Dear Fruzsina:

I have more thoughts regarding the different summary and quotes from my post above, but I will make the following very short. It might be difficult for you to read the following, if you at all consider it as valid. Please be as calm as you can be. After all, your choices are yours to make. If you want me to write more, to elaborate on any of the following, let me know and I will.

Key sentence: “”I’ve had anxiety ever since I was very young and a lot of things seem to scare me. I worry about the smallest things and make them so huge, and the reason I say I am complicated is because ones closest to me always have to listen to me talk on and on about the same issues…”

Your distress is about your anxiety that predates you meeting your current boyfriend. It is not about him. He did not cause it and he is not responsible for it. If you break up with you, you are likely to feel calmer at times (in between ruminating over whether you made a mistake) but the same anxiety will continue and be a significant problem in most if not all future relationships.

You wrote about his dysfunctional home life being responsible for him being “closed off”. I have no doubt that there was dysfunction in his home life, but there has been dysfunction in your home life as well. A functional, loving and close family relationships does not result in the child (you) being as anxious as you are, from an early age and ongoing, to this very day.

All that energy, or most of that energy you expand with him, lots of talking and “jumping around him very energised and hyper as usual”, that “little bit bipolar” you mentioned, is not about being an emotionally healthy extrovert but about that anxiety spinning your wheels, needing to be resolved. It is how you managed anxiety from an early age, how you reduced it.

Your boyfriend, from all your sharing, reads like a loving young man. Imperfect, I have no doubt, but loving and caring, he is. You wrote that yourself, repeatedly. Your expectations of him, to match your energy, are unreasonable expectations. They are unreasonable because he manages his anxiety in different ways than you do. He relaxes while you spin your wheels. His ways predated you and your ways predated him.

I believe that quality psychotherapy will help you to manage your anxiety in more effective ways, to gain insight into the dysfunction in your own home life, to correct some of your core beliefs about what a loving relationship is like, and so on.

anita