My [24M] GF [22F] has been stressing me out
As the title says. I met my girlfriend a little under 2 years ago at my job. We were coworkers for a while and became really good friends. Eventually, we ended up getting into a relationship and have been in it for almost half a year. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs. The downs mostly centering around communication which is a big one. We can’t seem to solve issues in a meaningful and fulfilling way. They tend to start small and escalate into something huge in a matter of minutes. There’s a couple of examples like once she got really upset because I didn’t talk to her as much as she wanted me to on a car ride home because she was pissed and nonverbal about something unrelated. There was another time she got upset with me because I didn’t help her with any of her bags from the hotel room to the car as I was already carrying a lot. She didn’t ask she just expected me to do it. None of those were intentional on my end which was explained, but these resulted in pretty big fights that almost ended our relationship and left me feeling like I shrunk myself to keep peace.
Basically the dynamic is, something happens (or doesn’t happen), she gets upset and goes non verbal, I try to communicate and ask what’s wrong sometimes multiple times because tension like that can make me anxious, she tells me “I’m good”, then I end up spiraling because there’s clearly something wrong and her words don’t match her actions and I try to keep budging. I’m not perfect I want that to be clear too. I struggle a lot with anxiety and in moments like that, I end up anxiously asking if she’s okay a lot because again her words don’t match her actions and it drives me insane.
We came to an agreement/plan with our last argument. I will agree not to overwhelm her with questions, calm my anxiety, and to take her first answer as is. In return, she needs to be able to tell me when something is wrong, give me more reassurance than an “I’m fine”, and to not escalate things to such extremes. I thought we may have finally turned a new leaf. Then yesterday we went to go see a movie, and she got upset that I didn’t hug her when I first saw her (didn’t think anything of it nor was it intentional). Rather than communicating with me, she sat through the car ride in silence. I asked her if she was good, she told me she was. Then she got upset again because we weren’t cuddling or holding hands or anything once the movie played. Halfway through the movie she randomly decides to just cuddle more with me and we had a good time. She ended up telling me later that night and i expressed how I wish she told me earlier. she agreed and apologized but obviously, there’s still a clear problem here. Now today is another new problem because she wanted to FaceTime later and I said that’s fine I’ll just be on the game with my friends. We had just hung out yesterday and we will be hanging out tomorrow by the way. Now it’s this problem of her feeling like I don’t give her enough time and how I don’t play the game with her as much.
To sum all of this up, I feel like our dynamic has been really stressing me out. It feels like I have to be perfect and do everything perfect and if one thing falls out of line or isn’t done correctly, it results in distance rather than communication. There’s expectations of me that aren’t being said. We are averaging a big argument every other week at this point. I don’t think either of us are necessarily wrong either, but there’s clearly a disconnect. I guess I am just trying to figure out where I’m going wrong here? I understand I make mistakes and it can hurt her, but it’s never intentional and I don’t believe they are that bad of mistakes to result in the type of distance I get from her.
TLDR: Girlfriend is stressing me out due to not communicating effectively. What have I been doing wrong?