My boyfriend and I have been together for about 3 years and I have felt this way for…a while…probably the bulk of our relationship if I’m being honest. This is both of our first serious relationship and we recently moved in together, I moved up to where he was from. I feel like in our relationship I have had to “initiate” all of our big moments-saying I love you first, deciding to move in together, any “issues” we need to communicate about and work through. He says he has trouble communicating his feelings and opening up and I let him know this makes me feel like he’s hiding stuff from me and that I’m being kept at an arms length. He keeps saying he’ll work on it and I don’t see any real effort to do this. I do love him and we have a lot of good times and fun together-enjoy a lot of the same things but also respect each other’s need for alone time or time away. I just feel like sometimes our relationship isn’t as “deep” as I assumed a relationship at this stage of commitment would be. It feels like he is content with where we are at and I assume he doesn’t know I’m feeling this way. I am more of an anxious attachment style and I feel like he is maybe more avoidant/fearful-avoidant. I’d like for us to sit down and maybe really talk about this but I am so tired of being the one that brings stuff up to discuss. I feel like when he doesn’t bring stuff up that he doesn’t care or he doesn’t want to “hurt my feelings” or upset me (these are his words when I’ve asked him why he doesn’t bring things up when I’m obviously feeling upset or hurt) and he knows this is how I feel. I just feel like eventually I’m going to want to leave him because I can’t keep up with this cycle of doing the emotional labor for our relationship but I have a hard time with this thought too because of everything we have experienced in our relationship and how much I do love and care for him. I’m feeling stuck and sometimes lonely though and I know this is not good for me long term. I guess I am just curious as to if this can be a “typical” feeling in a relationship and how you either work through it or embrace it and leave.
TLDR; feeling like I want to eventually leave my boyfriend because I feel like the emotional work in our relationship is left up to me