Hi everyone. I’ve dated my very smart, very handsome boyfriend for the last year and a half. Our relationship is anything but “normal.” By that I mean that we didn’t follow the “girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, girl and boy live happily ever after” formula. In fact, our relationship is far from a love story.

We’ve had our fair share of struggles. I don’t want to get into specifics, because they don’t really matter. What matters is how we handled them: through our ups and downs, I made the mistake of playing the blame game. I did a lot of finger pointing, a lot of lecturing, and I said a lot of really mean things. Sometimes my anger was justified, and sometimes I just had a short fuse. But I always fought with my gloves off. He responded to my anger by shutting down.

When our relationship began, he was optimistic and open. He talked openly about our future, made plans, shared things. Now, he’s shut off and distant. I need to pry and force things out of him. I feel both frustrated and partly to blame; I think my short fuse and tendency to nag about things has caused him to close off to me.

Now we both agree that we’re stuck in a rut. We both love each other and want to work out our differences, but our relationship is stuck in a very immature and undeveloped place.

I’m looking for some guidance. After some very deep reflection, I’ve realized that a lot of my frustration comes from my inability to let go of former issues, and anger that our relationship isn’t moving forward to a better place. From his perspective, he sees me as a short fuse, always nagging and picking fights, and he’s hesitant to take our relationship further because we are so unstable.

Like I said, we both agreed to work on things and give 110%. But I’m not sure how to proceed. On my end, I still struggle to let go of resentment and grudges I hold against him. I have an archive of all the things he’s done to hurt or frustrate me, and every time we argue, those memories add fuel to the fire. Meanwhile, he’s so shut down that when we fight he just goes blank and says “ok” or “we’ll see” to everything. Our relationship is “over-communicated.” We’ve talked about our problems so much, but we never really come to a resolution. It usually ends up being me yelling at him, and him going into his shell.

I need some suggestions on how to get out of this rut. How to find patience and self-control to hold back my anger and let go of my resentment. How to find the love and compassion to trust this man, even when he doesn’t give me the emotional support or security that I need (because deep down, I realize that I’ve disabled that part of him by being so abrasive). And most of all, how to communicate with him without turning it into a long discussion or fight that goes nowhere. Any suggestions, comments, or personal experiences would be much appreciated.

In closing, I want to stress that I really love this man. I think the world of him, but we’ve fallen into a rut where we’ve both reverted to our own methods of self-protection, even though that means hurting the other person. Thank you in advance for any insight!