Eugenia Hayden2 months agoHow to trust my (20F) boyfriend (21M) more as a fearful-avoidant?My (20F) boyfriend (21M) and I have been together for about 5 months now, 6 months in January. Everything about our relationship has been pretty great. We are long distance by a couple states which does make things a bit difficult, but we make it work as best we can given both our schedules as college students. He’s completely my type, and I really do like him and think he’s a great guy. My family and friends all like him too. But in the back of my mind, I just can’t allow myself to trust him. It’s not like I have a gut feeling that he’s not loyal to me or anything, but more that I will find myself fixating on these little things I’ve noticed him doing and make conclusions based off these observations that I can’t trust him and that, in the end, he is still someone who will end up disappointing me.For example, I recently visited him in his state and he was walking me around his college campus. We passed a building with glass windows which clearly looked into a room where a girl was working in a lab. As we passed the building, I felt he was staring into the building a bit too long and interpreted that as him ogling at the girl. My immediate thought was, “See, he has wandering eyes, I can’t trust him.” Another example is how he has recently been looking into transferring to my school in California for his Master’s, as he is getting his bachelor’s degree in the spring. One of the things he was researching about my school was the male-female ratio. I thought it was strange that he would find significance in something like this since if the roles were reversed, I would not even think of a statistic like this, much less be curious about it. I also figured that something like this isn’t relevant to his field, as he is an engineer (though he has talked about having a smaller female population at his school as he goes to a school specifically for engineering). I interpreted this as him hoping there is a higher female population at my school so he can be in contact with more women. Logically, I know that there must be an actual reason for him to be doing these things, and that he has realistically given me no reason to believe he will be unfaithful. Emotionally, I cannot shake the fear that he really is doing these things with the intent that I think and that I am making a mistake letting myself fall in love with him.I really do love him and I want things to work with him. I don’t want to hurt him and I want to be a good girlfriend for him, but I am just so afraid that one day he is going to hurt me and my heart cannot handle being hurt again. It makes it difficult for me to be emotionally vulnerable with him, and to trust him with my feelings - however, it is also difficult for me to talk to him about these feelings of mine because I don’t want to tell him about how I am afraid of these things and make him feel bad for worrying me.I guess my question is, what can I do about these worries to help convince myself that I should just trust him and get over my fear of getting hurt? If I were to talk to him about how I feel, how could I bring this up in a way that wouldn’t make him feel bad about possibly making me worry? For those of you with fearful-avoidant partners (or those of you who are fearful-avoidant yourselves), how do you reassure your partner so that they feel safe trusting you?TLDR: I have extremely fearful-avoidant attachment style and find it hard to trust my boyfriend even though he’s given me no reason to not. What do?11.6K
Eugenia HaydenEugenia Hayden