Gf afraid Bc she doesn’t “know” I’m “the one”
Hello All, I am dealing with a potentially fatal issue in my otherwise successful relationship issue. My gf and I have been dating for a year and a half. I am 29 and she is 27, turning 28 in November. Our relationship is loving, fun, and we have great chemistry, physically and I’d like to think emotionally. More than anything, our time with one another is utterly fulfilling for us both. She has questioned the future, however, because she feels that after a year and a half she believes she should “know” that I am “the one”, yet she does not.
I also worry that she’s saying something is missing but doesn’t know what.
Fwiw, I also do not know that she is “the one”, though I don’t really consider the implications of that since the future is a guaranteed unknown. She feels a sense of urgency here as she wants kids, and feels that if I’m not right, she may be getting too old to fulfill that wish.
Her analysis of our relationship is well thought out-we do have many differences-what music we listen to, our sense of humor, we process emotion differently and many of our interests vary, though we tend to have a good time exploring each other’s interests when done so together. Our life goals, sense of morality, political views, vision for the future and ability to see a complicated situation and separately come to the same conclusions, however, are very much the same.
For added context, she was in an extremely long relationship until about 10 months before we started dating. She changed cities, dated a rebound, that fizzled then found me. Since Covid started my elderly parents returned from out of state unexpectedly. One had a heart attack about 15 years ago, the other has an immunological disease that flared up leaving them bedridden. I internalized the situation and basically took on responsibility for saving my family and I developed what is probably anxiety disorder (I had never been good with contagious stuff). My gf believes she is an empath and absorbed my anxiety. She left to go home to her out of state-more suburban family home for two and a half months (with the exception of coming back twice for one week.) Most of our communication over this time was via text which I believe was damaging to our relationship health. While home she adapted to a healthier world view of a world with covid. She is responsible yet is willing to take risks endorsed as “safe” by the medical community, even as far as flying when necessary. I was left in isolation in an urban high rise, where My reaction became to respond with fear to any sort of risk at all. This caused multiple disagreements between us because our risk tolerance varied greatly.
Last week as she got back here, she let me know that she had been questioning all of these things, specifically my inability to cope with things necessary for her to live her life in the world were in right now. I went back and realized that the way I was perceiving things had been only out of fear, and that wasn’t fair or healthy. Since then I have come to realize that her view is actually much healthier than mine and tried to gravitate towards following her lead. I’ve gone out to stores by myself, agreed to get my hair cut today and gradually started to reassimilate and accepted that I have to trust her.
Ultimately, I am very fearful that our relationship will end and I don’t think either of us will actually benefit from it. We both want to be in this relationship, love and enjoy each other, but she fears that it is a problem that after this long she doesn’t know. I know she is fearful of staying in a relationship for too long, and I think that fear is causing her to maybe leave a relationship too soon. Ive looked up the data and for people of her career success level (very) approx 20% of mothers have their first kid after 35, so she’s not actually approaching anything out of the norm for nearly 10 years, though I know data is unlikely to assuage emotional fear.
I’m not sure how to think about her insecurities or how to reassuringly and lovingly address them and provide some sort of resolution to this. I think that we’re at risk of losing a mutually beneficial, loving and mostly healthy relationship because of uncertainty over something that I believe can never offer certainty, and an unhealthy obsession with the mere reality that there are differences between us, even if those differences don’t make us necessarily incompatible.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
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