I moved back to the States late last year to start graduate school after six years living and working abroad. It was a tough adjustment for lots of reasons, but primarily because I had been living in a critically unsustainable way. I was never the best at maintaining relationships, and the transience of living out of a suitcase meant that moving on was never much of a challenge—instead, it was an easily accessible coping mechanism.

Around New Years, I met a wonderful person on Tinder, and the first few months of our relationship passed in a manic flurry: we settled into what felt like a natural and healthy intimacy, she gets on famously with my roommate, we click in all the important domestic ways and we even started talking in rose-tinted tones about building some kind of a future together. My greatest apprehension was that we live in different universes: I work in the arts, and she studied biology but has spent the majority of her time working in health comms.

This is where it gets sticky. Part of her job, of course, is doomscrolling the news, and the combination of that with unreasonable pressure from her supervisors and clients means that practically every single day sees her chained to her computer, drained of energy, even forgetting to eat. The last straw was the death of a close relative, made worse by the doctors’ fumbling end-of-life care in a way that made her passing really painful to watch.

Since then, she’s been extremely detached. She talks a lot about “dissociating,” but doesn’t really have the words to explain what that means or what kind of support she needs. It’s ripping my heart out to see someone I love in pain and being powerless to help, but it’s arguably more painful to feel mostly alone in this relationship. I go out of my way to make plans, choices, all kinds of overtures (which are almost always welcomed and echoed—she can’t order off a menu to save her life, by her own admission), but the efforts are rarely reciprocated. The gulf between our interests and professions is only getting deeper as she recedes into herself, and I feel like I have nobody to talk to—and that is what I need the most in a partner. I’ve expressed this several times as we’ve started to feel tension mounting, and every time she apologizes, but I don’t feel like her behavior is changing much, if at all.

We’re both in therapy, we’re both on medication and we both value mental health, but I’m at an impasse of what to do. I want to support her and I want to nourish our relationship back to health, but I feel like I’m the only one putting the effort in. I need some advice on how to get through to her and some insight on whether or not I’m totally off base here.