My girlfriend is a senior in college and about to graduate. She has either one of two options -- go to grad school for her master's or get out with a BA and go get a job. She wants to do the former but it's going to be difficult to do. She has to really focus on schoolwork this semester because she didn't do so well last semester -- so much so that her "assured" grad school position is now dependent on her grades this semester.
Meanwhile, I have to do well this semester because I did absolutely terrible last semester. I'm a sophomore shifting from Software Engineering to...well, I don't know, but SE is not what I need to be doing anymore. I'm taking English courses this semester because it's what I'm good at and I need the GPA boost.
She and I both sort of enabled each other to do badly last semester -- we were there to comfort each other, but we did it too often. We almost provided for each other an escape from reality -- the reality that we couldn't just huddle up in bed together and hope that even though we were putting things aside for each other they would magically get done and we would both be successful and not do badly. Turns out we enabled each other too much and, well, we both didn't do well in school.
I know that I can't allow myself to give her that kind of escape, and I can't let her do the same for me. Neither of us can afford to let the other do badly in school, and over the holidays she convinced herself we would do that best by separating. We just had a long conversation and she decided against that, saying that we should just see how things pan out this coming semester.
I don't want to leave her, and she doesn't want to leave me. We both recognize that we might have to leave each other for personal reasons. (School, being too busy, etc.) She thinks it's going to be hard and believes that it might be too risky to do. I believe we have the capacity to work through our busy schedules and strengthen our relationship. I'm trying to be proactive and tell her that we can better manage our time, because lots of things were spontaneous in our relationship last semester.
Am I right in pushing her to stay with me?? I don't want to accept that it might be best to let her go.....but what she says and what she does suggests that it may be that way.
tldr: girlfriend and I both sucked at school and she needs to graduate this semester, she wants to leave me because she thinks we'll distract each other, I think we can work things out. Is it right for me to push to stay together or do I have to let her go?
You don't have to completely break up with her, but you may have to distance yourselves a bit more. I'm assuming you've got horrible time management skills. Meet with her and discuss that both of you should concentrate on the semester and set up rules as to being mutually distanced for the next semester. Less dates/time around each other is acceptable as long as the both of you can get in a date every once in a while when your both have time, like after finals (the last of them between you and her) as finals of many classes are schedueled roughly the same week. If you can talk to her on the phone, then that's alright as long as it doesn't cut into studying hours or class hours.
OP again, yeah, this is what I pretty much figured we needed to do. I've discussed with her that we need to schedule ourselves a lot more and focus more on ourselves individually and not each other as a couple. She's not quite sure what to think of it yet because it's a new idea and she's never really done this kind of thing before. Even then I think she'll be pretty understanding to it all. If anything that pretty much supports what I think we need to do so thanks :)
Same OP, same relationship again, need new advice.
Girlfriend is being very aloof. She plays WoW, and plays OFTEN. She's in a pretty serious RP guild, but they all really just like to hang out on WoW and dick around most of the time. Girlfriend does just that, and often -- she typically plays even when I come to visit, and only spends a fraction of her time with me compared to the hours she spends playing WoW.
She refused to tell her guild I was visiting last night. She quoted things I told her, and laughed at me when I was talking to her, and they heard everything, but she refused to tell them outright "boyfriend said ____," "boyfriend is here," things like that. She did that every time I visited last semester -- she loved telling them I was visiting. She quoted something I said to her back to her guild, but instead said "somebody told me ____" -- she referred to me as just "somebody" and I was in the same room.
She's said she loves me, she thinks this relationship can work, and that she wants to see me, but she makes no effort to actually see me. She's always "busy" but when I visit she plays WoW non-stop. She says that she enjoys playing with her guildmates and writing RP shit more than she enjoys the game itself, and that her guild is her only creative outlet during this tough semester. I can appreciate that, but she makes more time for the game than she even attempts to make for me. She is planning on going to Mardis Gras with her guildmates, and they all joke casually about sex and fooling around. That doesn't bother me, what bothers me is that she refuses to even invite me. She's legal, and I'm not. However, one of her other guildmates' girlfriends is underage as well, and my girlfriend wants this girl to come because he's her guildmate's girlfriend. What does that make me? An extra? Do I not get the same courtesy? I was pretty shocked by all of that.
I slept at her house last night and had a terrible dream that jolted me awake. I dreamed that the rest of the semester she treated me like this -- tried to "hide" me from her guild and her school friends, never wanted to make time for us. I woke up feeling like she had cheated on me.
She says that over the holidays she spent an entire month "getting used to being alone" and that she originally intended to leave me because school was going to be too hard this semester. She says school is tough, but am I expendable and WoW isn't? I fear that she has already accepted that she is over me and wants to leave me, and that I'm too naive to see it and let go. I'm afraid that she's going to treat school as work and WoW as her personal life, and that I won't fit anywhere in between. I fear that I'm going to be progressive about being responsible with our relationship, whereas she's just going to continue what she's been doing, continue to not care whether or not she sees me, continue to allow our relationship to be spontaneous and distant when what we need badly right now is organization and responsibility. I'm afraid she's going to treat me like her WoW buddies -- they're tight when they're together, but it's a very weak, shallow relationship that can be turned off whenever it's inconvenient.
I'm afraid she's already done with me, or she isn't willing to give up her comfortable habits now to make room for me. I fear that the nightmare I had is going to become a reality.
Really don't know what to do in this situation other than leave her, but that's the last thing I want to do. Is there anything left to save here anymore? Advice?
OP again. By "legal" I mean she's 21, I'm 20. The age difference is around a year and a half, I'm the younger one.
Don't know where else to turn with this, we're both members of a much bigger forum that isn't anonymous so she would see it if I posted all this there. Thanks in advance to any advice you all have to give -- I can use all the help I can get.
Probably a bad sign. She have any close friends on campus who are annoyed that she's a WoW-zombie? Maybe hold an intervention.
22 here, been there. Girlfriend was into WoW and we were three hours away from each other. I pay a ton of money to get us into an anime convention. She didn't want to do -anything- at the con. Just get back to that goddamn piece of shit game. Huge waste of money. I'm pissed off just thinking about it.
OP again. We just went out to eat tonight, took a newly-turned-21 friend out for drinks and dinner. She got drunk and started texting all of her guildmates absurd stuff. She was very protective of her phone and wouldn't let me see her send texts, which I don't really care about, but in the past she never really cared if I saw her conversation or not. That worries me. Later in the evening she was too drunk to realize I was looking over her shoulder but kept at it anyways.
The guys in her guild all, of course, asked her to send pictures of her tits. They all joke about sex and flirt with each other and hint-hint nudge-nudge all the time, but it's always in jest. They are all very interested in talking up their Mardis Gras trip, and a couple of the guys are texting her at all hours of the day every day lately, or commenting everything she does on Facebook, generally keeping communications open between them. I'm a guy, I've been here before -- drunk partying chick friends means there's a possibility to score and these guys are doing everything they can to snag it. I've done the same thing. I recognize their behavior. She enjoyed it and of course it's all a joke to her, or she gets excited about the Mardis Gras trip because she is legitimately excited to go party with her guildies.
She had a conversation with one of the girls that eventually lead to their sex life. She told this girl that she hadn't gotten any in months, then shot me one of those "this is all because of you" looks. She was drunk, I know, but this is really telling.
continuing to next post....
...continuing:
Girlfriend and I spent the entire month of December confused or mad at each other. We left on a bad note, and she chose to be angry with me. I spent the month wishing I was with her, confused as to why she was so mad at me still, and hurt, because she was really ripping me apart. We came back to school and made up, but our conditions were a little odd to me. She said that she "spent the entire break getting used to being alone" and that "she didn't honestly think she could handle school and a relationship" and said that "we should just keep seeing each other until one of us can't take the other anymore." This hurts me because it's a terrible outlook and insults me, because I genuinely want to stay with her. I love her. At the same time, it sounds as though she's already given up on me and is simply tolerating me at this point.
I'd love to have sex with her -- we haven't fucked in more than a month -- but she missed birth control doses before she came back and has had cramps and apparently started an irregular period immediately after she returned, so naturally she isn't going to want to do it. She can't blame me for this, but she seems to anyways.
Even after all this she makes no effort to see me, makes no effort to set aside time out of her "busy schedule" for us, makes no effort to make the relationship work. I feel like I'm pushing against a brick wall here.
Right now, the time we spend together happens spontaneously -- we don't schedule or plan anything, one of us just asks the other to come over and hopes it will work. She has never felt too inclined to ask me over, I typically have to ask. Lately, she has chosen to not respond at all to my requests, or turn me away because she's "busy," but the little time we spend together is spent with me looking at the back of her head while she plugs away on WoW. I scratch her back, I try to kiss her, I do all sorts of shit, and the most attention I get is her laying down with me for 5 or 10 minutes while she takes a break from the game. She always unplugs her headset so she can hear her guildies chatting away about stupid shit in their voice chat channel, and she has no problem leaving me to respond to them.
I used to be able to deal with it, but the weird behavior I've seen lately makes it difficult. I'm going to confront her tomorrow about it all and spell things out for her. We're going to start planning when we spend time together. When we do spend time together, I'm going to ask that she spend very little time on WoW and focus on us. If she can't do that, I have to leave her. There's really not much else I can do to keep myself emotionally stable at this point -- I can't sleep tonight because all this shit bothers me so much.
My roommate started playing over the holiday, so I don't really get to go to bed until his screaming ass gets off for the night and goes to sleep. I really don't want WoW to consume my life -- I hate the fucking game and have never played it nor do I ever want to.
OP again. I ended it.
She was going to cancel her WoW subscription this week, I think she did this afternoon. She can't keep playing throughout this semester, we both know that.
I went to visit her and told her straight up that I wanted to start planning when we visited each other, and that I wanted us both to be responsible enough with our lives to know when we can devote free time to each other. She said we couldn't, and that she couldn't do that. That we were asking too much of each other in these hectic times. I was shocked that she feels that I'm asking too much of her to want to see her every now and then and not feel like I'm imposing all the time, especially after the shit she put me through.
I then told her that I wanted us to start planning when we saw each other, because if we didn't, I would leave her. She seemed shocked. (Gee, you mistreat someone and neglect their efforts to see you, and they end up dumping you? Holy shit, what a concept.) She started saying that she didn't want me to leave her even though she knew I had to because school was going to be too hard for her. I told her I didn't want to leave her because I loved her, and she said the same, but that she knew what she had to do didn't include me. I insisted she was wrong, but she can never be wrong and refused to hear it.
We both sat and commiserated for some time, both of us taking turns crying, talking about how we wished it didn't have to end so suddenly, and she talked about how we could still be best friends. I told her that we couldn't, because both of us would be haunted by our desire to be together to the point that it would drive us apart. I told her I really wanted her to call whenever she felt lonely, but that I couldn't bear for her to actually do that because I would never call her myself when I felt the same way, because that would only serve to make us both feel worse. I then told her that I was leaving her, stood up and walked out.
She called our mutual friend and told him that she was shocked, she didn't know what to do, but that she wasn't going to act on anything just yet and suggested that once she gives it some thought she might come back to me. I walked out on her, however, so I refuse to open that line of communication again. She wouldn't believe me when I said I couldn't take how she treated me any longer, so I left her. She realized how terrible she had been and now she's leaving herself the opportunity to come back to me.
I know it sounds terrible of me and her, but I'll probably take her back. I'm attracted to her in ways I can't quite understand myself. All I know is that I spent almost 6 years alone -- without even so much as coming into contact with a woman -- and I spent that time observing others relationships' and learning what I wanted out of my own. I want her. I don't want to find someone else, I don't want to go looking for another girlfriend again, because nothing can fill the void she left behind.
I hope she reconsiders. I really do.