My boyfriend (29M) is the most self aware person I (29F) know and it might be the most confusing thing about him
Six years. Living together for most of it. And I still don’t fully know what to make of him, which is why I’m here.
I’ll try to be as fair as I can because honestly that feels important to me right now.
> The good
He thinks about things most people never bother to think about. Himself included. He has written dozens of pages, I am not exaggerating, analyzing our relationship, his patterns, his childhood, his failures. He names his own double standards. He quotes attachment theory. He will send you a 20 page essay with footnotes about why he behaved badly and what he thinks needs to change. When we are good, we are really good. I want to be clear about that.
> The bad
Last year he wrote a 20 page essay where he took accountability for everything: Calling me names, judging my appearance, my job, my confidence, how I dress, contributing to a really dark period in my life. It felt genuine, I believed him. But if you read it carefully the accountability doesn’t actually hold. In the same paragraph where he calls himself “a horrible shitty person who deserves a hard breakup” he turns around and tells me I shouldn’t feel victimized, and that my defensiveness in response to what he did is now the real problem. The apology was the setup. By the end of the paragraph the blame had quietly found its way back to me.
> The ugly
Every crisis becomes a document. An essay, a contract, a letter, an email chain. And in every single one he is somehow the one holding the pen. He defines the terms. He sets the timeline. He delivers the verdict. I receive it, respond to it, sign it. There is always a framework, always a clause, always a definition of what counts as a valid apology or a reasonable reaction or an acceptable timeline for healing. It is impressively constructed. It is also always constructed by him. I once signed a literal conflict resolution contract that he drafted, with numbered sections and enforcement mechanisms, because I thought it meant we were finally getting somewhere. I am now realizing it mostly meant he had found a more organized way to be the authority in the room.
When I show trauma responses to things he has admitted he did, he says I’m gaslighting him. He decides he has changed, announces it, and then expects me to immediately operate from that new version of him. If I can’t get there fast enough, that becomes my problem and my flaw to examine, probably rooted in my childhood, probably discussed in a future email. The version of him that caused the damage is someone I am no longer allowed to remember. The version of me still carrying it is someone he is losing patience with.
His standards for me are consistent, clearly stated, and well documented. His standards for himself shift depending on the day and who is doing the documenting.
The six days of silence have given me enough time to do something I probably shouldn’t have done, which is go back and read everything. Every letter, every email, every essay from every fight we have ever had. And I landed on something from October that I cannot stop thinking about.
He sent me this long message about how I unnecessarily fixate on things, how my stubbornness risks alienating him, how I need to just let things go. He used the word uptight. He built a whole prosecutorial case about how my inability to move on quickly was the problem in our relationship.
He is currently on day six of silence over one late night out with my girlfriends, after I apologized.
He wrote the rules. He is breaking them.
C’est trop bizarre.
What I actually want to know
Does anyone recognize this specific thing, where someone understands everything and changes nothing? Because I keep thinking that it might actually be harder than being with someone who just doesn’t know better. At least then you’re not constantly receiving proof that they see exactly what they’re doing.
Is there a way forward with someone like this or does it just keep going in circles forever?
I love him. The good parts are real and I know they are. I’m not looking for leave him. I’m looking for someone to help me understand what I’m actually dealing with.