Hi everyone,

I’ve been in a relationship with my partner for 5 years. Over the 5 years we’ve gone through rocky patches of feeling disconnected but have been able to work through them. However over the past year I’ve felt like I’m falling out of love with her and now the relationship feels like a struggle.

Some of the contributing factors are: - A lack of proactive communication from her. I feel that I do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to communication. Whenever it comes to addressing something in the relationship, I feel it’s me raising it. We have monthly relationship check-ins to talk about how we’re doing and she always wants to get through them as quickly as possible, whereas I want to give things space. We’re polyamorous and I often find out things about her via her other partner (who she’s been seeing for one year), rather than her communicating directly to me.

• Lack of sexual intimacy. She’s a trans woman and has a lot of dysphoria around her genitals. She recently has surgery and hopefully once she’s healed we can reconnect sexually, but it’s been a whole year of minimal sexual contact which I’ve found challenging.

• Feeling shunned in social settings. She acts quite differently to me in groups compared to when we’re alone. When we’re in a group I feel she often addresses everyone except me. Her body language is usually facing away from me. On one occasion, she and I and some friends were sat on a sofa and she turned towards them to talk to them and her back pushed right up against me and pushed me backwards. It took her a moment to realise what had happened. I felt kind of humiliated by it tbh.

• Polyamory / openness incompatibility. For most of our relationship, i’ve wanted more openness than she’s been comfortable with. And I’ve accepted that. We’ve been sexually open for most of our relationship but romantically closed. There have been a couple of people I wanted to date but she always said no to it so I didn’t explore those connections. Then around a year ago she developed romantic feelings for someone and I said i was ok with her exploring them so they started dating. A few months later i developed romantic feelings for this other person’s partner and we also started dating. 6 months ago i also developed romantic feelings for someone else and my partner said i couldn’t date them as she was feeling too insecure. This was quite upsetting and made me feel that she only let me date that other person because she was already dating their partner. She said she’s not able to discuss it properly until after surgery so i feel like i’ve had to put these romantic feelings on ice until then.

• Our intimacy. Our intimacy feels very forced from my end. I don’t feel much excitement or joy with her. I know that it’s normal for these kinds of feelings to fade over time and for relationships to require more work. But lately it’s felt like so much work for not a lot of joy.

I’ve discussed all these points (except the last one) with her so she’s aware of them but they’re still ongoing issues.

My therapist recently asked me what I love about my partner, and I struggled to answer in any meaningful way. I’m reluctant to acknowledge that the relationship might be over but the signs seem to point that way.

I’ve suggested couples counselling a few times. She was initially reluctant and thought that would mean i would break up with her, she’s since said she’d be open to it but doesn’t seem to have much drive for it. I think given that it’s a 5 year relationship, it would be worth seeing if couples counselling would help. But part of me is wondering if would just be more work with no benefit… I’m feeling very tired from this relationship so the idea of continuing to work on it is kind of daunting.

I mostly just needed to vent but any thoughts or reflections people have would be appreciated.