‘Why Does My Boyfriend Always Choose His Friends Over Me?’
Dear Emily,
My boyfriend loves when I spend time with my friends. He always encourages me to see them as often as I please. Which I appreciate — I love spending time with my friends, too. The issue is that he doesn’t seem to care about spending quality time with me.
In the two years we have been together, I can count on one hand the amount of dates he has planned or initiated. We have never been on a trip together just the two of us. We rarely do activities together. We live together but have very different schedules, and he considers spending time together to be the brief moments we have sitting on the couch or sleeping in the same bed. He shows love in other ways — like cooking dinner, cleaning our apartment, taking care of our dog, leaving me little gifts in fun places around the apartment — but more in small whimsical ways than the bigger ways I need.
We briefly went to couples therapy before he asked to stop going because the therapist “always took my side.” The therapist suggested that we sit down every Sunday night and choose two nights to spend together that coming week. Following that session, I asked him to sit down and make our plans. He pushed back a bit and said he doesn’t like planning like that and is more spontaneous, and what if a friend wants to see him one of the nights we have planned? After a while, I gave up trying to make plans with him.
I just went away on a vacation with friends. On the night I returned, I was so excited to see him and had the taxi drop me off at the park he was at with our dog and two of his friends. We all hung out for a few hours and watched the sun set over the river — a beautiful night. Eventually, I turned to him and told him I was ready to go home and asked if he could help me carry my bag and have dinner with me to debrief. He told me he was planning on going to get drinks with his friends who were with us. I said that I had just gotten home from being away. He looked over to his friends, and one said, “Please, can we just steal him for an hour or two? It won’t be all night.” I then had to respond, humiliatingly, by saying I would really love to spend time with my partner alone. Instead of defending me, my boyfriend pushed back and said he would spend time with me after drinks with them. I started crying because I just felt so ashamed to be begging my partner over and over again to have missed me and so badly wishing that he would want to prioritize me and make me feel special.
I am now at the point of doubting myself and wondering if the problem is me. Am I making too big a deal out of this?
Sincerely,
Am I Being a Relationship Karen?
Dear Relationship Karen,
I am going to go ahead and assume that when you say “shows me he loves me in other ways” — in addition to cleaning the apartment, etc. — it means you are having absolutely frontal-cortex-destroying sex with this guy, because otherwise I have no idea why you are staying in this relationship. Seriously. Read your own letter!
Two years into a relationship, you two went to couples therapy, then quit because he said the therapist “always took your side,” and he wouldn’t go along with the blatantly reasonable goal of planning out your weeks in advance to include time spent with just the two of you. His justification for this was that he wanted to be spontaneous and keep his options open in case the opportunity to hang out with one of his friends came up. Sorry, what? So then you stopped trying to initiate the planning conversations because they made you feel insane. You are not insane. What’s insane is that an adult person, in 2024, can’t make plans with friends unless they’re day of. I am guessing, based on the fact that you have a healthy friend group that you love spending time with, that you — like me, like most people with social and professional calendars — make plans to hang out with your friends in advance. Like, way in advance. As I write this, I am making plans to have lunch with a good friend three Fridays from now, because that’s the only time that fits in both our schedules. That’s how making plans with friends works. As you know! I am trying to find a word other than the hopelessly cliché gaslighting to describe what he’s doing to you here, but deliberately making you feel like you’re the one who’s going off the deep end when, in fact, it’s his behavior that’s absurd … well, there is just no other way to describe it. This man has tricked you into thinking you’re nuts for wanting to go on a date, and you live with him. I am in awe of (what I can only assume is) the power of his dick.
His behavior is weird enough to make you wonder if something deeper is going on here. I would be tempted to chalk up his inability to plan in advance to something neurological, like extreme ADHD, except that his last-minute plan-making never includes making any spontaneous plans with you. It’s enough to make you wonder if he’s in love with one of his friends (or in love with all of them?). He might not even consciously realize what’s going on; it seems as though there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance happening for him. Part of him is devoted to being your loving, dinner-making boyfriend. And then there’s this other part of him that is dying to get away from you most nights of the week. He’s either deliberately deceiving you or just deeply, hopelessly confused. And being around someone who’s confused is, as you’ve learned, very confusing.
It’s now your responsibility to wean yourself off whatever he’s giving you that’s destroying your ability to use your God-given mind. He has been consistently showing you — and telling you — that he doesn’t want to spend time together. It’s time to kick him out of your apartment and your life. His behavior has been unforgivable, culminating with that night when you returned from vacation. He has you in such a daze that you can no longer tell which of you is the wronged party: you, for wanting him to want to spend time with you, or him, for refusing to spend time with you no matter how clear you make it that this is what you want. You are not a “relationship Karen”; you’re in a relationship with someone who enjoys the convenience of living with you but not any of the other parts of being in a relationship, like actually doing things together and prioritizing those things over the possibility of hanging out with other people. Run away before the brain damage he’s inflicted on you becomes permanent!
Have a question for Emily? Email askemily@nymag.com (and read our submission terms here).