We had already chosen the rug together. Then, just as I was about to order it, my boyfriend wanted to call his mother to check whether the material would hold up. It was a reasonable question about a rug. What bothered me was that our decision apparently wasn't finished until she'd had a look.
We signed our lease six months ago. I'm 28, he's 31, and there is plenty I love about him. He's kind, ambitious, and good to me. Living together is showing me how often he needs his mom to confirm that he's doing ordinary things correctly.
At first, the questions were small: which laundry detergent to buy, that sort of thing. I could understand asking someone who'd bought more detergent than either of us. But the calls haven't stayed occasional. They come several times a day, woven into the things we're trying to do as a couple. Even meal prep can involve a call to ask how long to boil pasta.
I don't think his mother is scheming to run our apartment. She's actually nice, and she isn't the one inserting herself into every decision. He brings her in. That makes the frustration harder to place, because there isn't a meddling mother I can point to and blame. The person I need something different from is the man I chose to live with.
And what I need isn't expertise about floor coverings. I want to feel that the two of us can choose something, live with it, and figure out whether we got it right. A rug doesn't have to be a demonstration of our independence. But when the same pause happens over and over, I start wondering how much confidence he has in us without someone else checking our work.
The part I'm least comfortable admitting is that it's affecting how much I want him. I can appreciate his kindness and still feel my attraction fading when he can't choose a bath mat without consulting his mother. It isn't that a man has to know everything to be attractive. I don't know everything either. I miss the feeling of having a partner beside me who can make an ordinary call with me, even if we end up buying the wrong thing.
I tried asking him to rely more on the two of us as a unit. He heard that as me trying to cut him off from his family. That wasn't what I meant, but now the conversation has become about his relationship with his mom instead of the one we're building in this apartment. I don't want fewer people in his life. I want our shared choices to feel like they belong to us.
I still see the man who's kind to me. I don't want to turn his closeness with his mother into something ugly, or pretend that the good parts of our relationship have disappeared. But I haven't found a way to explain how lonely it can feel to make a decision together and then discover we're still waiting for somebody else's approval. He's defending a family bond I wasn't asking him to give up, and I'm still trying to talk about the life we signed a lease to share.
