First off, I'd like to say that I'm posting here because I feel that getting an idea of the general response received from multiple people, especially in this relevant part of the internet, may benefit me more than merely speaking to a very limited number of trusted yet perhaps biased individuals like I have in the past (2 or so). I've thought about going to a counselor to discuss various relationship issues and even began to look a couple of times. It hasn't been a very fruitful experience and I assumed this might be the next best thing short of magically scoring a professional who just happens to be exactly what I'm looking for.
I wish I could keep this briefer, but unfortunately without adequate detail I doubt the picture would be painted well enough to garner a sufficiently informed response.
My girlfriend and I have been together for almost exactly 3 years. I deal with some health issues, which I won't get into for the sake of relevance, and have consequently lived with my father up until now. We are co-owners of our house and share the mortgage. My girlfriend unofficially moved in after 8 months together and we decided to make it permanent after a few months. During that time she has had a handful of call center jobs and has generally struggled to accomplish goals that involve saving money or enrolling in cosmetology school as she wishes to do eventually. Her grandmother died about 4 months into our relationship and it has been a significant cause of grief, depression, and anxiety for her, as in many ways she was more of a mother to her than her own is. She also deals with some physical health issues (difficult periods and PMS symptoms, painful joints, IBS, headaches, fatigue) and over the years she has at least initiated looking into doctors to see if she has a possible autoimmune issue or not, but it has never amounted to anything. She had a colonoscopy to rule out Crohn's disease which came up negative, but beyond that she hasn't taken any further investigative steps. Most of the time she's functional enough to go to work, go see her friends, or do anything that doesn't require prolonged exertion to varying degrees depending on the day. Mostly I would call her considerably functional a decent percentage of the time.
My father and I discussed having her pay a small amount of rent (~$150/month) but ultimately I convinced him that I didn't like the idea of profiting from her living with us since we're not renting and have equity in the house. He understood my argument and agreed. He makes more per month than both my girlfriend and I combined and is very tolerant when it comes to money; voluntarily paying for utilities, purchasing most of the food, and even deciding to give my girlfriend $100 a month for her own groceries out of the kindness of his heart just because she is so picky with food and tends to avoid most of the stuff we eat. Once it was made official that she was living with us permanently, we decided to give her the spare bedroom next to mine which had only been used for light storage until that point. It was assumed that it would be beneficial to allow her to have her own space should she need it if our sleep schedules weren't compatible at times (which happens), or if she just needed to be alone for a bit, which everyone needs on occasion.
That should preface things well enough to finally move on to the entire reason for my posting here.
Over the past 2-3 years it became apparent to me that she is an incredibly untidy person, and that should probably be considered an understatement. I had a glimpse of this at a previous apartment she lived in, but that was the only foreshadowing I got. It looked like a bomb had gone off in her room; clothes, shoes, cans, food containers, a couple of gaping garbage bags, objects of any nature strewn aimlessly, etc. But her roommates at the time were also fairly messy and I didn't know how hectic her life may have been there, so I just brushed it off and focused on enjoying the honeymoon stage of our relationship. Unfortunately it wasn't just a phase. To be fair, she does have quite a few more belongings to handle here, but nothing that should result in the kind of dump that has manifested over and over again.
For one thing, when I say "dump," I mean it. Her room is hardly a living space. It's not somewhere I would imagine most people would ever feel comfortable spending time. The smell is often repulsive, and although she has cleaned her room a very small handful of times, eventually things tend to go right back to how they were. Dozens of old soda cans may line the window sill in stacks, cups filled with old scummy liquid and mold are found elsewhere, piles of stale clothes, trash, and miscellaneous items shift and grow, and yes, even food manages to stick around for various lengths of time left to rot and putrefy, in the warmer months serving as the perfect source of food for fruit flies to feed on and multiply. At one point, mere feet away from where she sat every day to do her makeup and mess with her laptop, she left a container of sliced lunch meat on her futon mattress for something like a week or more until countless maggots infested it to eventually turn into the (likely hundreds) of flies that could be seen hovering above almost every nook and cranny of the room. Thankfully something this bad hasn't happened again, but small numbers of maggots have been found elsewhere. Often dirty dishes and silverware from downstairs manage to stay in her room for months on end.
I could go on and on but the general idea is that she doesn't clean anything up until an extreme has been reached, and even then the extreme may go on until she finally decides to do something about it, whether on her own or because I've insisted. My father and I have discussed this issue together and it's clear that we both don't care how messy her room is, as long as it's not food, drink, or could damage the house in some way. My father doesn't talk to her about any of this because he has bad social anxiety, though he feels as disgusted with it as I do. He's able to ignore it a lot easier because he doesn't have to knock on her door and come in to talk to her about anything, but it still concerns him. I have to witness this before my eyes on nearly a daily basis, but not just due to seeing her room.
Her own space is one thing, and it's still important because it's not her house, it's ours, but my own living space is mine. I keep a fairly tidy room but I'm definitely not a clean freak. The only problem is that my girlfriend spends a lot of time in here, and that wouldn't be an issue if she didn't bring her whirlwind of refuse with her. I have a small end table on her side of the bed and it's consistently been host to used cans, half full glasses with mold in them, dirty bowls with rotting or dried up food in them, silverware, crumpled napkins, old sunflower seed shells - basically a mini version of what goes on in her room. And on the floor on her side between the bed and the wall it's a similar nightmare; a sporadic layer of clothes, food bags and containers, papers, towels, trash, and a lovely sealed can of Tostitos dip that has been left to develop a wonderfully floral display of various molds and what looks like fungus inside of it. This scenario has also played out in a similar fashion. Rarely she has cleaned up some things when I've borderline begged her to do so. At one point about a year ago the trash heap was almost as tall as the bed, boxspring and all, and the smell was so noticeable that I took action myself, removing literally several trash bags worth of garbage, including old fried chicken, pizza, cookies, and candy as well as displacing bins worth of her buried items and clothing.
And these are just the main sources of litter and debris. The bathroom counter has been a cluttered mess for the majority of time that she's lived here, and most of the time it's not even stuff that she's regularly using if it isn't just bottles and containers ready to be disposed of. Often she will make food for herself and leave the dirty cookware and/or other associated items out indefinitely until either myself or my father take care of it. If she cooks food for both of us, usually I will willingly handle the cleanup, but if myself or my father make ourselves food, we clean up the aftermath. Most of the time she doesn't. Sometimes all of us are guilty of leaving a dirty frying pan on the stove, but it simply goes beyond that. Her leftovers (and she hardly ever finishes a meal, or even half, so there are always leftovers) sit in the fridge for weeks because she simply doesn't go back to them, instead choosing to buy new, usually packaged food or snacks to eat instead. The old food will either get moldy or start to rot and stink up the entire fridge until someone else removes it. If she makes a mess with hair dye in the bathroom and says she'll clean it up later, it likely doesn't get cleaned. If she knocks over the cup of old sunflower seed shells onto my floor behind the bed and says she'll clean it up in a timely manner (or indeed at all), it doesn't get cleaned. If she says she'll clean almost anything within a decent amount of time there's a 95% chance it will wait until often much later (days, weeks) and only a 40% chance it will even be cleaned at all without external, often repetetive, influence. These are rough estimates but you get the idea.
As extreme as this all may seem, would you believe that in approaching these situations in an attempt to rectify or prevent them I would be the one met with an air of indignation? Because that's exactly what happens. When I bring up anything involving her either taking something downstairs to put it in the sink, refrigerator, or garbage can, or involving cleaning up a mess of some kind, she responds, "K," or "Yes..." with a harsh and oppressed tone, sometimes followed with something like, "...I was going to do it," or "You don't need to remind me every 10 seconds." This has regularly resulted in long drawn out arguments about her unnecessarily angry demeanor, her lack of care for our living environment and shared responsibility, and on several occasions it's sent her into a full blown depressive episode where she insists that she would be better off dead to make my life easier. Depression is ultimately what it all comes back to from her expressed point of view, stemming from the death of her grandma and what she considers a constant lack of money and preferred career path. She also says that she gets defensive because when she was younger and living with her parents, they had gone into her room without her and just thrown a lot of her stuff away without her permission, I assume because they wanted the room cleaned and it either never happened or never happened promptly enough. She knew I was on the verge of cleaning up the side of my bed a year ago and despite that I only thew away trash, when she came home from work to find me in the middle of rinsing out and recycling bottles found on my floor and under the bed, she told me in a disturbed, seething voice that she couldn't be here. She made it clear that she didn't know when she might be home or what she might do to herself so I had to go stand out by the car for a good two or three hours while she went through the various stages of indignant fury, despairing tears, and finally listless exhaustion. Something tells me there's a lot more going on than, "I just don't like my things touched because my parents didn't respect my boundaries."
The one saving grace about these tense arguments and episodes is that despite their continual recurrence, they haven't been frequent enough to serve as a death sentence yet for all of the positive elements of our relationship, and despite how horrible it may sound so far, yes, our relationship does have plenty of positives. I can honestly say that I know she's very much in love with me, just as I am very much in love with her; and I don't mean very much dependent on me which is then presented as love. I can sense it in the affection she exhibits to me naturally when she's feeling okay, the similar humor and genuine laughs we both share, the attention she gives me when I require it, the consistency with which she has paid me back what she owes me when she's able to do so, the patience she has with my own various health issues, etc. And as an aside, we're very much attracted to each other, both mentally and physically. We are both intelligent, she is still able to give me butterflies, and I think she's a total bombshell. Our relationship certainly isn't an absolute train wreck, and I wouldn't have stayed with her for 3 years if there weren't enough aspects that I loved about her to counter the things that I don't tolerate well. And that unfortunately brings me to my next point which will be quite a bit shorter than the first one.
From the beginning of our relationship we had a pretty active sex life. Often we would go multiple times in a day and sometimes we would instead have sex once or twice a week with drier months being less common. It just varied. For about the first 9 months that we dated, she used Xulane patches as her form of birth control. Due to insurance issues she had to stop for a month or two, and then for some reason when she tried to continue using it on two separate occasions, she suffered from horrible nausea, vomiting, and overheating which quite apparently necessitated the search for another option. We reluctantly used condoms until she finally had Skyla (an IUD) installed about 6 months later. That went fine for a year until 8 or 9 months ago we experienced a sexual lull that eventually resulted in complete abstinence for the last 7 months. She's said on many occasions that she's wanted to get the IUD removed because 1) it doesn't help to lessen the severity of her menstrual symptoms and 2) she's felt that it may be responsible for her lowered sex drive. I looked into it a bit and all I could find from other women with Skyla was that it caused the exact opposite, i.e. an increase in their overall sex drive due to the lack of hormones compared to other options. I've brought this to her attention and she says that if it's not the IUD then it might just be due to her depression.
Regardless of the cause, the path to take is clear: if she wants it removed, it should be removed, and then we can go from there if the problem persists. I've tried to make it clear that while I care about her health in general, whatever is going on with her total lack of libido needs to be figured out soon because it's had a significantly straining impact on me at the very least, and, I believe, her as well. I'm positive the lack of intimacy can't help but affect both of us. She doesn't want me anywhere near her genitals or her breasts at all times because the thought of sexual arousal is, as she puts it, too uncomfortable and overwhelming to her. What makes this so difficult is that she has what seems like almost zero motivation to fix any of it. She says she feels bad every time I mention how much I miss sex or the fact that the source of my sexual release for the last 7 months has been relegated to my own hand with the help of either porn or her body as she lies next to me. But feeling bad doesn't change anything, only taking action does. When it's become apparent in our discussions on the matter that, yes, I care about sex and mutual intimacy and its place and effect within a relationship, she has responded with, "It just doesn't matter that much to me. It never has."
At this point I'm just at a loss for what to do or even what to think. I feel like I so desperately want our relationship to continue and to blossom and to nourish both of us, but these two issues are wreaking havoc on my psyche. It doesn't seem fair at all to me, and yet at the same time, I catch myself wondering how much of it I should just be accepting or waiting out purely to see through the potential of all the other positives. I spoke about my health issues before, and honestly, finding her when I did was a godsend. We were both in very rough places psychologically and the founding of our relationship turned all of that on a dime. The limitations I continue to deal with she has been right there to accept and manage with me. I'm concerned not only for how much I love her and how much it will hurt if I break it off, but also for how dependent I am on her presence and how unlikely it may be that I would ever find someone else to fit as perfectly as she has, despite all of the rough edges.
So, in conclusion, I'm not asking a question so much as I'm asking for advice - any and all advice. If a question is mandatory, I suppose it would be, "How do I best handle this?" I don't know what the optimal choices are anymore and I feel that ultimately choices of some form will have to be made, because I'm afraid if this continues without change, the relationship as a whole may very well be unsustainable. And considering that possibility breaks my heart. Thank you so much if you've stuck with me until this point. I look forward to any responses I receive.
tl;dr: My girlfriend and I have been together for 3 years. It's been a very good relationship for the most part considering our various health issues. She lives with my father and I who co-own the house and pays zero costs of living as far as the home and utilities are concerned. The room we gave her is often a total dump, complete with stale or rotting food, trash, flies, and stench. Her side of my bed has its own mini dump on the end table and floor. She scarcely cleans up after herself in the kitchen, the bathroom, or nearly anywhere, and whenever I bring up that I'd like something thrown away or taken care of, it results in harsh defensiveness and heated arguments. We also haven't had sex or mutual sexual intimacy of any kind for 7 months. She blames at least the former but perhaps both issues on depression and perhaps the latter issue on her IUD but has done virtually nothing to change the situation.
Submitted March 27, 2017 at 05:38PM by dvnrm11 http://ift.tt/2nn53fr relationships
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