I (might) be having that experience now, but I'm not sure. I'd actually love some well-informed advice.
First, I'm 30 and she's 23. We are both really earnest people, we have goofy senses of humor and we write raps or songs and sing them together. We do monk chanting, we make food together, we're both liberal-minded and egalitarian people. The sex is great, though it could definitely be said that I struggle with monogamy (read this .
Some of our problems are rooted in that--I just have trouble sometimes, imagining that I could go the rest of my life with only one sexual partner. I've heard a lot of peoples' opinions on this, from, 'You're a guy and you only care about getting laid' to 'Open relationships are a real thing, and you should take your needs more seriously'. My girlfriend, by all indications, is simply the monogamous type. She will insist that, not only does she not want to fool around (I wouldn't mind if she did, I'm not the jealous type, it'd only make me jealous if she liked someone more than me)--but she will insist that she is actually not even attracted to other people (I'm her first boyfriend, we've dated for 2 years).
As an older guy with a lot more experience (I've had 4 relationships, and about 20 sexual partners) I would say she's the closest I've had to a relationship with my best friend. I'd hate to lose it, we just have lots of fun together and she's great.
The downside for me is this, and it will sound a bit like a stereotypical scenario from a sitcom or something: I think she's going to turn into her mother. I've met her family, and it's an astonishingly odd dynamic over there. It's almost like an inverted 50's home where the mom is the chauvinistic figure. She's a nice lady who...treats her husband like an annoyance when he tries to enter conversations. He has high blood pressure; I'm sure partly because they fight so much, and he works 2 jobs with little rest--she doesn't work anymore, even thought her kids are all over 16. She devalues any undesirable things he does or thoughts he has, by blaming his blood-pressure and criticizing him for not taking his medication. Imagine if anytime you disagreed with someone, they blamed a condition you have and removed any agency of yours. Then imagine they were constantly trying to control your meals and your habits, and get you to take meds. From one perspective, this is very caring, but from another perspective (have I mentioned I'm a Psychologist?) this is domineering behavior. Her husband feels like he doesn't control his own life, and if he made healthier options he would feel like it was appeasing the source of his maltreatment, so the result is that he is left drifting and confused. He can't stop supporting his kids as they go to college, but he can't be happy at home because everything he does is wrong or needs improvement, in her eyes. Her 2 sons, who also live at home (one is 16 the other is 25) are also great indicators of this. Her sons are her 'babies', they don't make their own meals and from her point of view, they need her. She wants badly to be needed, she is simply a controlling person.
This brings me back to a woman I really love. She's wonderful, and if you met them both you might imagine that she's what her mom was like before her mom became angry and disappointed with her life. My girlfriend also wants badly to be needed. A part of her finds it cute that her brothers are geeky boys with tons of potential, who need their mommy constantly and can't do anything without her approval. She once described her dad as kind of dumb, or at least the dumber member of the family. He's not a PHd, but this guy can take apart and rebuild anything from a desktop computer to a mustang to an air conditioning unit, what I see when I look at him is a guy whose confidence is cowed by his family thinking he's dim-witted and under a mind-spell caused by high blood-pressure. What depresses me is that, when I look at my gf and her mother, what I see are....sexist people. Just sexist people, who can openly be sexist, because sexism against men is not treated very seriously. The family is sort of the embodiment of those 'stupid father' commercials.
Anyway...didn't realize how much I apparently needed to vent.
TL;DR worried my girlfriend might become her mother