I’ve been with my partner for 3 years and I still don’t know much about him. He keeps everything private and doesn’t talk about his life or family to me. Says he’d much rather not, even his friends complain to me.
He’s quite a closed off person and most days he appears normal. Something has shifted and his friends are reaching out to me about his distant behaviour. I’ve tried asking him what the matter is but he says he likes to keep things private. It makes me feel like I can’t be trusted. Is this doomed?
Hot damn. That’s a bloody long time to not know anything about someone.
If after 3 years of being together you’re asking him to open up a bit and he isn’t then I wouldn’t expect anything to change in the future. So you should be asking yourself if this is the relationship that you want. You can’t force people to change.
Maybe you could start with not having private conversations with his friends where they complain to you about your man.
I wouldn’t trust you either, that’s dirty
I haven’t. His friends reached out to me to ask if he was ok as he hasn’t been replying or seeing them.
If you want a decent answer, you’re going to have to add a little more clarity to your post. It gives no context whatsoever
I wouldn’t want you to find out about my two other wives either. Sounds like the whole is working out fine as is if it’s been going on for that many years.
Don’t repeat anything he tells you.
Don’t ask don’t tell. Best way to live life.
That is who you married. No use trying to change him now
A better question is how in the hell did you spend three years or someone you don’t know?
Like it’s seriously one of those situations where you’re going to need to figure out if you need to run a background check on him or something. A lot of people are not that closed off unless something serious happened, or something is going on with them.
Ask him this. “What can I do to gain your trust?” His response will be either nothing or you already have. Your response “How I am supposed to feel about this when I know so little about you?” Start there.
Casually ask him about how things are going with your friends. He gives you the usual,say your friends said this said they were concerned about you. “How am I supposed to feel about this?”
If he’s truly avoidant, you don’t get him to open up because he’s literally not wired for it.
You either choose to leave and find someone who can open up the way you need them to, or you go on a long quest that may or may not lead anywhere learning how best not to trigger him to suddenly get spooked and have to fade out for a while.
It is possible for anyone including avoidants to rewire themselves and there *is* such a thing as healed avoidants out there, but they have to realize their issues themselves and put in their own effort to get there. The hard part is that avoidants don’t only avoid deeper connection with others, they avoid connecting with themselves so they may never even learn what’s going on with themselves. So healed avoidants are rare.
You can try to teach him about himself, you can try to teach him how his behavior negatively affects you, you can hope that he’ll then start on his self healing quest, but yet another hard part about that is that doing so is highly likely to trigger him because it’ll all feel like pressure to him. Most likely his response will be to fade out and it’ll get nowhere while you get more and more frustrated and sad.
Potentially the best thing you can do is have the patience of a saint and give as little pressure as you can and *maybe* he’ll slowly open up like a skittish cat coming out from hiding. But this could take years, and after all those years you might discover that nothing’s changed whatsoever. Do you think this risk is what’s best for you?
It could still be worthwhile to enjoy what time you’ll get with him. Nothing wrong with that. Just don’t do what I did with an avoidant woman (pretty much same pattern as avoidant men though) and drive yourself absolutely crazy continually hoping and gobbling up their breadcrumbs when they popped out. On the bright side I’ve learned a helluva lot as you can see from this huge reply 😂😮💨😤
You don’t want those demons out.
Leave it alone.