Spending All His Time Working

[ElleT]

So I"m not sure where to post this. It's not totally related to my mental health, and it's not a trigger topic or really dark. It's more venting but I don't have access to that forum so I thought I'd post it here.

My boyfriend works, a lot. I know he needs to, it makes spending time together difficult with his current work schedule we only see can see each other, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. He works night so the other days we don't see each other, and sadly most of the time unless I am the one to initiate contact we wouldn't even talk.

We have had a couple fights about his problems with communication, he knows that he is bad at it, and claims that he will work on it but I haven't noticed a change. Okay so we have only been together for almost 8 months, not long at all but we love each other very much and are at the same places in our lives and can easily see ourselves getting married. Not anytime in the near future, I still want to get a degree (that's been on hold for five years because of my mental health) and he wants to figure out what he wants to be when he 'grows up' (he already has his degree in Business Management but isn't quite sure what he wants to do with his life).

With the summer coming up he told me that he wants to take up a second job. Which would mean that he would have even less free time. The free time he does have would probably be spent doing required life things, like sleeping and grocery shopping and stuff like that.

I hate this. I'm pretty sure he's aware that I hate it, but I feel like I have no right to ask him not to. He has a lot of debt that he needs to pay off before he can move anywhere and he wants to move to Denver, Co with me as soon as he can. I'm moving at the end of August, we both know that he won't be able to move when I do, and probably not for a year or two after I move.

So I understand logically why he needs to work the two jobs, he needs the money to live and to pay off his debt so that we can actually start to make our lives together. I still don't like it.

I don't like to think I am an incredibly clingy person, I don't need to see him every day, and there are some days that I don't need to talk to him, but unfortunately I am not mentally stable. I just started to get the rigth treatment for BPD because I was just diagnosed. So while logically I may understand everything, emotionally I don't know how to feel. I don't know what feelings are rational and what feelings are irrational and need to be talked out.

I also feel like there is no solution to the problem, I don't have very many people I can rely on where I live right now. I have one of my best friend close by but he has his own issues and when I want to talk about anything pertaining to my mental health he brushes me off and says that I'm perfectly healthy mentally.

I guess I'm just trying to figure out if my feelings towards this whole situation are rational or irrational, I think some of them are rational, and my worries are rational as well. I'm not sure my boyfriend (whom I will refer to as Hen from now on) will think they are rational though.

My mental health has been a problem for our relationship, he knew exactly what he was getting into when we first started dating but I don't think he really understood what that all meant. He works in a hospital for the mentally unstable in crisis situations so he gets to experience that on a near daily basis. But he doesn't like that my moods can change at the flip of a dime and he has no idea what to do about it. He doesn't change his behavior, he acts like he normally does and tries to treat me like a normal person who isn't mentally unstable, which part of me loves but another part of me thinks that it doesn't help? I"m not really sure what I need from him, I know he loves me, and emotionally most of the time I believe it, but when we can go five days with barely even a text I start to get a little crazy. I don't want to be the only person to initiate contact. I've told him all of this already so I don't really know what else to do.

I'm scared because I feel like this summer I basically won't have a boyfriend and I'm scared of what that will make me do. In the past if I have felt neglected or un loved I have sought out other men or women to give me the attention I crave and I don't want to start to feel that again. I also don't want to tell Hen this because i"m worried he will think I'm trying to manipulate him. I have a tendency to try to manipulate people so it's not a far fetched assumption.

I'm slightly worried that I will loose him, but not by any real fault of his own, just by me falling into old patterns again. I don't really know what to do or what feelings I should be feeling.