New to Reddit, and a looking for some honest advice for my situation. I 23 F have been with my 26 M boyfriend for about 4 years now, and overall he is a wonderful person. In saying that I mean he is extremely kind, makes me feel safe in myself and my quirky personality, and has helped me love myself again. I love him, and feel that I would be completely lost without him, but I’ve been reflecting on our relationship recently and have been struggling with a few things. I have always expressed my feelings towards children, and he has known since our beginning that I really aspire to be married and have children one day.
In the course of our relationship he has done some things that have been hard for me to move past. For some context, I believe trust and communication are some of the most important things in a healthy relationship, he hasn’t specifically gone out of his way to break this, but he is the kind of guy that thinks, “if I don’t bring things up, maybe ignorance can be bliss”. In certain ways I can understand where he is coming from, but there have been some situations where I found out the truth via his friends or family and address this, with his reply being I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I think I get frustrated more in the sense that I know he didn’t mean to hurt me, but you should want to tell me the truth so we can completely expect trust from each other always. It’s not that I ever have thought he meant to hurt my feelings, but being deceptive and making certain decisions are the “bigger” issue to me. Some examples: he has lied to me about who he has spent time with, and when addressed tried to say I was just jealous, he has partaken in activities where more illicit drugs have been taken (I work in an environment that doesn’t allow for these and don’t personally approve of them, not speaking about marijuana or anything adjacent as I’ve dabbled in my teen years) and the only reason he admitted to this was because his friend mentioned doing mushrooms/ acid/ molly with him and he was “caught”. Although I don’t think this is a huge deal in experimenting, I again am having a hard time with doing these things and making an attempt to hide it from me.
Now to get to the title, sometime within the last year or so, I noticed that our shared sink (we live together in a condo I co-own with my brother) I noticed a little pool of yellow in the basin of our sink specifically early in the morning as I have gotten up to use the bathroom or to start getting ready for work. The first few times I didn’t think much of it, but as it kept happening it clicked and I realized he must’ve been getting up in the middle of the night and using the sink to pee instead of our fully functional toilet. I admit when I get up in the middle of the night to pee, I’m not usually very awake, and stumble around, but always ensure to use the toilet. So, in his defense I assumed this was an accidental half-sleep kind of thing. I did decide to bring it up obviously, but when addressed he made a comment of, “I’m sorry I was asleep and didn’t think you would know”. This was extremely frustrating for me because to me this admitted some sort of awareness, and he was only apologizing because he got caught. I told him if he was NOT allowed to urinate in our sink and if I caught him doing it again he would need to spend some time out of my home learning the responsibilities and hygiene of being an adult. I won’t go into full detailing all the issues we’ve faced regarding cleanliness, awareness and overall responsibilities, but I do want to mention I have come home from working 10+ hour shifts to lay down on tacks, scissors, pocket knives in my own bed because he forgot to put them away. About 2 years ago my car was stolen as he accidentally left my spare set of keys on his dash in his car (thankfully we got it back thanks to the local police, but it had almost been totaled and littered with needles, blood and stolen items). I know this wasn’t something he did on purpose but I constantly feel that I need to follow him around like a parental figure. Yesterday I came home to more piss in the bottom of our sink and almost lost it. Although I know there are a lot of things couples have work around when living together, I feel like I might be at my breaking point. I know I’m not a perfect partner and absolutely have things I need to work on, I genuinely worry about our future together. A general lack of any kind of responsibility in a home seems unfair when we both work full time jobs, and I slightly dread what our relationship would look like if we got married or brought children into the dynamic. I have unfortunately been in my fair share of bad relationships where cheating and abuse played a role, so I feel blessed to have a partner that doesn’t even remotely come close to that, but I also worry I may be putting up with unacceptable behavior as well.
I’m looking for genuine advice, or questions as I know I haven’t gone into detail about many things. I don’t go to therapy, and don’t have many people around me I feel that I can talk to about this. Please let me know what you guys think. Thank you!