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Is it normal that I feel so stressed out by boyfriends?
I'm 22 and I've been dating my current boyfriend for two months. In the past I've had two prior serious relationships and dated a few guys in between.
I know this might sound weird, but I feel like men become really obsessed with me really fast and it bothers me a lot. I'd like to mention here that I'm religious and very ambitious and not the kind of girl to get into risky things or date "bad boys".
In my 1st relationship the guy and I wound up getting an apartment together within 3 months because he really wanted to move in with me and be together all the time. We stayed together for 3 years and were engaged, but I broke it off because he wasn't the kind of guy who I saw myself spending my life with (due to an increasing number of bad habits and little ambition). Even though I broke up with him he tried to get back with me for almost a year and a half later until I blocked his number and moved out of the city.
The next guy within two months of dating started stalking me everywhere I went and whenever I was with him he wanted to have sex or engage in sexual activities. Then he wanted me to move with him which I declined. Then he forced me into meeting his parents and grandparents even though I didn't want to. Within three months he got so crazy that he threatened to kill himself when I wasn't with him and wanted to talk about marriage. I wound up with a restraining order and charges against him after I broke up with him and he began sending me threats against my life. When I first started dating him though he was a good christian boy (I met him at church) that was really sweet and nice so I don't know what happened.
A guy I dated before my current bf started out as a work crush and then we started dating. He had a really great personality and all that, but before I knew it he constantly wanted to spend every day with me and wanted me to live with him after about a month, which I declined (again). He also kept bothering me about meeting his family. Then after I had sex with him the first time he kept bothering me for sex all the time and I wound up breaking up with him because he was bad in bed to the point it wasn't fixable...after I broke up with him he would send me letters and flowers up to a month and a half later.
My current boyfriend has been pretty great to me, but I'm starting to see some of the same signs. After I had sex with him once he started wanting to have sex every night and he's already asked me to move in with him multiple times. He wants me to spend every night with me and talks about how much he can't stand to be away from me. Now his parents are coming up and he wants me to meet them.
I don't understand why men become like this with me so fast and it really stresses me out.
I'm also a full-time college student and work full time as well and with all the stress of that, adding on relationships like these are incredibly overwhelming. When I ask them about it they say things like "It's because I'm so beautiful, fun, and smart" but that doesn't seem fair to me because then men get in a huge funk when I'm not in a mood to be that girl.
Sometimes I wonder if I should stop dating until I'm out of college because it's just way too much stress. I always feel like everybody expects so much out of me and depends on me so much when all I want is somebody to help alleviate that stress, not make more of it. I don't want to be expected to be a perfect girlfriend 24/7 and to be okay with moving in with a guy so soon into a relationship. I also don't want to be expected to get to know and please another person's family before we've even been together a year. I don't want to be expected to want to have sex whenever the guy wants to and to be up for anything in bed. I also don't mean to make it sound like I hate sex or anything like that because I do like sex, but when I feel like it's expected, it kills the pleasure of it.
Should I break up with my current boyfriend because everything is just stressing me out too much?
I don't know what to do and I don't feel like this is normal, but I see every girl/woman I know with a boyfriend or a husband and they typically live with them too and I don't know how they can handle it?? My two best friends are living with their SO and one of them has only been with him for 6 months and the other is married with a baby to their SO when they've only been together a year.
Help please! :(
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Wow...thanks for the details and it sounds like you certainly have had bad luck with a definitive pattern to it so I can understand the stress. If it was me, I'd be gun shy of every new relationship.
I am in my late fifties now, with 2nd husband and will share what little insights I have from my own life in hopes any of that may equip you to feel less stressed about the process of dating to find ones SO or mate.
It may be long but I will address things you wrote of in the order they were written.
I was glad to hear you state right off the bat what you are like as a person. It takes understanding ourselves well enough to be able to even have a hint at who we'd be a good match for and due to who we are, and including our past, the bad parts that haunt us, it is a good way to start figuring what kind of guy is going to be the right person for us. For example, I don't know how religious you are but it might be a good thing to figure out if you are going to require a man who is a believer, religious or just spiritual, of if an agnostic or other faith is something you are also okay with.
What I find interesting is that all the guys wanted to move in with you very early on. While thats not weird or anything, it is not always the behavior of men in their 20s but more the older men already divorced or widowed who have a better idea of what they are looking for and can be quite sure early on. SO can females, so I'd like to share next what I believe the process of dating relationship to be as it will help you to know whether the guy or perhaps yourself are jumping over some important steps.
Dating is for determining if there is interest beyond basic attraction, discovering more about the other to determine if you like and can handle their personality traits, and whether there's enough in common, or evidence of destructive habits or tendencies in one or both people that would harm the partner emotionally and/or physically and kill the relationship. Depending on what you discover, you either continue dating the person and take it to the committed couple level or you break up. If you break up, you look for the next dating partner, always trying to find someone a step better than the last partner, basing your choices for the new person on traits you discovered that you liked enough to look for in the next person, while at the same time avoiding the other things that you won't tolerate.
If all is going well and you develop some serious feelings for each other, you take the relationship from just dating to the committed couple level. At this level, depending on your age, you are dating each other exclusively or moving in together or getting married. A lot of people see someone exclusively but won't make a commitment if it is more to have someone to attend a movie with or go out socially. And some want a partner for the security, financial reasons or to be their live in Mommy or Daddy but nothing more.
So if they aren't needing you for your money, or to pick up after them, perhaps it could be for a reason as I encountered in first marriage. I'll come back to that.
Since I don't know what bad habits were evident with your 1st guy, nor examples of lack of ambition, I have no idea if the 1st was simply looking for a girlfriend for two reasons, convenient sex but also to fill the mommy role for him non sexually, meaning you're the adult and he acts more like a child. I did notice you worded it that 'He wanted to move in with You' rather than wanting you to move in with him.
To me, there's a possibility for a difference there. In one he's looking for someone to take care of him, in the other he's a well established, successful and mature man who wants the female to live with him simply because he loves her and wants to share life together, an equal partnership.
I will state right here that committed relationships like marriage only work if both people are putting in the same effort, maximum effort to make a relationship work and it goes far beyond how much personal attention a mate shows you, like the running of a household together as well as shared budgeting (who pays what or joint acct.)
And now you mention sex (the good christian guy)
Religious or not, males are going to be interested in having sex or hoping for a sex partner someday. The best way a male is guaranteed having a sex partner handy all the time is to be in a relationship with female who has the same libido as him. Libido is how much and how often a person wants and desires sex as this will prompt them to seek out someone but most people, including myself (back at age 20) don't know how important this one little thing is.
So I ended up marrying a guy who had low libido while I had high. Usually the more common combo is the other way around with the guy wanting sex more often. Having it expected or scheduled, indeed does kill the desire as you mentioned so you already know more than I did at that age. Then theres the chemistry between two people. Often early on sex is so special due to the newness of a partner. New relationship energy is what this would be called. But eventually, just like the much desired toy you finally got at Christmas, unless the toy was really geared to your personal interests, like mine having something to do with art, I lost interest in the toys, much the same as two sex partners or one will lose interest if the connection between them isn't strong enough.
I'd also like to address the fact that you don't know what really happened for a CHristian guy to go so far off track and have all those problems.
I assumed I was safe with a Christian guy too but as a traveling pastor once said,
Just because you find a mouse in the cookie jar, that doesn't make him a cookie." So no matter how nice a person is, my guy was really nice and that impressed me, you need to know a little more about people before you can discover if they are a true solid believer or if they are someone with problems and just wanting to get better. The problems you mentioned may have been in place long before he attended church. My ex was late in life diagnosed to have mental illness but didn't want to see a Dr. to get better. Deep down inside, many people with undiagnosed issues know something is wrong but they are afraid to find out what it is, just like the ex. So in a self effort to appear more normal to the world in general, you want to look like you fit in. In church, there were more couples than singles so for him, the solutions were to marry someone and have a couple kids and own a house with the white picket fence...you know...what they call the American dream. And that way, he felt he wouldnt stick out. But not only was he verbally abusive for the entire marriage but due to our great differences in what we were like sexually, he and I were even a sexual mismatch.
It is at this point that I will say that I am now an advocate for two people who have met and spent enough time talking and spent together to be sure the other is what your looking for and as part of that, near the end of this stage, that the two have sex to discover if they are a good match. Once won't tell you if the both of you have the same libido so having sex then often or once living together is another way to find if you have the same libido's and like the same things.
Another thing I've learned with experience, is that no two sex partners are alike. When you have a new sex partner, it takes quite some time to get to know that person well enough to be able to please them easily. What one guy likes or how he responds to a certain touch sexually is not the same with the next. I can't think of any that were exactly the same and I've had lots of partners. So keep this in mind when you are considering a guy to date or live with. Living with can be a sign of commitment but for others it is just a more heavy duty version of the getting to know your partner well and its not uncommon for peole living together to finally discover things they can't put up with in the partner and they split up. This is all a normal part of the dating and relationship process. So don't think badly of yourself for having gone through it.
Again though, I find it odd that guys want to live with you so soon after meeting. Perhaps there is something that can be changed about the meeting process...more of you stating what you are and are not looking for in a guy after thanking him for his interest in you and also stating any boundaries you have. I actually did that 2nd time around when looking for my 2nd mate. I was on a couple dating sites and guys wrote me all the time. It added up to the hundreds over a handful of years dear and I am not exaggerating. Very seldom did I get a guy upset because he didn't meet the criteria he needed to meet to even see me in person the first time. I had a list.
Your current boyfriend asked you to move in with him. You mention sex again and he must like it but theres not mentioned of the type of relationship the two of you have. Theres give and take as we share our days together. Sex is just the icing on the cake and the best way to show ones love for their SO, thats why depending on the situation, it can also be called making love.
But if making love is the icing, there needs to be the cake of the relationship and that hasn't been addressed. So I am wondering if there is much 'cake' at all to this or any of the past relationships. Just sharing rent, having someone to eat some meals together with and see coming and going, and to have sex with is not what a solid happy rewarding relationship is. You may have left it out so as to keep it short. However what needs discussing beyond whats written could take an afternoon of you sitting with a best friend talking this out.
As for guys finding you beautiful, fun and smart and wanting you for those reasons, well heck, anyone with a good head on their shoulders is going to be looking for the same. I told the men writing to me in dating sites that if I went out on just one date with each guy per day, and only went out with the tons of guys who said I was sexy, funny and intelligent, then I'd have a different guy willing to go on one day for every day of the year. I heard those compliments often enough to know it was just a line from desperate lonely men who wanted a regular love in their life and/or sex parter.
Only you can know if stopping dating til you are done with college will help you with the stress.
However, once done with schooling, you'll be right back where you started, a job and your other daily chores, and any other priorities like friends, family, etc. My own husband said he didnt write to me for a long time in the dating site cus he didn't feel he could offer much time to the relationship cus he was working overtime almost every day. leaving 6 am and not home til 7pm leaving only evenings and weekends to have together with him so exhausted after his delivery job that he had little quality time to give someone. However once we met, we realized we were more perfect for each other than anyone we'd met before and than any of the couples we know. Its for those reasons that despite the time crunch, us moving in together was a way to have that little time together and though sex was and still is a big part, there is so much more. He loves to wait on me hand and foot, we take turns cooking and cleaning up, basically he tales as active a role in our relationship as I do. If you meet the right guy, then I am sure instead of stressful, you'll find yourself busy but happier to be living together with the perfect guy you've found.
I do have a letter with instructions of how to find Mr. Right. And it would go well for you at some point to have this info as well. If you choose not to date until you finish school, ask me for it in the future, or now and save it.
If you just want gals and guys to be social with to go out to eat with or watch a movie with the little time you have, then when you meet a guy, let him know you find him very intriging and would like to have a chance to know him better but alas, you'd tried dating while still in college and working and find you can't handle the stress of having time for a relationship. So if he wants a group of friends to hang out with once in a while, he can add you to that group, but you will not doing regular dating right now, and list any other boundaries, like no more sex until you finish school. Good luck dear.
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