And probably to leave very quickly. She needs help, but she needs help from someone who CANNOT give her the thing she thinks she wants - because as long as the person trying to help her can give her what she thinks she wants, she isn’t going to accept the help - she will fixate on ‘it will all be better if you marry me and have a baby.’ The faster she gets help from her family, her girlfriends, the people in her life that are not going to be husband and father to her kids EVER - the faster she will figure it out. The longer you remain in the picture, the longer she will cling to the fix she has determined on.
Okay, like everyone else, I agree you need to get out of this situation pronto. This girl sounds extremely immature, and more than that, crazy and manipulative. Nothing good is going to come out of this.
That said, I know people often stick it out longer than they should contrary to all advice. So if you decide to stay with her for the time being, try this. Do a little research, and put the reality of the situation in black and white for her. Lay out the expenses of the following (and these are the bare basics…):
Initial expenses:
Crib (and sheets and blankets to go with)
Receiving blankets
Changing Table
Car Seat
Stroller
Breast pump
High chair
Clothes (You’ll need 4 sets just for the first year, to keep up with a baby that grows incredibly fast…possibly 5 if she has a preemie)
socks and hats and jackets
Bottles and nipples (She’ll say she’s going to breastfeed, and that’s great, but the reality is that there’s a possibility she won’t be able to, so you need to account for the cost. You need bottles for pumped breast milk, anyway.)
Ongoing expenses:
Formula (see above about breastfeeding)
Diapers (I don’t know the prices where you are, but we spend $150/mo just on these two items.)
Wipes
Baby food (when the baby hits around 6 mos)
Toys
I’ve left out a lot of the extra “fun” expenses for that go along with having a baby (like decorating a nursery), but these are the essentials. If she sees two numbers, like, “Currently we are bringing in X amount each month. To have a baby, we’d need to be bringing in Y amount,” maybe it will sink in. I doubt it, but maybe.
Also, do you have access to any small children? A colicky baby or a bratty two-year-old would work best. Take them for a weekend. That might make her lose her delusions right quick. It’s one thing to hold a sweet baby for fifteen minutes and then hand it back to the mother when it starts to cry or gets a dirty diaper. But when it’s 2:00 AM and the baby just won’t.go.to.sleep, or when it poops in the crib and uses it to fingerpaint the wall, or when it throws up all over your cell phone and ruins it (like what just happened to me), reality sinks in fast. Be careful, though. There’s a danger if you only take a baby for a couple of hours, and she doesn’t get to have real, extended access, she could get baby fever worse than ever.
Whatever you do, DON’T give into her crazy desire for a baby. Not only for yourself, but for the kid. I hate to say it, but think of the children!
Best of luck to you!
There is a win-win here. You get out of this destructive dangerous relationship and she faces what’s really happening in her life. You know, the things she’s trying to fix with her “happy-ever-after-family” scenario.
As for not leaving her to fend for herself, as long as she thinks she has someone else to fend for her, she won’t even try. She needs to get healthy and you need to let/help her do that by getting out of the way.
You can’t fix this for her, and you can’t fix her.
I’m seconding/eighthing/whatever-ing the advice to run like a bat out of a very fiery hot painful place.
If you really do care for her–it sounds like you do, and if you still care about her after all she’s putting you through here it says something really positive about you–you can still try to remain friends, as horrible as the cliche sounds. Hopefully you can be there for her in a constructive way, no strings of possible children attached.
Take the day off when she won’t be home, gather up her belongings and put her out. There is nothing but danger and drama in your future. If you’re worried about her, call her parents and tell them she’s moving out. Mom will probably reach out, maybe not, but in any case, she needs to go.
I’m going to say something I’ve heard on this very board, from people who have experienced it - if you walk through a field of red flags to get to someone, you will be beaten by every one of them on your way out.
Yeesh, I’m not even *in *the relationship and I have this strange desire to run away.
Good luck. I’m afraid merely breaking up with her might not be the end. I feel like you have genuine crazy on your hands. Change your locks and stuff, you know.
I hope it’s not as drastic as all that, but if it were me, I’d keep my pet bunny in plain sight.
Completely agree. I don’t have to squint much to see suicide threats from this girl when she doesn’t get her way. There are any number of posters here who have actually married and had kids with women (or men) as troubled as this woman - just ask them if they wish they had run far and fast at the first signs of trouble (and before the expensive, bitter divorce and the 18 years of child support).
Darn…that was mine. Run, hide, change your number and perhaps go into the witness protection program.
As someone who had issues being manipulative and entered into relationships expecting others to save me from my life, I concur with the rest of the people here: run run run far away!!!
It wasn’t until I went into counseling that I realised how entirely messed up my expectations of others were. There is just no talking sense into someone who is using not only her emotions but your emotions as well to manipulate situations to her liking. Any logic will just be thrown away and turned into an incessant whine of “Why don’t you looooove meeeeee?” And honestly, it’s not your place to love her. She has to love herself before she can expect others to feel the same. Oh yes, it will hurt when you end it. Crazy people have feelings too… but don’t let yourself be tricked into thinking that the pain is your responsibility. It’s up to her to learn how to deal with relationships that don’t work out. Taking rejection is just a part of growing up.
This is the biggest red flag of all your posts. She doesn’t want a third party’s opinion because she knows they will count against her. Essentially, she is saying that other people’s sane, logical reasoning doesn’t count and it’s her emotions that you should focus on. Even if it’s unreasonable, you should do what she says because you supposedly care about her, right? And if you don’t, it just means that you don’t love her… and I’m not proud to say it, but this is exactly the type of manipulation tool I used to use. It’s always a tactic of the manipulative to try to dissuade others’ opinions because “they just don’t know what goes on between us! They’re outsiders to the relationship! I know us better than they do.”
Run run RUN!!!
You are going to be beaten with every single red flag that you ignored if you don’t get this girl out of your house and out of your life. (Shamelessly stolen from Anaamika). Two weeks is too soon to be moving in together and certainly too soon to be talking about children and marriage. You’ve only known the girl for two months. You don’t know her well enough to love her yet. Even if you have spent every minute of the day with her for the last 60 days. If she’s giving you the “If you loved me you would” line, cut your losses as soon as possible. I mean like pack her shit and have it at the door when she comes home.
zhlf210, there’s been a lot of talk about Julie being crazy in this thread. I hope you don’t take it personally. It’s kind of disrespectful to the woman you love. And (AFAIK) none of us are psychologists and none of us has examined her. So take it for what it’s worth.
But I think you owe it to yourself (and her) to get an objective opinion, and weigh your options carefully (as you’ve been doing). It’s a really bad idea to get into an 18+ year commitment just to get someone to stop crying, I’m sure you’d agree.
Run. Run far and fast. You’re not the bad guy here. Sometimes you have to hurt the ones you love in order to help them. The best thing you can do for this girl is to dissolve this relationship. You sound like you really care for this girl, but you have to understand that it’s not your job to fix her. The fact of that matter is her behavior is unhealthy, and your actions up until now were misguided at best. Why did you let this girl into your house so soon?
Look, I’m not trying to be judgmental, it’s just that I’ve had my own share of fucked up relationships, and this whole incident screams ‘RUN’ to me so loudly that I almost feel like typing in all caps.
How can he … oh nevernmind.
Chiming in here to nth the advice to get away from her. Many possibilities could be driving her behavior, and none of them are good.
@tdn, while I understand we can’t say she’s crazy, we do have to recognize the potential. These aren’t issues ppl are supposed to have to deal with in the first few months of a relationship. There’s enough smoke that I don’t need to see the fire.
OP, much like the Olympic gymnasts, I think you need to stick the dismount. E.g. don’t break up with her and leave her alone at your place with your stuff. You may come home to find she has disappeared everything, shit on your TV, etc. Hell hath no fury, and with her current state of mind, I would watch my back.
I’d be thinking about changing locks. I’d be careful not to be alone with her in case she decides to call the cops and claim you’ve been beating her or something. You might also look into prevailing laws, rights, etc. in your area. Good luck!
I hope (and it seems) that you’re getting the message here regarding how scary-bad relationship material she is and that you need to break it off to protect yourself if for no other reason, but I just wanted to chime in with another rebuttal of the “it’s only because of her intense desire to have children that she’s behaving this way” idea.
This is something I’ve never told anyone and am kind of ashamed of because I know how abnormal it is, but I’ve really wanted a baby pretty much since hitting adolescence. I’ve never acted on it, though, because I know it isn’t reasonable to do so given the reality of the situation, which is that to date, I have never been in a position to be able to provide a good, stable home for a child. (I’m 24, by the way.)
Your girlfriend may indeed also have a strong urge to have a child, but her behavior is driven by a great deal more than that, none of it pleasant. She seems like a very unstable person, and you need to extradite yourself from this situation. Good luck. I hope it goes well for you.
I did the whole sexual-politics-with-a-manipulative-girlfriend thing once in college. When I clawed my way out of the wreckage a year and a half later, I was emotionally devastated, mentally exhausted, and if I wasn’t psychologically unstable before I started dating her, I sure as shit was afterwards. At the time, I thought I had reacted extremely poorly, shaming us both, and I felt terrible about it.
All these years later, I now realize I did very well, considering the circumstances. I didn’t knock her up, I didn’t move in with her, and I didn’t marry her. That’s about as good as you can expect to end this sort of thing.
Don’t worry about losing. You’ve already lost. Run. Right. The. Fuck. Now and cut your losses.
(Looking at myself now, it’s kind of odd to think about how there ever was a time when someone would actually take the trouble to manipulate and politick me into bed. Part of me is flattered, but a much larger part thinks the whole thing was kind of creepy.)
I’d add in a red flag on any situation where she’s moving in directly from the parents. It’s a good thing to live for a time on your own.
Run. Leave skidmarks. You’re being used.
Q
Stage 5 Clinger.
Don’t pedestal the girl. You already know the answer to your question. Don’t rationalize. Accept the reality of the situation (she’s f***ed in the head) and deal with it. Time to man up as my friends would say.