Dear Prudence,
I’m dating someone seriously for the first time, but I often feel that I’m more into my partner than he is to me. We’ve been together for a year and half, and I did feel a kind of mutual amount of being “into” each other for the first few months, but I think the honeymoon phase wore off with him a lot faster. Our relationship is a significant part of my life, but I get the impression that it isn’t as significant to him, and that I just don’t cross his mind as much as he crosses mine. I think the bulk of it is capacity—he has chronic fatigue and serious mental health issues. Part of it is maybe communication issues, since I am usually the initiator and planner for us, especially with his illness. I know he’s giving me what he can, that it’s not fair to want what he can’t give, but I get scared that even if he was well, he still wouldn’t reciprocate the amount of feeling I have.
I know that that doesn’t matter, because this is the relationship I’m in now, not a hypothetical, but I can’t stop seeming fixated on it. I’ve been kind of spiraling since I found some poetry he wrote about his ex, saying the kinds of passionate things I wish he’d say to me (the kind of things that I do say to him). I know they were together during a period of his life before the onset of his disability, and I need to stop comparing. I just don’t know how. I really do adore him, and he’s a wonderful person. I know he loves me a lot, but sometimes it feels like there’s this unreasonable, sad, lonely, childish monster in me that can’t help but greedily want more. And yes, I’ve started therapy.