I really need genuine advice. Please read entirely, and please be kind.
First, it is important you know my background. I am a 26F. My beloved dad passed away after a two year battle with cancer in October of 2024. When I tell you he was my everything, he really was. I grew up with an alcoholic mother. My parents remained together but my mother was absent emotionally. She did not abuse me, she behaved instead like an angry child and I spent most of my younger years parenting her. She was inconsistent emotionally. Any “womanly” things that I needed guidance with growing up was helped with by my now sister in law (8yr age gap) or my older cousin (5yr age gap). My dad was the one to make sure I had a “normal” childhood despite it all. He instilled in me values, such as family, morals, etiquette. He made sure we went on vacations with my cousins and my aunt and uncles, he made sure that whenever I needed to get away from my mother he took me out of the house and we would go and do things together to take my mind off of it. He provided me with the emotional consistency that my mother couldn’t. She is a good person. She really is filled with love but she could not give me what I needed emotionally as a child. My dad was really my best friend and even as I got older he was the person I told everything to, he let me make mistakes so that I can learn from them, he gave me the trust to make my own decisions and knew when to step in. He validated me emotionally, and to him I was “his angel” “his everything” and I grew up always striving to make him proud (he was proud of every achievement no matter how big or small). My father was legit loved by everyone he ever met. People say this often but this is not a lie. I never saw someone with so many friends. When he became sick, his friends helped out and I took the role as his caregiver as he got sick although I was in school full time. I made his medical decisions, I guided all of his treatment and I wouldn’t change that for a second. I grieved him as he was alive, but now with him gone I am a shell of a person. He gave me everything and now I don’t have that one person who just “understands” me anymore.
I started therapy at 11 and it made me a very emotionally aware individual, aware of myself and others, and extremely extremely perceptive and intelligent emotionally. Often in my romantic relationships I find that I am light years ahead of my partner when it comes to deciphering feelings, communicating through conflict, expressing love; any and all of it. I love very deeply and fully and I guess you can say I expect the same back. A flaw of mine though is my abandonment wound, and my anxious attachment. I met this wonderful man a year ago. He provides for me, and in the beginning was attuned to my emotional needs, especially when it came to my grief. I lost my job when I first met him so nothing started off easy. Then I gained a bunch of weight, grief hit me hard and I stopped socializing, my moods were changing, I became a mess but I grounded myself again and got another job and I was stable for a bit, I guess. He was there through it all and loved me when I was at my worst possible self. My worst possible self is all he has seen. He hasn’t seen the person who wakes up at 4 in the morning to go to the gym, hustles at work, meal preps, and takes care of my own emotions. She was gone for a bit.
As I started coming back to myself, I realized how any time I expressed a “need” of mine to him such as more affection, more PDA, whatever it was, he’d get annoyed because he’s not the most “emotionally deep” person. When I express something that upset me that he did and say “hey, I just wanted to say that when you did this it made me feel ____ and I just wanted to know what your intentions were when you acted that way,” or something involving HIM, he invalidates it, shuts it down, and minimizes my experience if he doesn’t believe what I’m saying to him is “logical.” There are times he has apologized for things, but majority of the time he lacks accountability and turns it to me. We’ve fought a lot because we have gotten into a cycle where he will say something in an argument to shut me down or label me as something and it will get me angrier and the whole thing escalates to a level it didn’t need to get to. Now, he is at a place where his tolerance for any discussions or conflict is at a 0. I will be honest and say that I don’t blame him for being fed up with my emotions because for 90% of our relationship I wanted to speak about every little thing because I was afraid he would leave, and I didn’t regulate any of my emotions myself. I used him for that. But now we are at a place where I can’t figure out how much is his warranted fatigue, vs how much is just him. I really am in my head so much and having relationship OCD doesn’t help. Please help me decipher this and what I should do to better this situation. Do I walk away?