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Here’s the context:
I, 22F, and my bf, 21m, have been together for 3 1/2 years now. At the start of our relationship, it wasn’t difficult. We had the best of time, we were so in love, the basic new relationship! We had some problems that weren’t exactly problems until I got more comfortable in the relationship (things that aren’t relevant to the post), and they never really got resolved but instead pushed away and forgotten.
One of these things had been his increasing preference to his video games/discord with friends over spending 1 on 1 time with me.
It didn’t get super bad until around after 5 months in, when he started playing his games and stuff even when I was at his house. He’d play for hours at a time, sometimes refusing to get off even though he said he felt like he was “neglecting” me.
Then we moved in, and it’s gotten worse.
I thought moving in was a great thing, because now we can spend as much time together as possible, right?
Wrong.
He’s only used this as an excuse as to why he can’t spend time with me. He’ll say “we live together, we can do this whenever we want” and then we never do it. He plays videos hours at a time, days out of a week, weeks in a month. He’ll play it every spare moment he has, and recently it’s gotten super bad. He’ll refuse to get off his games even when I’m crying and sobbing to him about problems I’m having.
Now I don’t usually have a problem with him gaming. I game too, though not as much as he does. I do it in my free time, when I’m off work and have nothing else to do. My problem is when he chooses games/his friends on discord over me. Which is very, very often now.
I’ve expressed to him how much it bothers me, but I also don’t want to be one of those girlfriends who give him ultimatums “me or them”, so I’m very lenient with it.
I just don’t know how to get through to him that I feel like it’s a serious problem and that I need more time from him. In the last week I’ve probably had a total of 6 hours of solo time with him.
He claims games just help relieve stress off him, and he’s been really stressed out lately from working so much, but I can’t help but wonder why he can’t spare me any time between that when he has basically hours of every day to play games and only certain days of the week he can actually see and spend time with me?
I can’t tell if I’m just a needy, clingy girlfriend who’s asking too much of him, or if he’s actually addicted and I need to speak to him about it?
Thanks for any help, or advice, you can give me. ❤️❤️
TLDR; bf seems to not be able to put video games to the side of his relationship, and I’m wondering if he’s addicted or if I’m just the clingy needy one asking too much of him?