u/Ievel7up

I am FA partnered to SA and it's not all that. In fact this could be the worst relationship I've ever been in as far as conflict and arguments go. She is however fiercely loyal which is one of the best, most secure feelings you could have in a relationship and something that up until meeting her I hadn't experienced.

Up until I discovered our attachment styles I thought I was the good guy because I would seek to end conflict before it happens and when we have arguments I try my best to stop it and move on, or apologize as quickly as I can in the hopes of moving past it. The issue I have with the SA style is that my partner has very clearly defined boundaries that I find inflexible. Remember Jonah Hill's famous boundaries for his model girlfriend? Well it is kinda like that where when I encroach on my wife's boundaries, she gets really, really upset. Now I am capable of higher peak anger than her but I suppress it until I blow up while her dragon-level anger is pretty much instant and consistent throughout an argument.

Now I'm finding out that I'm the bad guy because I run and hide and avoid conflict. But when I'm away I'm running everything through my mind to come to terms with my emotions and come up with a solution. I often come back apologetic and ready to compromise, but when I come back to her she picks up where she left off, as if she hadn't had any self reflection at all for the past hour or more. This causes me a lot of frustration because it makes me feel like I was the only one working on our issues during the time apart. She's so sure of herself and her convictions and boundaries that she comes off as stubborn and rigid to me. And that makes me feel like the only way out is to one day pack up my stuff and disappear.

When she first finished the AS quiz I thought she must've answered the questions wrong, but I took it and put in the answers I thought she'd give and still got SA. So it seems like just because you're SA doesn't mean you don't have things to work on, especially if you're in a relationship with a different AS.

For the first time in my life, someone told me that being a good person is the wrong way to live your life and is why I'm unsuccessful. Apparently NT's operate internally with "me first" intentions, while I am the fool who internally operates on "what is good for the community". This came up while in a drive thru for McDonalds, where they had two windows at the end, labeled 1 and 2. Typically you drive to the last window to pick up your order, so that the car behind can go to the other window which allows McDonalds to serve two cars at once, speeding up the process. Well, I drove to the last window and as I passed the first one, my partner said there was a clerk at the first window. I explained the process and how I was at the correct window. Unfortunately there was no one at the window and after waiting for a couple of minutes my partner started berating me about how stupid I was and that I should have stopped at the first window because there was a person there, and only gone to the 2nd window if they told me to. Here I thought I was doing the restaurant and the cars behind me a favor by helping them speed up the process, and also sending out positive vibes into the universe, but apparently I did an evil thing by forcing us to go starving with no food for a few minutes.

I could not back up the car since there were cars behind me, but I was losing it myself so I backed up anyway and wrestled my car into the spot after 4 cars got there food already. I asked the clerk why the 2nd window wasn't open and they said that it doesn't work. Yet there was no sign on the window and no sign at the ordering section to warn us not to go to that window. So I was wondering, were they just AH who don't care about anyone else or were they too stupid to inform customers? I settled on the latter in order to forgive and forget. But for the past week I've been struggling with the realization that my partner is right, that the world doesn't operate like I do, and that if I want to achieve anything in life that I have to be assertive, selfish and take what I want because no one is going to hand me anything or any opportunities for just being a good person. Even restaurants are not operating to serve customers, they are operating to sell you something and make money, with the customers experience and convenience an afterthought.

It dawned on me that NTs to me are all narcissists. They largely only care about themselves and only show empathy (often well timed exaggerated empathy) when it benefits them. If true narcissists are 99% selfish, "normal" people are 90% selfish and unempathetic. What kind of a monstrous world am I living in? Why would I want to raise kids in this world?