I’m About to Break Up with my Fiancé due to his Extremely Extroverted Behaviour
I have been with my fiancé for three and a half years. We got engaged after one year of dating and have been living together for about two years now.
On our first dates, I could see how much he loved talking to people. I mean random people. We would be somewhere, like in a shopping mall, and he would start talking to a random person about anything. Or we would be in a restaurant having dinner and he would start talking to the people sitting at the table next to us.
Now, I’m not a fan of talking to strangers, so I didn’t really like this behavior of his. But I sometimes joined the conversation a bit or stayed on my phone waiting for it to end. The problem is that he started doing it more and more. Sometimes I could see the person he was talking to was trying to end the conversation, but he kept on talking. It started feeling a bit off…
One day, we had a really bad situation with some girls in a restaurant. He started talking to them - they were sitting at the table next to us - and they started saying some very embarrassing and awkward things to us. We just wanted to be left alone at that point, but they wouldn’t stop talking.
Later that day, I finally gathered the courage to tell him that I didn’t really like this talkative behavior, especially because sometimes it made me feel completely put aside and ignored while he was talking to a total stranger. He apologized, but his behavior didn’t really change. Then I started realizing a few things… Every time we were in public, he wasn’t fully paying attention to me. He was always looking around, trying to find someone to start a conversation with.
At first, I thought he was just extroverted, but there was always this voice in my head telling me something was very wrong with this behavior.
We traveled abroad for my birthday and we were at this party, drinking and having fun. Out of the blue, he started talking to this guy and completely forgot about me for about 10 minutes. When we went home, I talked to him about it and we had a really bad argument. That was the first time I thought about breaking up with him because of that. But in the end, we talked and he apologized and said he was going to start controlling himself more.
His behavior changed for the first few weeks, but then he started talking to random people again. The only difference was that he started apologizing to me right after talking to a stranger.
About three weeks ago, we went to a restaurant and right before finding a table to sit at, he started talking to this guy who was waiting for a takeaway. I was just so tired of it by then, so I found a table myself and sat there and waited for him to finish talking. After some minutes, he came to our table and apologized for talking to that guy, but I didn’t even say anything. I was just like, “What’s the point?”
The next day, I arrived home from work exhausted and just wanted to sleep, but he insisted we should check out this apartment - we were looking for places to buy - and told me it was going to be quick. I ended up going, and after the inspection, he was driving us home and saw his friend’s car and started honking and stopped the car. I was boiling at that moment when he left the car to talk to this guy for about 10 minutes while I was there in the car waiting. He knew I was tired after working for 10 hours, but he still couldn’t resist talking to this person. Again, he came back to the car, apologetic, and I just said I was not in the mood for his apologies and just wanted to go home to sleep. He got quiet and drove home.
We talked about it later and he apologized again. The thing is: he apologizes but doesn’t stop. And it hurts me so much because that really makes me feel like literally any person is more interesting than me in his eyes.
The last straw was when we were in the supermarket and he started talking to these guys. One more time, I was there, put aside on my phone, waiting for him to finish his conversation. At one point, he mentioned to the guys something along the lines of him being the “girls’ chosen one” - I’m not going to say exactly what he said because that would break his anonymity. I was there, next to him, hearing him say something like that to a bunch of guys he had just met.
In that moment, something snapped in me. Something made me see that I had indeed become invisible to him when he was talking to random people. Something made me see that, for him, strangers’ attention was more important than my attention.
I didn’t say anything in the moment, but I told him once we were home and he was furious, saying “he was tired of me controlling him.” I never meant to control him. I just expected more from him as my partner - more respect, more attention.
Now, we are sleeping in separate bedrooms and I’m trying to find another place to go. He is being extremely apologetic again, but I’m just tired of that. Just tired of forgiving him so he can do this all over again. I really think I deserve something better.