Since the GTBYH thread is long since dead I'll ask here.
My GF and I have been together for 1.75 years now. It's been unfortunate after a fashion because there's been a LOT of change/chaos in our lives (mostly good change, but it's still disruptive). I'm starting to come to the realization that maybe this just won't work out. We'd known each other for maybe a year and a half before we started dating (I should say 'aware of', we didn't really hang out or anything). About 1 month after we started dating I accepted a position across the country. It was within the same company so there was still 3 months of prep and really 5-6 months total of pretty frequent travel back and forth. We ended up not wanting to just call it off so I (admittedly reluctantly) asked her if she wanted to move out here after a few months of the LTR thing. After that got settled, we had a few months peace then we went to a few weddings, brought her family dog back, it died a couple of months later, took a vaca to Vegas and I bought a house so now we're moving again. So good things besides the dog, but still chaotic. Of course the marriage thing has come up a few times, she knows I'm dead set against it and she's kept trying to change my opinion on it.
The problem is I'm eternally hopeful as a person but I'm a bitter realist with how I deal with situations day-to-day - so I let myself get frustrated while maintaining hope that things will get better. A few examples of what's started to turn me sour:
1) One night when I had a whole bunch of friends over back east we ended up playing a board game (I think Settlers of Cataan maybe) and she just basically said 'not interested' and went to bed. I was upset but I got over it, everyone has bad days whatever.
2) I took her to try to learn skiing twice. First time she refused to take a beginners lesson and just read a book in the lodge. Second time she relented, but basically got fantastically upset about falling over too much within 30 minutes and got frustrated and that was the end of that.
3) In Vegas, I wanted to walk back up to the strip from Ceasars and I was just kind of bushwacking along a side entrance for Limos to hop back out to the main road and she flat out turned around and walked away and left me because she felt 'uncomfortable' there was no sidewalk form I dunno 100 feet? There was no traffic on it and it went (visibly) right to the strip. So I had to double back and we had to go through the ENTIRE fucking mall again.
I feel like she just has this trouble/challenge/adversity = SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING mentality. I'm just tired of it. Some days it takes her 1.5-2 hours to get ready to go out - we're talking Walmart or groceries, not gala event. I've started to get pissy about it and she just shuts down even more. I don't know how else to go over it - go faster, do better, I don't know what the real issue is but fuck, I have to do things from time to time. I'm trying to be reasonable but lately it's just being more and more irritating. I know I'm impatient and very quick to judge people against higher standards than perhaps I should, but at some point I'm trying to figure out what the end-game is here. I've tried talking with her but it always ends up being a variant of "I know I need to do better, I'm going to work on that" with zero change. I do have to balance it out with the frequent life changes we've had to endure, though, and any time I start thinking about whether this is going to work out in the long term, if it's just more time/money/aggravation then it's worth, I feel guilty. I know she's the one who decided to move out here and this and that, and I do love a good deal about her, but I feel like I'm not asking for perfection when I want someone who can get ready to go in under 2 hours, tries new things from time to time (with the proper support) and actually trusts me. Not to toot my own horn, but I know she'd be devastated if I broke up with her (just more and more disruption in her life) and she still wants a future together and she's getting old enough where she can't just troll the bars for 15 years hoping to run into the right guy so this is adding even more to the guilt aspect of really analyzing the relationship or my feelings, so I keep delaying and using the excuses of life events for anything I find wrong.
Am I being too hard or unreasonable here? Is it just compatibility issues? Relationship challenges that can be overcome? Unbridgeable ravine? Part of the issue is this is the longest relationship I've been in at this point, so I don't know if the other women I dated were just try-hards at the beginning and this shit is women in a nutshell and I have unreasonable standards OR if it is a personality/personal issue.
