I'm [23f] a student teacher; my fiancé [24m] is convinced I'm cheating with my master teacher. This has made him go insane.

Here are my suggestions. I think some of them apply to everybody:

  1. You need to be happy as an individual before you can be happy as a couple. This means finishing your masters so that you can pursue the career that you want. Will you make anybody happy by giving up your dreams? No. Not you, not him. The same applies to him: he is clearly not a happy and content person. I am not sure where the anger comes from, but he needs to fix it for himself.

  2. You need to think long term. A good marriage lasts forever. It should last longer than your dress, than your wedding cake, longer than your momentary fears of dumping him, and longer than the sense of euphoria you get from the ceremony. You should be able to pursue happiness together throughout that time.

  3. Talk it out. A good couple works hard on proper communication. If you fear violence or receive continuous refusals from talking about your needs, you are, at best, in trouble. At worst, you are with somebody who needs to space from the relationship to engage in deep self-reflection, maybe with therapy.

About talking, though, I have a rule. Every sit-down conversation with anybody should have the following elements:

A conversation must be frank and open, in the spirit of kindness, and with the goal of progress.

What do I mean by frank and open? It's best if you allow your personal goals to rest gently on the table when you have a talk like this. "I want to feel happy and pursue my dreams" should be your talking point when you discuss your masters program, and "I want you to share my dreams with me." If he cannot respect these things, then your conversation has given you immense clarity.

As for frankness, he should be made to realize that you want him to help you attain these goals, and that his jealousy is hindering this, with a focus, as always, about how it relates to your feelings: "I need to feel supported, and your demands are making me feel like I have to choose between my dreams and your support. Feeling this way in the long term is a deal breaker for me." Even if he is not willing to help you feel supported, the conversation has enlightened you to the realities of your compatibility.

What do I mean by a spirit of kindness? I mean that your fiancé has a mental thing going on right now. He is unconfident, perhaps controlling, and fear-driven. This is cyclical in that he is making you defensive and clearly making you angry, and this makes him less confident. Rinse and repeat. Coming at this from his perspective and realizing that he has insecurities and issues that we all feel - getting on his side - is super important. It's easy to deal with this: "I see insecurities and trust issues in you that I have felt before. They're tough to get over, and they can be really painful. I want you to feel confident in our relationship." Stuff like that.

And your goal should be progress. If that means saying "I needed you to understand this so that when I say I need space, it is so that we can both move forward with our lives separately," that's fine. If it means saying "Because I love you, I want to give us some time to work on this together," that's fine, too.

Even when I fire people, I keep that rule in mind, because the purpose of a conversation is not to fight, but to clear up issues, even if that means clarifying something in a way that neither of you emotionally want.

Oh, and if you don't break up because your parents bought you a wedding dress, you're disgracing the purpose of that gift, which is to support a ceremony that should lead to a lifetime of happiness. If they knew this gift caused you to compromise your happiness...they would feel terrible.


Holy shit that post got huge. Whatever, I'm going to post it anyway.

/r/relationships Thread