Dear nextsteps:

In your original post, April last year, almost a year ago, you wrote about your boyfriend: “he is lovely, kind and supportive…I KNOW my boyfriend is a lovely person and the life/home we have here is lovely, I just don’t FEEL it.”

Today you wrote about your boyfriend that he told you things like: “you look fat in those jeans don’t wear them… I don’t like flat shoes or buttons on clothes wear something else”, and “if he feels he is ‘right’ then no listening occurs. He will say things to put me down e.g. about attractive people where he works, about my weight, my lack of ambition in his eyes… it feels like I am living with a disapproving parent still. …Nothing is ever good. It always need improvement… he either criticizes me or doesn’t say anything much. He is on my side”

My input: he is on your side compared to a man who would criticize you and scream and yell at you, perhaps, on your side compared to someone worse? And he is “lovely, kind and supportive” from time to time, correct?

I wish your boyfriend was indeed lovely, kind and supportive and that your life with him was indeed lovely, as you presented it to be in April last year. I wish it was and you wish it too.

But reality doesn’t care for wishes. And so, you feel that you are “living with a disapproving parent still” because you are. Living with a disapproving man, that is. Like you wrote: “he sees me as a little girl”, inferior to him, one that needs correcting.

You want to feel at home someplace, like you did in those stables, and in that friendship. Unfortunately it is impossible when living “with a disapproving parent still”.

With a disapproving parent one is stuck trying to be safe, safe from criticism. Living in an ongoing danger of being criticized, being disapproved of, being treated as less-than, does not permit a person to … really live, to expand, to learn and heal.

I hope that one day you will find a home, a place where you will be treated as worthy, as an equal, accepted and encouraged to be more of your lovely self: the loveliness you seek, is it not in having another person see it in you, and encourage you to show more of it?

anita