Fully Exhausted My Romantic Partner

[WRM]

Fully Exhausting My Partner

As a contextual foundation, I uprooted my entire life to move to a different country and things have not worked out well especially after moving from 6+ years of long distance into living in the same home together.

My immigration status is quite muddy and things are financially downwards. I have been placed in charge of household chores which I fulfill on the daily basis but I sometimes make mistakes like leaving a door unlocked or forgetting to wash the towels. The issue is that everytime I make a mistake, my partner would reinforce that their resentment for me is increasing as a result of our relationship situation being affected by things beyond our control. I live in a constant state of worry as my partner's mood can change depending on how well I have conducted myself on the basis of utility.

An example would be, them complaining about having to tell me what needs to be done and their frustrations with my lack of sense and intuition. I will be get called things like useless, parasitic, brain dead and the other slurs that define someone who is disabled. In public, I would get put down in front of friends or get snapped at for standing in their way in a narrow store or not staying still so they can store things in my backpack. Their friends have observed these behaviors and detected there is something wrong, one of them even confronted them about it. Visitors that enter the home will sense something is off and would crack jokes about them abusing me (I am uncertain if this is abuse or simply frustration).

I have brought up my concerns and depression as a result of being put down so much but their response is that they are only this way because I have been an irresponsible person, or someone who has been romantically terrible. I do not know the ins and outs of romanticism or how to date properly and I am inept at emotional support. However, I cannot help but feel as if their treatment towards me is incredibly unfair especially if they have begun showing resentment towards autism or would make off-puting remarks about my condition.

In terms of other situations like hobbies, romance and intimacy, I feel as if I would be consistently tested for my level of enthusiasm, my "performance" and my conduct in common shared interests like TTRPGs. I will get made to make choices in which there is a right or a wrong answer even though they display such choices as equal in measure. There are times where I have picked the wrong choice and it gets tallied and brought up in arguments against me. Upon researching the subject matter, one could describe these tests as Kafka-esque in nature.

In aspects of interest, if I show too much excitement or interests for something or ask for something, they spitefully refuse to acknowledge it in meaningful ways. The more I ask or talk about my interests, the more they disengage or seeminly lose tolerance towards. As a result, I have learnt to essentially keep my interests and obsessions to myself but found peace in sharing them with their friends instead.

It is also contextually important that I am a transitioning MtF individual while my partner is "non-binary." I use to force myself to take on more masculine roles in aspects of our life to fulfill their intimate needs but despite the discomfort I put myself through and still would willingly do so to give them what they desire, it always falls short or lacking. As a result, our sex life has also diminished to a state of near zero.

I am unsure how to move on from this as I am stuck in another country and they are financially supporting me despite the way I am being treated. I have come to this forum because they tend to read all my social media messages and if I try to talk to their friends about them, they would intervene with the need to share their side or the story to explain why they have treated me like this as if theyre doing damage control and it hurts to know I would put their friends through that kind of stress and confrontation.

 

[Outdated]

I am unsure how to move on from this as I am stuck in another country and they are financially supporting me despite the way I am being treated.

That sentence holds the answers you need.

You need to be able to move on and find people that you fit in better with, but far more importantly than that you need to learn how to be independent and self supporting. Get a job, earn money, rent your own place to live in. This is incredibly important not just for how other people perceive you but also for how you perceive yourself.

 

[Cloudy Stuart]

I felt trapped in a situation once where I felt powerless. I phoned help-lines. In the U.K. there are organisations such as The Samaritans, who are not just there for life or death critical emergencies but can also give people advice who feel trapped or powerless. In my area (and possibly there are equivalents in other parts of the world) there is a mental health emergency line. I phoned these because I felt trapped and the situation was making me quite paranoid. These help-lines directed me to help and advice and to people who could help me plan a way out of the disturbing situation.

One thing to say is that paranoia, which is what I had during that period, is unusual because it was causing others to change how they behaved towards me. People lost patience with my paranoia. To give some background, in my case I moved into a quiet leafy area where there had never been any autistic people and there was very little understanding of what autism was. A kind of Hitchcock suspicion arose amongst the neighbours, who would run inside when I passed by. No matter how I tried to appear casual and pleasant their suspicions grew. I of course added to the difficulty by becoming paranoid, which created more suspicion. I survived that house and that neighbourhood by turning my lounge into an art gallery and invited drawing groups to set up easels and meet once a month (I provided free tea and coffee. ) Art in that narrow suspicious neighbourhood helped to change the narrative: "He has not come here to murder us in our beds, he is just an artist.' I stayed there quite a long time in the end because new people moved in who understood that people don't have to be socially identical.

In your situation I would say you should get as many free phone advisors and face-to-face advisors as you can. In fact aim to break the national record. You should also find ways to switch off from those around you by buying newspapers. A newspaper, helped me because a newspaper is a symbol of ordinary life and day-to-day routine. Even carrying a newspaper seemed to make me less visible, less targeted, more a part of a normal day.

'Outdated' is right when he says you can improve your prospects by finding a job or else finding voluntary roles in the community. That will definitely help you. In the short term the phone help-lines might help you as they helped me. The phone advisors are people who have encountered trapped people many times before and they have proven methods of steering people towards a better all round situation.

Even though I admit that my autism fascination is photography I must explain that becoming a photographer changes how people relate to you. Once they spot a photograph you have taken that they like then their attitude changes. They suddenly see a side of you that they understand. Pinning up your photographs in your home changes that narrative as I said before. Photography is a great liberator.