I've been with my BF for 6+ years, we've lived together for 4. I grew up with an emotionally abusive father who passed recently, and had previous abusive relationships. As such, I am extremely tolerant, understanding, collaborative, because this is how I had to be to survive.
Overall my relationship with my BF is positive – he's generally kind, takes great care of our dog, has a great job, is a put together person, is funny, and is caring, but I feel like oftentimes, he lacks a really important quality – the quality to problem solve/relax a bit/not take everything so seriously/needing to be perfect.
For example, I love to host dinners… I know it stresses him out, so I buy all the ingredients, do the cooking, decorate to take it off his plate etc, but he always finds MORE to do — be it cleaning so you could lick off of our floor, buy new napkins, whatever standard he's built up in his head — and it destroys the fun. He gets so stressed out, makes snide comments/digs at me and it stresses me out ("How could we have people over with paper napkins? We're adults! that's embarrassing.), with this perfectionism. It sucks the joy out and I care more about spending time with people than it all being absolutely perfect.
Another example was that he wanted to smoke brisket for the first time at my parent's house, and had my mom grab one from Costco. He then proceeded to research on youtube on how to do it, watched so many videos, and then started dragging me into it — asking me to watch with him, have 100s of conversations with chatgpt etc and then got so overwhelmed he didn't want to do it anymore. By that point, I get irritated — I am such an easy going, let's figure it out kind of person — and was excited to try now that I'd been roped in, so I ended up leading the charge to actually get the smoker going. Once the meat was on, he was complaining about how it was the "entire day" (mind you it was raining all day), and it was "too much work," qualities I just find really unattractive, plain and simple.
My job is all about managing teams, dealing with problems, and extremely stressful situations. I am a firm believer that good enough is good enough and there's no need to stress about everything, and learning something new can be terrifying, but you learn by doing. No biggie. He's the opposite — everything needs to be perfect, including dinners at home that I cook, the kitchen must be cleaned to perfection after (including comments about the mess, aka can you "just microwave dinner tonight so I don't have to clean?"), and it can't just be good enough. It makes me stressed out just thinking about cooking us dinner and I've realized that to avoid the stress I often cook when he's away or at work and re-heat to avoid the added stress.
I'm at the point where I'm wondering if the way I approach life is just too different — and his OCD is just too much. It's hard for me to feel comfortable in our place, because, well, it all has to be up to his standards. It's also hard for me to plan anything at our place or elsewhere, because there are usually criticisms. I feel like a horrible person for contemplating leaving, but I am also worried about living like this for the rest of my life. I've pointed all of this out to him multiple times – but he cites that his way is "better" and that he'll "work on it." It's been a long time, and I can say — it hasn't changed, I've just had to adapt so I am closer to his standards, like I am so good at doing.
TLDR; my boyfriend's OCD and attitude is really making it difficult for me to envision a future.