u/EnvironmentBig2965

I feel like my boyfriend is not man enough and I mean that in the sense that I cannot fully tap into my soft feminine energy because I don’t feel like he would handle business as a man the way that he should. I grew up in a two parent household and my father very present in my life as well as a brother and I feel like I have a pretty solid idea of what a man looks like in a relationship. My boyfriend grew up without a father figure and was raised by his grandmother due to his mother’s disabilities. I have no problem with the way he grew up, everyone has a different background and I’m very accepting of it and love his family.

Due to this difference, my boyfriend falls short in the man category for me but preaches that he knows what it’s like to be a man and how to hold down a woman. Even to the point where my dad has raised an eyebrow. I don’t feel he truly knows how to lead it hinders me from tapping into my full feminine energy.

I am a pretty independent woman. I just bought my first car out of college and I’m working on my second degree. He has a degree and a full time job. At times it seems like he’s insecure about where I’m at in life and doesn’t treat me softly as he should. He doesn’t treat me bad but in all reality he does the bare minimum and thinks it’s adequate. He has told me on occasion that “I want to be the man”, and “you have too much masculine energy” and it really sinks my confidence because to me I’m just handing business the way I was raised by my father.

How would I even go about this conversation and explaining what I want to see out of him? He often gets offended when I “question his manhood”.

I [23f] took a trip to Spain a few years ago with a group of girls from school and had a great time. During my time there my group met a young man and woman who took us around Madrid and we all tried hookah for the first time. Spanish culture is very friendly and accepting of the LGBT+ community. For fun we chained
smoked the hookah (when you go lip to lip with another person and blow the smoke into their mouth). I did it with a few straight women from my group and the female guide but no men. Lips were not locked and it was really just a peck at most. I am bisexual, and was in a relationship at the time with [22M] I was accused of cheating. AITA for even doing this in the first place while being in a relationship?

Me (23F) and my boyfriend (22M) have known each other since 2023 but have only been officially dating for a year and a half. We have our ups and our downs, and generally we are a pretty solid as a couple. I’ve got my baggage and he has his but at the end of the day we want to be with each other so we try to make things work by any means necessary. We are fresh out of college and recently moved to a new city so that I could start my masters program (he followed me and got a job there) and a lot of our problems started here when I decided that academically it was better for me to get my own place and I didn’t feel ready to move in. This alone caused feelings of betrayal, inconsideration, and distrust for him towards me.

For some context he grew up in a single parent household but was raised by his grandmother due to his mom’s disability. He has lived in the same house his whole life and commuted from home throughout college. I grew up with both my parents (family of 5) living in 3 different states, several homes, and I went away for college. In the general sense we grew up widely different in a lot of ways, and I think this has attributed to the root of most of our relationship problems because we often don’t see eye to eye. He isn’t very adaptable to other thinking and the things he was taught growing up he seems very unwilling to change for the betterment of our relationship. In the back of my head I know I can’t change a man and it feels like I am stuck between a rock and hard place with him. To say the least he gets exhausting and after talking with some close friends and family they agree. He likes to be right and he gets stuck in the way he thinks and truly believes that his was is usually right and he would never lead me astray with his advice and guidance. His problems with me is that he does not feel considered or respected.

I’ve recently started to feel like due to some of the recurring arguments we have about differences in opinion the longevity of our relationship just isn’t there. How would you go about this? Is the relationship worth fighting for or are we just young and naive, figuring out life together?