Dear Matt:

You are welcome. I agree with your “creeping feeling that this relationship isn’t right” for the following reasons:

1. When you share your feelings of insecurity with her, she “gets angry at me for being so helpless”. A loving girlfriend would respond with empathy for you, not with anger.

2. She has strict rules, “from where the plates are supposed to stand… not being allowed to spill water on the sink… she gets irritated at me when I fail to follow these things… I’m afraid I’ll do something wrong”- a loving girlfriend will not express anger at you for spilling water on the sink. A loving girlfriend who has anxiety like she does (and therefore needs everything to be in a certain way to feel she has control) will work on herself and not expect you to accommodate her anxiety. It is not a way to live, for you, to live in fear of her anger.

3. I don’t think you are the reason, in this relationship, for not having more meaningful conversations and connecting more. You can’t connect more to a person who expresses anger at you for you feeling helpless, or for you spilling water in the sink. Fear and deeper connection don’t go together. She is not allowing you to communicate more with her.

“When I talk to her about how I feel jealous or my insecurities, it never seems to resolve, and I always end up feeling even more like an idiot”- this is so because she blames you and shames you for feeling what you do. She attacks you when you are weak.

In your recent post to me, in your examples, you did the right things and she did the wrong things.

The wrong things she did: tell you that you were “nice and weird”, got angry with you for asking her what she meant by it, blamed you for feeling hurt and negative about a hurtful thing she said instead of answering your question. She yelled at you instead of restating what she said when you asked her,

The right things you did: asked her what she meant by “weird”, asked her to repeat something she said because you didn’t hear, told her it hurt you that she yelled at you, took time out going for a walk alone to calm down.

You wrote, “I feel like I can’t really blame her for getting angry at me, since I’m not able (or I don’t dare) to fully communicate”- she attacks you when you communicate, therefore it is scary for you to communicate with her, and understandably so.

I believe you are confusing your issues with hers and you incorrectly think that everything is your fault. Other people have issues too. Her issues is her anxiety, her need to control, her intolerance to your (and her own) feelings of weakness. In other words, even if you had no issues of your own, a relationship with her is unhealthy for you.

anita