A friend approached me confidently about realtionship advice and its a tough thing to address. What better place than to ask Lemmy given the broad scope of culture and more genuine reactions here. We figure what can it hurt.
Background:
A couple in my friend group have been together for 3 or 4 years who really seem to love each other looking in from the outside, are having some tension.
The lady doesn’t input the same effort for planning life events, making any sort of weekend plans or after work activities. It’s always the guy picking all the slack up and managing problems. Budgeting and making sure everything is in order. He cooks, does the cleaning, and generally does the relationship thinking as a whole. That is not to say there isn’t some input from his partner, it seems she’s very indecisive from how he describes when making plans or any sort of choices like where to eat or what to do during a problem of any magnitude, almost stress outburst behaviour from her. Defensive type lashing out against him.
He wants to know some advices on how to rebalance the effort scale and to generally improve the dynamic as she seems to be shutting him out according to him. It’s always been imbalanced in effort since the beginning he said but they are good together. They want to make it work but the stress and tension is building to unhealthy levels from what I understand as in he’s ready to break up. They don’t fight really but there’s some definite underlying issues, when he tries to talk about it or anything emotional derived she says things like she doesn’t know, doesn’t know how to explain the way she feels at all and says her mind is sort of blank and that is how he describes most of their deep talks. He described to me that their communication as he’s a very involved communicator and she can go off and be unresponsive or completely not answer questions he asks like they don’t exist.
There’s tension between them she’s snappy more often than not and deals with severe depression/anxiety. Hates her job. Is always in a negative mindset. While he is usually more upbeat and postive not bubbly but hopeful.
I’ve seen him have hard days and be tense and snarky as well who hasnt had a rough day? To me it just isnt like her where she always generally has smart comments towards anything. She’s not what I would say is an uptight removed but almost anything can ruin her mood.
I’m likely missing some points here it’s not my relationship nor am I good at these things but I’m trying so be easy on me here. The only thing I can tell is they genuinely seem to love each other. Sex life is imbalanced he has a high drive and her very low as in can go months then sometimes 1 to 4 times a month. They did get hormone testing but everything appears normal. Worth noting he said she sleeps excessively like after work all through the night most days. They no longer talk as much or text during the day. Where that used to be more common. He did mention she has a male coworker she works with daily that they are fairly close he is unsure of in-fidelity but they meet for work at his apartment every morning apparently it’s easier since they share a work vehicle. I was told that he wanted to quit in a rush a few months ago and they had an argument because he was about to leave and she irrationally seemed to want to quit with him. At the very least their very emotionally tied. It may be nothing he said.
She told him she doesn’t feel any different in the relationship for the way she views them when asked.
But just doesn’t show attention anymore when he gets upset her response will be Boohoo or similar.
Personally I believe she’s burned out and has anxiety on top of horrible depression but I have no real clue how to address that for them. It’s such a personal topic.
Lemmy give them some of your best advices they used to be so full of life and laughter. Thank you all! If I missed anything or any specific questions just ask. We both are excited to see what comes of this.
Edit and UPDATE: They have started to talk again after being silent yesterday all day and have decided to take the week to each write a long and well thought out letter from each of sorts that address how their thinking individually, how they view each other, concerns to address, and ways to meet on level ground to try to form and maintain structure during times of stressful interactions rather than both going in defense and bring more hate into the relationship.
She said she wants to try to speak with her doctor about mental health problems including ADHD, anxiety, depression, and also wants to learn to take time to focus on activities that she derives happiness from or did before the shutdown aspect (art most likely is my understanding but only she knows I suppose) and to spend less time sleeping. They are going to remain talking throughout the week casually it seems and plan to swap letters and have an more formal discussion at the weeks end.
If I hear more, I will update this and keep the help and advice good or bad coming!
Step 1: get both parties to agree there’s an imbalance.
If you can’t get to this point, no other advice matters
She agrees it’s wildly imbalanced and wants to change/ feels horrible and she told him he deserves better. He said she tries hard for a day or two then drops the ball and returns to old ways.
Cool. Now it’s just getting her to come up with different options that are based on her unique characteristics. Not everyone is made for planning. Not everyone is made for coordination. Not everyone is made for todo lists. She needs to bring her wholeself - he needs to contribute his special powers to supporting her developing her special powers and vice versa.
lol, both parties agreeing does mostly nothing. It’s a nice step, and maybe even necessary for them to stay together, but with “no other advice matters”, you vastly overstate how important this realization is. You can easily agree on this and everything can not work out anyway.
You misunderstood the words. You can agree on this and fail to resolve. But you can not disagree on this and resolve. And that was the point
I’m pretty sure I didn’t misunderstand the words. You literally said “no other advice matters”. I.e. this is the only thing that’s important. That’s quite clearly false, you just admitted it yourself.
It is actually possible to resolve without this. There’s so many resolutions that don’t involve both parties agreeing.
no, you misunderstood. “no other advice matters” does not mean “the most important” in this case but that its a necessary condition for any resolution.
You think it’s possible to solve this problem without both parties agreeing that it’s a problem. I disagree with you.
This seems like it’s mapping. They both agree there’s this issue of equality in the relationship but perhaps they just aren’t a true fit like they thought. Maybe all good things come to an end. I didn’t want to jump to saying this because I don’t want to be that guy.
Just because this is not literally the most important thing, doesn’t mean the relationship is necessarily doomed.
But one thing I believe very strongly is that a relationship only works when both people are fine with leaving each other under certain circumstances. If leaving is such a big hurdle that you accept lots of misery instead of it, something is fucked. That’s why I hate marriage and the whole “until death do us part” thinking. If you can’t leave someone, you’re basically saying “I’m fine with you doing the most horrible things to me”. Leaving should always theoretically be on the table. People treat leaving or the end of a relationship as this super horrible thing, but in actuality everyone knows that sometimes it’s absolutely the right course of action.
To me, it doesn’t seem like their relationship necessarily needs to come to an end. From what you have said of course. With more details, this might change. But I can still see lots of paths that could lead to them staying together.