I (28F) love my boyfriend (32M) but feel like I am "falling out of love" with the relationship. What do I do?
Hi, everyone!
I am in desperate need of advice and perhaps even some (constructive) criticism regarding my long distance relationship and how I've been feeling and acting in said relationship lately. I'm hoping to receive thoughtful feedback and direction. I really don't want to read any "just call it quits" comments 😭 at least if it can be helped.
As the title says, I'm 28 years old and my boyfriend is 32. We met at the very beginning of 2023 and entered a relationship with each other that same spring/summer. Our distance isn't the worst but it isn't the most convenient as we live on opposite sides of the country, which makes traveling to see each other expensive and difficult to time. In fact, in the 3 years we've been dating we've only met each other 6 times.
During the "talking" phase of our relationship we both agreed on what we thought was the "right" relationship trajectory for what we wanted out of life (marriage and children). I made it very clear that I was not interested in entering a long distance relationship that would ultimately be a dead-end job, so to speak; I wanted to see real movement if we were serious about each other by our second year. We're entering 3.5 years of flying back and forth with only a tenuous grasp on what our future together actually looks like. In addition to surpassing our mutually agreed upon time frame, I had a miscarriage at 8wks in September of 2025. The miscarriage, and the fact that every other woman in my life got pregnant around the same time as me, has sent me spiraling (hence the constructive criticism).
We've talked about our relationship trajectory and how discouraged I've been feeling lately by our timeline and lack of inaction. He's currently unemployed and looking for work, and he promises that once he finds work he'll save up for "a few months" before presumably making a move to my current state. Those details are kind of loose because, again, there's no definitive plan. Lately we've been having more and more conversations about how unhappy I am that we are still apart, and about how I'm not getting younger and my fear of being a mother by 30 is dwindling.
The stress I'm feeling from my own expectations has been causing distance between us. I'm trying to fix it but I don't seem to have the energy to talk to him. I want to talk to him, but it's kind of like my body is going "What's the point?". I think a lot of this stress and urgency was caused by the pregnancy. I think in a way, had that never happened, I'd still be on edge about my/our future together but maybe not to this degree. I've created this pressure-cooker environment in my own relationship and I feel neurotic because of it. One minute I'm having a borderline panic attack and the next I have no interest in messaging him.
I can't imagine my life without him but I'm just tired of our relationship being what it is. I'm losing the energy and the will power to message him and have meaningful conversations. It's a weird emotional dry spell.
Had anyone else gone through a smiling emotional dry spell? I'm fine with the honeymoon phase ending but the doom and gloom I'm feeling daily is what's getting to me