrum? Many of things you describe and many of the details that other commentators responded to (not seeing the forest through the trees for example) are spot on descriptions of individuals with autism. Not to mention you are of the age that unless you were mute or of the very classic Rain Man style of autism you would have easily been missed in a diagnosis. I am 36 and female. I do believe I am on the spectrum as well and am in the process of trying to get an official diagnosis. And because of this I have done a lot of reading about autism in general. I have learned a great deal including the fact that I am still me just now I have a better grasp of what is going on with my brain. By learning about it I have really begun to grasp some tools to help me in social situations that I did not have before. Maybwith a little introspection you might come up with an answer that helps you.
This right here! As I was reading this my immediate thought was – he’s on the spectrum. I know several people like this, and it checked so many boxes for being on the spectrum. I strongly suggest being tested for this.
What a great, compassionate response Wendy! I agree with everything you said and encourage the letter writer to do a bit of research. He may be interested in Social Thinking (check out Michelle Garcia Winner) to see if that resonates with him as well. In addition to a counselor, social thinking can be addressed by speech therapists that specialize in pragmatics and/or social cognition. There is so much that can be done therapeutically to help those with social thinking differences and I really hope that this letter writer finds someone qualified to help. Best of luck letter writer!
Be grateful that the two of you found out that you may not be a match before you said your vows. This way you can remain friends, but you haven’t committed to each other yet and thankfully added children to your relationship.
I literally grew up with my husband since we were three years old in our church nursery. We were always very good friends. We didn’t start dating until he was in the Navy. We only dated each other on weekends here and there when he could get leave. We knew each other’s family also. Our parents were youth leaders together in our church. We decided to get married not long after dating because we really thought we knew everything we could know about one another. Once that ring was put on my finger I soon realized I didn’t know crap! He and certain members of his family had some major issues. Things kept coming out the longer we were married. Then children were involved. It can be so surprising what a person or family can hide.