Dear coconut:

I will retell your story (it helps me understand better when I do that):

The two of you met in college. For the first 1.5 years of the relationship you saw each other daily, except for weekends and the summer. After college it was a long distance relationship. For 2-3 years of the long distance relationship that followed college, you wanted the two of you to live together and pressured him to do so, to  move in with you.

You were “being mean, feeling jealous for no reason, picking fights etc.” that resulted in “constant disagreements and fights… we were fighting almost all the time”.

Because of those fights, he old you then at one point that “he doesn’t feel anything anymore and that we’ll never get back together”.

The relationship resumed following a temporary breakup.  You continued to pressured him to move in with you, “constantly telling him that I don’t want a ldr anymore. He told you that “he’s afraid to move because of the past when I hurt him with my behavior (being mean, feeling jealous for no reason, picking fights etc) and that he needs time to see that I have really changed”.

Two months ago, the two of you still living apart, long distance, you told him that you “felt like I had no feelings for him anymore”. As a result of you telling him that, he finally agreed to move in with you, realizing that “he really doesn’t want to lose (you)”. Two weeks after, when he suggested that you may be interested in another man, you told him that you were attracted to your co worker.

The two of you moved in together two months ago. You “don’t pick fights anymore” with him, and he doesn’t get mad at you in return. “he is really affectionate, we don’t fight anymore, things are really nice. I mean, everything seems perfect

But you get anxious when he doesn’t understand how you feel at any one time, for seeing things differently, for disagreeing with you and for having “different opinions on trivial things, not the important ones”, for the fact that “he doesn’t find funny the things I find funny and vice versa”, and “Sometimes I can’t tell when he’s joking or not and I have to ask because he doesn’t clarify it by himself… I find it annoying when I don’t get his jokes”.

You wrote: “Me and my father have a similar relationship, he most of the time disagrees with me… I grew up kind of angry and yelling”.

Here is my understanding at this point: you got used to a war-zone relationship, the one with your father. You are now living at peace with your boyfriend, but you are re-living your life with your father. We often re-experience a troubled past no matter where we go and who we are with, until we heal from that troubled past.

What you experienced with your father is a combination of something like this: a strong emotional attachment to him, fear of the next time he disagreed with you (disagreeing with you when it was not called for, not necessary, in an eager-to fight kind of way), fear of his anger, fear of losing whatever affection he had for you, and your own anger at him.

Same with your boyfriend, you are emotionally attached to him (“I am extremely attached to him and dependent”), afraid 0f losing him, feeling at times angry at him, and being afraid he will be angry at you in return. With your boyfriend, like with your father, you are very alert to any potential disagreements, and you feel threatened by any disagreements, no matter how trivial, any differences of opinion- because it didn’t take much for your father to direct aggression at you, any trivial disagreement could have led to his aggression.

“Things are going great, so why do I have these thoughts?”- because until and if we heal from what injured us as children, we keep re-experiencing the same injuries, we keep re-experiencing our childhood.

anita