u/thoughtforgotten

I'm still fighting to get a decent night's sleep and today I feel emotionally low, foggy headed, and beyond tired.

Weed was my go-to way to practice avoidance and right now I feel as useless as I used to feel when I would smoke a bowl and ignore my responsibilities for the rest of the day. Now I'm sober but I'm still avoiding: my brain is so scattered and slow that I can't wrap my head around my day job. Instead I'm horizontal on the couch trying to tell myself that I can answer emails tomorrow, and the world isn't going to fall apart if I need to have a quiet recovery day, but I feel immensely guilty for struggling with this.

I know this will get easier, but today sucks. The crushing humidity doesn't help. The luteal phase doesn't help. The ADHD doesn't help. I hate feeling like I have to push through so much just to do the things normal people can do every day, but at least I'm not stoned and creating more unnecessary barriers for myself, I guess.

tl;dr - My partner backed out of our plans for me to move in with him and I'm having a difficult time with coping and knowing how to move forward. What do?

I am 36, my partner is 35, and he has a 15 year old. We've been together for 3 really solid, happy years. He rents a 3 bedroom house and I own a small 2 bedroom condo.

In the early spring, I raised the topic of living together. My thought was that I should sell my condo to pay off my debts and move in with him where there was lots of space, and we could save a ton of money to eventually buy a home, together. My financial situation is suffering with the rising cost of living and home ownership. I'm self employed and have to rely on credit more often than I'd like to pay for life because I'm not always paid promptly by my clients. He has a full time job and is paid weekly. He struggles financially too as he supports his kid and rents by himself.

He said yes, we had many thoughtful conversations to make sure we understood each others' hopes and fears with living together, and we started talking out details. He told his kid I was moving in, and she was excited; he told his landlord too. As the spring progressed, I moved my container garden over to his place (this is a massive hobby of mine - I have about 15 large containers of perennial flowers and fruit bushes) and he encouraged me to plant out a garden in his backyard, which I did - I spent a not-insignificant sum on plants, soil, and mulch for a native shade garden.

During this time, he never really did the things that we had talked about him doing to get his place ready for me, like moving his bedroom out of the basement and into the master bedroom, and clearing out the spare room so I could start to store items in there. His bedroom was what mainly started the tension. I sleep really poorly down there, and he suddenly changed his mind and said he didn't want to move where the bedroom was anymore as it would interfere with where his jam space could go. I insisted that I wanted us to have our bedroom in the actual master bedroom upstairs, because I knew I could sleep up there (his bed is right next to a built-in bar, the basement is very cold, his daughter's room is right above us and her footsteps/chair rolling is loud at night).

You can probably figure out the rest. As soon as I pushed back about the bedroom, it became an argument, and over a pretty short period of time he ended up deciding that he wasn't ready to have me move in at all. He didn't want to sacrifice his jam space (I wasn't asking him to do that - the house is big enough that there are other options), he didn't want to sacrifice his time alone, he didn't want to lose control over his space.

I'm pretty devastated and now trying to figure out where to go from here. He says he still wants to be with me and he loves me and wants to live with me down the road, just not in that house (where he is planning to live until his kid graduates high school in 3 years).

From my perspective, he's shown an incredible lack of consideration for how much this has hurt me, to be welcomed in and feel like I'm going to have a home with him and his kid, who I love, and then pushed away. I'm now seriously reconsidering whether he is a good partner to make any major life plans with. He also hasn't done a great job of validating my feelings about all of this. When I try to express sadness or disappointment, he mostly repeats himself about how much baggage he has from his childhood (which is true, and also was a big part of our conversations while we were discussing this in the first place) and although I know he is remorseful and does feel guilty, he can't seem to understand why I'm spinning out a little over this and reconsidering how to go forward in our relationship.

I guess my ask is - is there any hope for this, given how deeply his baggage has affected me, and how little he seems to understand how to care for my feelings here? He has shown me a side of himself that is incredibly defensive and stuck in his ways. He seems to be taking every opportunity now to push me back further when I try to ask for my feelings to be met. He doubles down a lot and insists that he "isn't the bad guy" and most conversations end with us frustrated over each others' difficulty understanding the other.

Also - what do I do with my garden? I can get my containers back, but I don't have room at my condo for the things I planted in his yard. Do I just chalk that up to a loss?

This sucks, and I've been an absolute haunted mess for days. We're currently taking space away from each other to cool off and think, and I want to be able to approach the conversation with my head on straight. Do you have any advice for me to help me see through the muck here?