I (21m) feel like my boyfriend’s (22m) emotional support animal
(Using a throwaway account for this.) For context, my boyfriend and I are both autistic. We have been dating for about a year, but have been friends for at least 5 years. For a good chunk of our relationship, I have been his primary source for emotional support. He is on antidepressants and has a therapist, but he only sees her once a week and he hasn’t been in therapy for very long.
When we first started dating, I had stated that I was not good at comforting people and didn’t really enjoy it due to my autism and also past experiences where I had to play therapist for a LOT of people. I knew he was someone who would need to be comforted more than most, and I told him that even though it is not really my best skill, I would do my best to provide comfort and emotional support because I love him. However, it quickly became expected of me to comfort him every single time he got upset, and sometimes there are periods where he is upset or anxious multiple times a day every day and I am the one who has to sit on the phone with him and comfort him for hours.
Most days, we talk for 3-5 hours. This is because usually we text for 30 mins in the morning, call for about an hour in the half in the afternoon, and then call for about 2-3 hours during the night. I personally do not need to talk for this many hours a day, but we did it so frequently that it became part of his routine and if we do not talk for at least 2 hours a day he gets upset because his routine is thrown off. We used to call a lot more spontaneously. It used to be that one of us would ask if the other was down to call and we would see how we felt in the moment, but over time i guess we accidentally formed a routine, and now I am part of a routine that, if broken, will make him upset even though I was never asked if I was okay being an integral part of someone’s routine. Given his anxious and easy to upset nature, plus the fact that we call for so many hours, he is bound to get upset at least once while we are calling. It could be something small that lasts 5 minutes, or I could be comforting him for at least an hour, even if all he did was spill a glass of water or something.
He never asks if I have the capacity to give him support beforehand, he just starts freaking out and then I am expected to comfort him. And if I am not comforting him in the exact way he wants, he gets even more upset. It is a lot quicker and easier in person to calm him down because he responds well to physical affection, but we don’t see each other irl often because he lives an hour away.
I have been meaning to communicate with him about this for a while, but I feel like I’m being put in a really difficult situation. He freaks out if I even MENTION wanting to talk to him about something more serious, and I can’t be like “hey later today I want to communicate something” because he will be on edge until the talk and it will be all he can think of, but I also don’t want to randomly spring a serious conversation on him with no warning because that wouldn’t go well either. He is a pretty traumatized guy and is really scared of being seen as a burden, and it was only recently that he stopped feeling like one, so I don’t want to make him feel like he is. When he gets upset or has a meltdown, he shuts down and there is no use trying to have a productive conversation when he is shut down. I feel bad because I haven’t brought this up with him, but I’m really scared of hurting him and confirming his greatest fears :(
(to be clear, I do not think he is a burden. I just think I am doing way too much emotional labor.)
For a while I thought I was ok with all the emotional labor I had to do because I love him and I wanted to support him and his needs as best I could, but it’s all becoming too much and I feel so burnt out and I can tell there is resentment building and I don’t want that to be the case at all :( I know I need to communicate this to him, and I’m planning to next time I go to his house, but I really don’t want to hurt him or make him feel bad about himself.
TL;DR
My autistic boyfriend has really poor emotional regulation skills and relies on me for comfort almost every day, but communicating that to him is really difficult due to his trauma. Does anybody have any advice about how to communicate this to him or what I should do in general? Thank you :)
(please don’t be passive aggressive or anything in replies, I am autistic and cannot really pick up on that sort of thing)