At first, being told I looked like a model was flattering. My girlfriend would say she didn’t know how she’d managed to get me, and I took it as a compliment. After a while, I started hearing the way she was talking about herself.
I’m 18, she’s 20, and we’ve been together for three years. I love her a lot. When she puts herself down, I tell her she’s beautiful and that I love her. I’ve also told her I don’t like hearing her speak about herself that way. She tends to shrug it off.
The praise spills into conversations with her friends. If one of them mentions something nice her boyfriend did, my girlfriend starts listing things I’ve done for her. A friend’s story about getting flowers becomes a story about how I learned to make flowers out of pipe cleaners so I could give her something handmade.
I’m happy those flowers meant something to her. But I don’t like hearing them brought up as though her friend’s flowers need to be beaten. Someone else is sharing a nice moment, and suddenly I’m being entered into a competition I never agreed to join.
When I’ve raised this, she’s asked why I’m complaining. She laughs and says I’m just a good boyfriend, and that what she says reflects how well I treat her. I understand that she means it as praise. It still makes me uncomfortable.
Then she described me as more “well managed” and “well trained” than men from where she’s from. She’s American; I’m originally from somewhere else. She said someone like me was rare.
I asked her to stop making those comparisons. She said they were true. Then she went back to saying she didn’t know why I would ever be with her.
We argued, and I told her I needed some space and time to myself. Now I’m wondering whether asking for distance made her feel worse about something she already seems insecure about.
But I had asked her to stop, and the conversation kept returning to the same place: I was supposedly better than other men, and she was somehow less than me.
I love her. I also meant it when I said I needed space. I’m left wondering whether that was an unfair response to her insecurity, or whether she can understand why all this praise has become so hard to hear.
