I (26M) don’t know if I should move with my GF (24F)?
This one’s a doozy. Honestly don’t know what else to do right now other then get this off my chest
I met my current girlfriend on tinder in early 2021. Back then I had just split up with my first girlfriend about 4 months earlier. I saw her get in a fling really quick. I was honestly just looking to talk to other people and get over her. My profile was a combination of me and the garments I was working on at the time, I was a cringe “artsy” type and my current girlfriend was really the only one who was serious about wanting to go out with me. She was really respectful and I found myself liking the attention. I found out that I was the first guy to genuinely want to know about her and spend time with no ulterior motives. She opened up quickly, sexually abused as a teen twice and grew up with alcoholic parents. The one stepfather was a violent drunk and verbally abused often. She raised her stepbrother essentially starting at 13.
At first she said “it’s only a matter of time before you’ll want to be done with me”, like everyone else in her life before. After a few weeks she said it felt like we’ve known each other for so long. Intimacy came quickly after. I asked her to be my girlfriend because it felt right. I was living with a bunch of roommates at the time. I visited a good friend from high school when I went to see my parents sometime after that because the friend had to get her ovaries removed, and she wanted to cry about it over ice cream. Told my girlfriend when I got back and I think that’s the first time I broke her trust, I really wasn’t used to having to communicate everything to her. I still moved like I wasn’t in a relationship:(
I apologized, but that set the tone for a lot of our relationship to come. She was already quick to distrust because of all the trauma she grew up with, on top of every past relationship growing sour.
She was surely a sweet girl who just wanted to receive unconditional love for the first time in her life. I was a pothead who only focused on trying to be someone in life, I roped her into the habit thinking it was harmless. I failed at being a saxophone player, graphic designer, and videographer previously. I was so zoned out and incapable of what I now consider complete and present thoughts. Our time together in Orlando was anime, late night eating out, and cycling through local brick and mortar shops. We were both lonely and it was comforting. I began to love her.
She didn’t like that I was friends with a classmate at fashion school who made money as a bottle girl. At the time I was headstrong on only seeing my view: that I had known the classmate long before her and that it felt off for her to want me to cut ties. Looking back, the classmates Instagram was a mostly half naked feed and I see why she felt the way she did. I also answered a call from my ex after her fling ended, telling her “I can’t be talking to you anymore man, bye”. I was all smug feeling good about my ex’s misfortune. This also upset my current girlfriend, she doesn’t like exes at all.
My current girlfriend always said her intuition was incredibly strong, and anytime she found something that would point to her intuition being right she would reinforce the idea. She began to feel like I was prioritizing other girls over her, when back then I just didn’t want to lose my ability to choose my friends. I was immature. Throughout all of this she would always want to stay with me instead of leave, even if she didn’t subscribe to my stance on not wanting to cut people off unless they’ve done something wrong. I don’t know if it was because I was the only guy who treated her with respect. I didn’t last the longest in staying respectful when she got passive aggressive in arguments. She learned to act that way as a defense during her formative years.
I didn’t like myself for being unkind in an argument. I decided I wouldn’t be a good fashion designer either, and switched life paths one last time to physics. I wanted to move back to Tampa with my parents at 22 to reset. I wanted to go without my current girlfriend, but it broke her heart into pieces telling her that. And after a long talk, she went with me. She was for some reason so stuck to me, because of me being a decent person, which I feel is the bare minimum.
I wish I didn’t, but from then on I subconsciously prioritized my degree above her. I refused to be mediocre or quit on another career. That whole time she didn’t get enough attention, and dates were sparse. She said she loved me and would always support. We really spent all our time in nature smoking, or using dab pens and watching Adventure Time or Family Guy at night. She studied fine arts and played her switch often. I made friends in community college. Here I only had one classmate who was female, and her dad died from cancer shortly before my aunt did too. Talking about it helped me. I also discussed lab stuff too with her and was in a group chat. This triggered my current girlfriend’s intuition, and I ended up cutting the girl off.
After going to state school my girlfriend wanted to know about every girl that I met, in class or wherever. If I didn’t tell her immediately we would get into it. I ended up being the weird one in my cohort who never hung out with anyone. Even my male friends, she didn’t like me suggesting having time out to hang with them. I was admittedly spending too much time on schoolwork. It was because we always bonded over smoking, and my mind was rampantly slow trying to study physics while getting high every night. For this reason she didn’t get the attention she needed, and it resulted in my feeling like all my free time had to be spent with her. Even if we spent the whole Saturday together, it wasn’t special enough. I wouldn’t exactly plan the entire day, only a few hours for stuff for us to do. Then when we were deciding what to do after, we’d mostly spend all our time figuring out what to do. The rest of my undergrad was like this, just not really having a social life.
When I went to visit and decide between some grad schools that I was admitted to, she would call throughout the visiting day. When at UMass Amherst, she wanted to talk during the designated lunch time we had and I spent the whole thing in the bathroom talking while my seat was empty. When I went to Syracuse, she called me 39 times when I went to the bar afterwards with the current grad students. I told her beforehand that I would call her when I’m done, and admittedly the whole visiting day at Syracuse plus the bar time after took essentially the whole day, but for me it was important to try and extract as much info as possible to make the right decision for my program. The next morning in Syracuse I was gonna get breakfast with another potential grad that was at the visiting day with me, and she called me crying saying I don’t give her the love she needs. I was the one with the rental car and this guy was in the passenger seat when she called, at first the phone connected to Bluetooth and you could hear her crying throughout the car speakers. I told her calmly that I’m so sorry she’s not feeling well and that I’ll find time to call her when I have a moment, just to make her seem less down in front of the other guy, but she wanted me to drop everything and talk to her. The only problem is that I was essentially this guy’s ride until we got to the airport. I ended up telling him he needs to call an uber. saw him at the airport because we had the same flight to Charlotte and it was awkward.
Now look, I heavily feel like it’s all my fault that the relationship got like this. I don’t blame my girlfriend. I was telling her I can’t do this anymore and I’m sorry that we got to this point, but she begged me to stay. She had been in therapy for a few months by this point and she said she’d make all her weekly visits about being “better” for me. I don’t want her to feel reliant on me, plus I feel like I’ve turned into a bad person from this relationship.. you know not as considerate as I should be. This whole physics career just takes so much to do well in. All this visiting day stuff happened in late March.
Now I’m stuck between moving up north with or without her now, since I chose Syracuse. We’d be moving from Tallahassee to Syracuse. Since March she’s been better about being willing to have me hang with friends and go out to the gym on my own. But I don’t know if that’s only because she’s afraid of me leaving. I feel like shit man. When it’s just us, with nobody else around it seems like we can be fine together. But all our problems we’ve ever had arise when outside people come into the mix. She doesn’t really have any friends or people she hangs out with, just classmates she saw often in class before she graduated. I’m not sure what to do. I don’t know if things can just get better and change in such a short time. I want to be able to have friends in grad school without her getting upset, and sometimes I’ll have to stay up late doing homework and grading assignments when she’d rather me watch movies with her. I ended up quitting smoking because I could not continue studying with such brain fog, but she’ll want me to smoke with her. She says all these things that I’m worried about won’t be an issue, she reassured me that she’ll be more laidback after I reassured her that I’ll keep consistent date nights weekly. But if you know about physics grad school, during the first year it’s really rough and 60-70 hour weeks aren’t uncommon. I might not have time for grand dates every week, although I would absolutely do everything I could to have them.
Overall we’re very familiar and comfortable with being together, but I’m not sure if I’ve ruined it in the end. We’ve been together for 5 years.