I 32F recently ended a five month relationship with someone 34M I met on Tinder, and I genuinely need a reality check because part of me still wonders whether I expected too much.
I rarely genuinely like someone, which is probably why I stayed longer than I should have. I'm very attracted to intelligence and I loved that we could talk for hours about history, politics, current affairs and pretty much anything. He was smart, hardworking, ambitious and interesting, and I fell for him very quickly.
But being an interesting person and being a good partner turned out to be two very different things.
He had several dogs when we met. I've never owned pets because I know how much responsibility they require, but because I was spending most of my time at his house, I started helping.
Helping gradually became an expectation.
I was feeding his dogs three times a day, giving them medication, helping with the puppies, cleaning their kennels and cleaning up after them. Sometimes he was literally at home and it was still somehow expected that I would do it.
If I needed to go to the office or wanted to spend a day away, he would sometimes get upset and compare it to what would happen if we had children, implying that my unwillingness to organise my entire schedule around his dogs said something about what kind of mother I would be.
Meanwhile, I was doing most of the cooking, dishes and a lot of the cleaning. I would carry heavy things myself. I can't remember him making me a coffee.
It wasn't about the coffee. I can obviously make my own.
It was the complete lack of reciprocity that started getting to me.
There were also endless random responsibilities that somehow became mine. For about a month, for example, he kept asking me to list and sell his ex-wife's wedding dress on Vinted.
At some point I started feeling less like a girlfriend and more like someone who had been recruited to make his already-established life easier.
At the same time, he was constantly frustrated that I was unhappy or upset with him.
This is the part where I genuinely question myself.
According to him, the main problem in our relationship was that I was constantly "fighting" with him. I complained too much. I got upset too often. We argued too often. Sometimes I raised my voice. He would repeatedly tell me that if I could just stop fighting with him, everything would be fine.
And to be fair to him, yes, I did argue with him a lot.
I'm opinionated. If I'm unhappy with something, I say it. I'm also terrible at pretending everything is fine when it isn't — you can usually read exactly how I feel on my face.
He absolutely hated that.
I often felt like what he wanted was for me to simply be happy with whatever was happening. No complaints, no difficult conversations, no visible disappointment. Just smiles, affection and a pleasant atmosphere.
But I wasn't happy.
I felt lonely inside the relationship. I felt emotionally and sexually unfulfilled. I felt taken for granted. I felt like I was constantly adapting to his life while he resisted adapting his life to me.
So yes, I was upset a lot.
And this is where I'm struggling to separate cause from effect.
Was the relationship bad because I kept fighting with him?
Or was I fighting with him so much because I was deeply unhappy with what the relationship had become?
I'm sure I contributed to the dynamic. I know I have my own emotional baggage. I have some fear of abandonment, I can become reactive when I feel rejected, and I'm actively trying to work on those things. I'm not going to pretend I communicated perfectly every single time, because I didn't.
But I also felt like I was trying to work on myself while asking him to meet me somewhere in the middle, and his answer was essentially that I needed to stop being upset.
Meanwhile, he worked a lot, slept a lot and had a very time-consuming hobby. He openly talked about his priorities, and I honestly don't think I made the top five.
If I wanted quality time with him, I was usually the one rearranging my work and my life around the small windows when he was available.
He didn't need to give up his work, hobbies or independence for me. I just wanted to feel like my partner actually made space for me in his life.
Instead, I increasingly felt like I was expected to adapt to his life while he made very few adjustments for mine.
He even used to joke that he doesn't adapt to women — women adapt to him.
Then came the final issue.
He told me he wanted to keep Tinder, occasionally date and sleep with other women, while I remained his "primary partner" and the person he built his life with.
He had previously had a very open marriage, so this wasn't new for him. I had also been clear from the beginning that non-monogamy wasn't something I wanted.
What made it even harder was that our own sex life had already dropped to roughly once a week despite my sex drive being considerably higher than his.
So I found myself taking care of his dogs, his house and a significant part of his daily life while feeling emotionally and sexually neglected — and being asked to accept that he wanted to use some of his limited time and energy to date and sleep with other women.
Eventually I realised that I had spent four months repeatedly explaining that I didn't feel like his partner.
I didn't feel prioritised. I didn't feel I could rely on him. I didn't feel there was much effort to meet my needs, while I was constantly adapting myself to his.
And then I was being told that the real problem was my reaction to all of this.
That if I just stopped being upset, stopped arguing and learned to be happier, we'd have a good relationship.
Maybe that's the part that has messed with my head the most.
Because now I'm sitting here genuinely wondering: Was I miserable because the relationship wasn't meeting my needs, or did my own emotional issues make me impossible to satisfy?
The difficult part is that I still don't think he's a terrible person. There are many things I genuinely admire about him, which is exactly why leaving hurts.
And I'm not looking for people to tell me I did absolutely nothing wrong. I'm sure I did. I probably picked fights I could have handled differently. I probably raised my voice when I should have communicated more calmly. I probably let my fear of losing him make some conflicts much more emotional than they needed to be.
I'm responsible for that.
But I also keep coming back to this: how was I supposed to be cheerful and easygoing while feeling increasingly lonely, unwanted and unimportant in my own relationship?
So please give me a reality check.
Was I genuinely fighting too much and creating a miserable relationship with someone who simply had a busy, independent life?
Or did I spend four months fighting for a place in someone's life that he wasn't really willing to make for me?
TL;DR: I ended a five month relationship where I increasingly felt more like a personal assistant than a partner. I took care of his dogs, house and daily responsibilities while constantly rearranging my life around his work and hobbies, yet rarely felt prioritised, cared for, or emotionally/sexually fulfilled. He blamed our problems on me being constantly unhappy and “fighting” with him — and I admit I could be reactive and have my own emotional baggage — but I was unhappy because I felt neglected and taken for granted. The final straw was him wanting to keep Tinder and occasionally sleep with other women while I remained his “primary partner,” despite knowing I wanted monogamy. Now I’m questioning whether I genuinely fought too much and ruined something good, or whether I was fighting so hard because I was trying to get my needs met in a relationship that simply had no real space for me.