Tears interfere with serious talks with boyfriend

Dear Carolyn: I’m having trouble navigating through an issue with my boyfriend. I feel as though he sees spending time with me as an obligation and not something he WANTS to do. He’s generally pretty deadpan and hard to read, so I tend to hurt my own feelings quite a bit before talking to him about how things are affecting me, but I struggle with bringing up these issues sometimes because my stress response is always to just burst into tears.

I wish I could learn to control it but years of therapy have done nothing for that specific issue.

But this tends to derail all discussions because his only goal is to get me to stop crying in the moment and long-term things don’t always improve.

Some people have told me to write him a letter, which I’ve tried, but the result usually ends up the same during the follow-up discussion. I don’t really know how to move forward in a constructive way.

Waterworks

I know your question is about the tears. But I have questions. Why do you want to be with someone who doesn’t show pleasure at being with you?

Why stay with someone whose communication style you don’t understand? Why is your answer for such style differences to tiptoe around him and turn inward against yourself — “hurt my own feelings” — vs. either to fix the communication or break up?

Why are we talking about how to get through these stressful conversations instead of why they’re so stressful and why there are so many of them?

I harbor no illusions about relationships. They’re hard sometimes. But that’s not a reason to treat grueling teary frustration with a partner as normal and therefore something you have to just find ways to muscle through.