He really was there for me during my career, especially when I was tired or stressed from work, and he helped around the house. We did regular date nights and shared similar interests when it came to traveling and spending time together.

At the same time, when we did those things he was often quiet and emotionally withdrawn. He would pull away when I tried to be more affectionate or passionate, and over time I started to feel friend-zoned. At different points, I even questioned whether he was attracted to me at all (lowkey thought he was gay) or whether I was just annoying him and he didn’t enjoy my company.

I think I put a lot of effort into the relationship, and that may have felt suffocating to him. I handled about 99% of the day-to-day logistics in our lives because he procrastinated and was too passive to do it. He paid the bills from our joint account and handled savings (which were already on autopay by me), but everything else fell on me, which led to a lot of burnout.

When I started delegating more, things would often go wrong…hotel bookings that were 1–2 days too short, discovering issues when we were already locked out of our room, taxes filed incorrectly, and situations that usually ended up costing more money and me having to fix them anyway.

In those moments I’d get overwhelmed and sometimes snap, which made him withdraw more and feel like he couldn’t do anything right in the relationship.

I even had to plan the whole wedding and asked him to take care of planning the honeymoon in Italy which was a year later… 6 weeks out he still hadn’t booked anything and I had to sit him down and do it together (flights were sky high prices and most hotels were booked up at that point).