Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

So I've been having a few relationship problems recently.
I kinda fear talking about them with my girlfriend (we've been together almost 14 months now) because she's a (fragile?) person emotionally and I don't want to throw her into depression talking about my problems with our relationship especialy since she's going through some tough personal/family stuff right now.


That being said I do feel I have things that need to be said about our relationship, I just don't want them to get drowned out by other things that may be unreasonable and me not thinking. This is not a relationship I want to end but I'm not sure if it's going to work out .-.


Here's a list of things I want out of a relationship, just tell me what's unreasonable or talk to me about how to tell her about it. I'm not going to do all of them at once because again she's not very strong emotionally.
Please don't tell me I'm a dick or something for thinking these things, I'm young and hardly know what I'm doing in a relationship and don't have much guidance from my parents, who themselves didn't have too much success with relationships before they found each other.   
Anyway here's the list

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I want someone who will not lie to me.
I want someone who will talk to me about their problems and let me talk to them about mine.
I want someone who trusts me and I can trust.
I want someone who will go to the same church as me. (I'm Christian and I prefer dating Christian girls, makes for fewer arguments. Same church makes for even less)
I want someone who has similar ethical, political, religious, etc views.
I want someone who is social enough to go to things like dances and dates with friends and doesn't why away from big groups of people.
I want someone who I can live life with. (Maybe needs more explanation?)
I want someone who makes me a better person.
I want someone who wants to be educated/ is educated.
I want someone who is independent.
I want someone who enjoys spending time with me and wants to spend time with me.
I want someone who is outgoing.
I want someone who isn't extremely self concious and doesn't change themselves just because of me.
I want someone who will let me be who I am and do what I do. (More explanation?)
I want someone who finds me attractive and likes me for me. (Who doesn't?)
I want someone who won't cheat on me.
I want someone who is ok with me joining the military.

My GF dies fall into a lot of these things but also missed a few too.
And before you say anything, yes I expect them to hold me to the same standards or higher.
Is any of this unreasonable?
Please help I don't know what I'm doing, I'm trying to figure it out. This is my first relationship.

[Urist Arrhenius]

None of it is unreasonable, though I think you should seriously consider how much similarity is required with respect to beliefs.

If I may ask, what is your current partner missing and how is it affecting your relationship?

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

She goes to a different church (used to go to mine (baptist church) now goes to a (penticostal?) church).
She has completely different views on how she would raise kids and such (ok not completely different but enough to cause arguments)
She's got zero socialness and nothing I do will change that (trust me, I've tried more than I probably should).
She is extremely shy (went to prom recently and she wanted to dance/talk with a friend and I was going to go with her, she noticed her friend was talking/dancing with other people that she kinda knew but not really so she stopped and walked away, I tried to tell her it's ok and she insisted on dancing alone and she'd talk with her later)
She has absolutly no desire to leave this town (forgot to add that to the list).
And a few other things I'm probably missing though.



With the beliefs/views, they just need to be similar not exactly the same. Ours are pretty different (I'm accounting family background for at least 75% of the differences. We grew up in completely opposite families)

[Eldin00]

All of the things you list are reasonable things to look for in a romantic partner.

That being said, you should be looking for someone who already has all of those qualities (or for whom you're willing to compromise on the ones that they don't already have), because for a lot of the things you list, a person who isn't already what you're looking for is unlikely to easily change to fit what you want, and might very reasonably get upset or offended that you would ask them to. And as to your current situation, unless you either talk to her about it or learn to be ok with the things in your relationship you aren't happy with, things won't get better (and will likely get worse over time). Talking about it could also lead to a breakup. But honestly, if you really aren't happy in the relationship, a breakup isn't the worst thing that could happen.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

So not a single unreasonable thing?

[Eldin00]

Nothing that I think is unreasonable to want in a partner. But the majority are things that are probably unreasonable to expect a person to change to make you happier in a relationship.

[Urist Arrhenius]

Nothing that I think is unreasonable to want in a partner. But the majority are things that are probably unreasonable to expect a person to change to make you happier in a relationship.

This. I also think you'll find your partner agreeing with you gets as old as your partner disagreeing with you, but agreement on some issues may still be important.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

So how should I bring this up?
Which ones would probably cause the most arguments?
Should I just start a new and end this because it'll probably go nowhere and it'd be better for both of us in the long run?

[Eldin00]

There probably isn't a 'good' way to bring it up. The talks about "Why I'm not happy in this relationship" are never easy, in my experience.

Which ones will cause the most arguments will vary greatly from one couple to another. For example, I'm agnostic and my wife is buddhist, but we agreed to disagree about religion early in the relationship (and agreed that we will teach our children to respect everyone's religious beliefs, we can each teach our children about any religion we want, and if/when they make a decision about religion for themselves, we will respect their choice) and have been married almost 6 years without it ever causing any friction between us. Other people will find dating someone who goes to a slightly different church to be something that causes no end of fighting. This isn't to say that my wife and I never argue, just that our religious differences have never been one of the things we've argued over.

Should you just end it and look for a new relationship? I don't know. How much is your current relationship worth to you? Obviously, keeping it going in the long term is going to require some effort and some compromises on your part (and likely on hers as well). So ask yourself if the relationship is worth the level of effort and/or the specific compromises required to keep it alive. If the relationship is worth it (and she also thinks so), then I'd advise to make the effort. If either of you feels that the effort or compromises are too much, then I'd advise to end it sooner rather than later, and go looking for love elsewhere. But without having a talk with her to figure out what changes and compromises each of you might need to make for things to work, then you can't really judge the level of effort or specific compromises involved accurately, in order to make that decision.

[Eldin00]

I should also probably note that ANY successful long term relationship is going to require some amount of effort and/or compromise. The trick is finding a relationship that's good enough to be worth that price, not finding one that doesn't have it at all.

[Bauglir]

You can want literally anything in a partner. Success here isn't going to be so much dependent on meeting your criteria as it is on figuring out which qualities are too important to compromise on, which are just things that are kind of nice, and which are things you can talk about and reach some sort of basic understanding on. For an example on this last, "I want someone who will talk to me about their problems and let me talk to them about mine." - do you really need absolute transparency here, or can you find middle ground because (again, for example) it's really about trust more than the speech, and so letting some things go unsaid might actually support that better. How much of that clarification is something that you could have filled in by a dialogue with a partner, instead of by plumbing the depths of your own thoughts?

You also need to keep in mind two caveats of figuring out what you want in a relationship. You need to know which things are qualities you want in an SO, and which ones are qualities you want in somebody in your life. That is, you need to know for which things you're willing to say, "I would rather be in no relationship at all, than in one that lacks this", because that will usually be the choice you have to make. You also need to realize that, while knowing what you want is very important, you shouldn't treat it as a checklist; you're likely to find real relationships to be a bit too spontaneous and fuzzy for that. You know this, but you can't foresee everything; you may meet somebody who excites you in totally unexpected ways, or somebody who checks all the boxes yet is totally unattractive to you. In either case, you shouldn't let your formalized articulation of what you think you want take the place of what you do want, but neither should you totally ignore it.

For instance, I want somebody I can have a good argument with. Not a fight, necessarily, but somebody I can disagree with and keep on loving without endangering the whole arrangement. And, moreover, somebody whose perspectives offer me a challenge to wrap my head around, because they are not thoughts I've already had for whatever reason. I don't think I'd ever actually need to have an argument to prove it, but that's the sort of thing I look for. But I've gotta be realistic - this does cut down my options a lot, because there doesn't seem to be as much overlap as you might expect between A) people who have strong opinions and are willing to discuss them at length adversarially, and B) people who do not need external validation of their opinions and will not feel as though I'm attacking them. And there's nothing wrong with either of those qualities, they just aren't what I want out of a romantic partner. And that's fine because I'm pretty comfortable not being in a romantic relationship; it's the status quo for me, at this point, which helps a lot.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I'm finding the biggest problems right now (sorry if not meniltioned earlier, I posted this after midnight so I was tired) are:
She won't talk about her feelings when she is obviously sad, and won't even tell me that something is wrong. I mean I could get it if she didn't want to tell me but she won't even say something's wrong she's just saying she's meh for no reason at all.
She has absolutly no desire to move from this town, I can't wait for the day I leave here.
She won't say it but I know she doesn't want me to join the military (90% sure this is going to happen) and this kinda goes with the previous one (military families move a lot, trust me, I'm in one).
She's also not social at all which has caused quite a few problems and arguments.

[Bauglir]

Well, is this a list of what you want in a partner, or a list of things that you want her, in particular, to be? Because that changes a good deal of what's reasonable or not.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

it's a list of what I want in a partner, she meets about half the list.

[Bauglir]

So I guess you need to ask yourself, "Is everything else about her worth it even if she never changes?" She's not terribly obliged to become the person you want her to be, which is the big difference between having this list and looking for somebody who fits it and having a person and looking for ways to make them fit the list. And, of course, she's a lot more than just whether or not she checks off boxes in your Ideal Mate form; she's her own person with her own history and unique take on stuff. Sounds to me like she's just a good deal more private than you'd like. God made each of you who you are, and while it's the responsibility of each of you to see how you, yourselves, grow from there, you've gotta work with what you find in others, including each other.

Of course, that's the thing; she's guaranteed to change. People grow. What you want is liable to change, too. But you shouldn't count on that happening in the way you necessarily want it to. You might leave her because she's not what you want, only to meet her again in 10 years and find that she's grown into exactly the person you wanted to date, but have no chance of rekindling the relationship. You might stick with her to tough it out, only to have a devastating breakup those same 10 years later that leave you both with emotional scars you never wanted. Or things might go happily, whichever you pick. What I'm getting at is, there isn't one Right Answer, a strategy you could pick if only you knew enough. So all you can do right now is think about what seems worthwhile, stay humble, and make decisions as they seem best to you.