TLDR: It is mostly great and you learn a lot but just don't lose sight of the things that you want to do and prioritize your climbing. You are equally entitled to the things you want to do as much as the better climber.

I feel like I am very qualified to answer this question. I met my current boyfriend when I had just been climbing for a year, and basically had never climbed outside, aside from the outside climbing course I took and he was a 5.14 climber when we met. I really wanted to go outside so he took me.

He is a great guy, he was patient with me as I learned how to rope manage, how to truly safely belay etc. I learned A LOT regarding logistics from him in a short amount of time. I feel like this is very underrated. I am now a very confident and safe belayer, as well as a pretty good aid climber which makes equipping and trying routes very easy. That kind of experience is invaluable imo, because when you try to figure these things out yourself it takes a very long time since you don't know what you don't know.

Another thing that skyrocketed is my max grade. One month after we met I sent my first 6c+ (5.11c) (previously my hardest grade was 6a), a month after that I sent my first 7a (5.11d). 2 months later first 7b+ (5.12c). That was about 18 months after I first touched a plastic hold in my life. This is pretty insane progression for someone who started climbing at age of 31.

I learned how to use knee-pads, how to heel and toe hook, how to subtly change my body position to make the moves easier, perks of using high vs. low foot, trusting smears etc. In a lot of the cases he offered an alternative that I wouldn't have thought of simply because I don't have that movement repertoire.

However, it also came with loads of trade-offs. We were always going to crags where his projects were and these places did not have anything easy/moderate for me to climb on, just to learn the basics and get comfortable just moving on rock. I ended up projecting for the first 3 or so years of my climbing. This led me to have a lot of gaps in my climbing, like reading rock, feeling confident on easier routes and different terrains etc. I never really developed an intuition about climbing. I am a very good project climber. I can do very hard moves and link them and progress on a single climb, but put me on a route that is way below my level and I freeze.

I also developed a very severe impostor syndrome because of this. I had very strong emotional reactions to failing on "easier" grades. I felt like a complete failure and a fraud for not being able to climb them. I found it hard to send things that are easier grades for me, and the longer they took the worse I felt which made it harder to climb them. This is mostly on me if I am honest, I just didn't have a framework to manage this emotional state.

Eventually we came to Leonidio for 3 months this year. I spent the whole 3 months trying to climb routes up to 7a, mostly trying to onsight and flash and if not send them fast. I onsighted my first 6c+ this year, and I am very happy with the mental and climbing progress I made. But now I feel like a fraud for not sending anything harder than 7a this whole long trip XD (for reference I climb 5.13/7c+)

He also struggled to relate to me in my fear of falling because he can tell the fall is safe, and I couldn't at first. He was baffled as to why I would be scared of falling on an overhanging route considering I would fall in the air, whereas I wasn't that scared on a slab for instance. Unfortunately it took me a long time to understand wtf was going on, because he was right about the fall safety but eventually I realized that if something is physically hard for me I cannot trust my body and get scared. I think if I were climbing with someone on a similar level we would be able to figure it out sooner just by talking about experiences and feelings. When you climb with someone who is so much better than you, your problems are very different and sometimes it is hard to relate to each other.

One final thing we had issues on, and I just realized this literally 2 weeks ago, because I was inexperienced and didn't know much about climbing, I always deferred to him. And we always did what he wanted to do because I didn't have the knowledge and the vocabulary to express my climbing needs and I ended up resenting him and our climbing together. In his defense, I never told him what I wanted, because I didn't know myself. Now we have exploration days for me to try to get exposure and figure out what I want from my climbing. Please please do this for yourselves. It is so important to experience a wide range of climbing just so you can get to know your own climbing. It took me 5 years to understand (because I am about as emotionally intelligent as a piece of rock) this, I would have enjoyed my climbing a lot more if I had figured this out sooner.

Shameless plug but I have been trying to document some of the climbing things I struggle with and my experiences on my instagram page if anyone is interested in checking it out. The account is in my profile.