A
female
age
36-40,
anonymous
writes:My boyfriend of 4 years seems to be going through some sort of crisis, and I have no idea how to help him or even if that's possible.He keeps saying he hates his life. He hates the fact a lot of his family have moved away to different countries. He hates the weather. He hates his job. He hates the street he lives in. He hates the people in our home town. There are so many things.I've tried to help and have given him some suggestions on how he can change things (like go back to uni, get a new job, find a different flat to rent etc), but he shoots them all down. He keeps saying that he wants to go on vacation, but we only got back from a trip to Spain 3 weeks ago! He then said he just wants to leave this country and live somewhere sunny cause it's so boring and cold and rubbish in Scotland.This is really starting to drain me, and it's also a bit hurtful that he thinks it's so terrible here when me and our life together are here. He still has quite an active social life and goes out drinking quite a lot with his friends, so it's not depression to the stage that he doesn't get out of bed or anything, but could it be a milder variety?He says his life is just no fun because all anyone does is work and nothing exciting happens. Which is true day to day I guess, but we have a few weekends away planned in the next couple of months and he's going to a couple of music festivals in the summer too so there is a lot to look forward to. I'm starting to think that it's his expectations that are the problem. I mean things can't always be amazingly exciting can they? Oh and he's 26 at the moment.Any advice will be appreciated.
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male
reader, Mark1978 +, writes (18 May 2014):
 Your quite right OP life can't all be amazingly exciting. Life is hard and i'm guessing he is struggling to reconcile the life he once thought he would be living with the actual reality of what his life currently is.
One of the problems might well be his age. If he had high expectations for his future when he was younger and now find himself not achieving what he hoped then that could be the problem. At around 26 a lot of us find our selves caught somewhere between our idealistic, naïve ambitions of our youth and the cold, hard reality of adult life.
When we are young we think the world is there for the taking. We plan amazing things, we dream of incredible lives and think we can achieve any goal we set ourselves. As we get a bit older however we usually get a big reality check. Like so many people, Me and my friends chuckle at our naivety when we look back to the dreams, plans and ambitions we had in our late teens/early twenties. We realize now, in our thirties, that back then we had the optimism of youth. We planned to have exciting, amazing, successful futures. Its not that we didn't fulfil our potential or failed in some way, far from it, but rather that the goal posts moved. The game had changed.
Its a bit like finding out Father Christmas is actually your parents. Well, my dad was not literally Santa, but most of us can still remember that feeling. It hurts, we feel cheated, we feel the world has deceived us. We suddenly know that our view of things before was incorrect. Yet it isn't long before we move on and accept it. Im sorry for the Crap analogy but its the same with life really for a lot of us: We start our adult life full of enthusiasm, dreams, hopes, ambitions...We think we can do anything! By the time we get to thirty something we have usually accepted the realities of life; the boring stuff, the stress, the problems, the threats, the disappointments. Somewhere in between those tow situations is probably your BF.
Here in the UK, as im sure you know, so many young people want and plan to move to America. The vast majority never actually do so. So many of our younger generation leave Uni with amazing qualifications and full of hope only to struggle to find decent jobs. Its one thing to plan our future, quite another to cope with the reality of actually living it. A lot of us go through a stage of feeling depressed, angry or a failure because what we thought we would be doing is very different from the occasional monotamy and regular stress of real adult life.
The good news is that if it is what I think it is then it will usually pass.
Hey nobody at 20 thinks "By the time im 30 I will have a failed marriage behind me, be burying my parents, lying in bed at night kept awake by the threat of redundancy and be paying a fortune for a kid I never see..." Yet for a lot of people that's how things turn out. Im not saying that's his life of course but you get the point im making. Adjustment can be tough. Especially if he perceives that others have gone on to better things.
As for hating his street, his life, the weather, again it could be the age thing. When we are young many of us are optimistic that life will get better and that our generation will solve the problems that matter to us. At the risk of sounding a bit depressing myself, as one gets older you realise certain things have got worse, not better. As I got to my late twenties the once clean, safe, enjoyable area I lived in had become overrun with crime and anti social behaviour. Id grown up in that neighbourhood only to see it become a grim, dangerous shadow of its former self. The recession took its toll on many of my friends and family and I guess the world just seems to have a lot of problems right now. I went through a period of depression about it but after nearly loosing my dad and various other things I guess I out grew my anger that the world was imperfect and got on with life.
You could try talking to him. Ask him why he feels the way he does and what his expectations were and are. I know you feel it personally when he says he is dissatisfied with his life but sometimes those in that situation take it out on those that are closest to them.
He is clearly missing his family who have moved to another country. He probably thinks his family are having fun all the way while he is stuck in a job he hates, in a street he cant stand and maybe has lost sight of the fact that his family and friends are probably having stresses and dissapointments just as much as he is.
Sorry I have rambled on and on - yes its his expectations IMO. How do you deal with that? Talk to him, encourage him, try to talk up his achievements and good times and try to make him focus less on negativity. If that doesn't work maybe suggest he speaks to a doctor as he may well be clinically depressed and need treatment.
If he refuses and/or the situation gets worse then maybe you need to question your future together. If you are a level headed, realistic person with a clear grasp of reality, and he is one of these people (like my brother who's 33) who still lives in a dream world of crazy expectations and unobtainable ambitions then maybe you need to accept that your are not on the same page.
Mark
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