She's Very Needy and ClingyWe often have visitors write in with solutions to each others' problems. Here is a visitor's solution to one of our visitor's questions. Original Visitor's Question from a 31-40 year old Male me and my girlfriend are going steady for abt 5 years. thing is, when we started our thing she was somewhat a difrent person than what she's now. she had a strong personality, a voice of her own, very reserved and a very strong person. but in abt 2 years in the relationship, she started to change. she became very moody, dependent,tantrum throwing sort of a person and started depending on me for every small matters. i felt a bit suffocated and told her so. this resulted in many a crisis situations. since im long way into the relationship and since i have a broken relation at my back, i dont want to break up or something. but i would definitely like her to change. then , tho we share physical closeness, we never had sex. she has always been a bit reluctant in sexual matters all the time. of late she's goin thru a phase like wanting me when im not near and not wanting me when im physically close to her. this is a great stress for me. third, her whole world moves round only me, which makes her possesive,jealous and at times suspecting. this makes me feel very suffocated and i cant tell her this categorically as it'd create a lot of crying episodes which i hate. she keeps on shouting at me for very small or aparently no reasons, which i accept without getting angry most of the time. yet she keeps on saying that she loves me and shows it in all the ways too. i sometimes feel i m losing out my identity while adjusting with her. please tell me what i should do to make the relation better .i feel very afraid if would kill the relationship one day if i go on like this. User Submitted Advice from a 21-30 year old Female Ask her Hi, I dont usually post on message boards, but i wanted to reply to your question because it reminds me very much of my own situation. i've always been a very strong, independent, easy-going person, with lots of friends around me and things going on in my life. This is how i was when i met my (now ex) boyfriend over 6 years ago. we got to know each other, both fell very deeply in love and had a very happy and intense relationship, spending most of our time together, going on vacations, meeting each others families etc - and i, as well as everyone around us believed we would last. however, in our last few months-a year together (during a very stressful time in my life that i wont go into right now) i changed and became a bit like how you describe your girlfriend now. I would get upset at my boyfriend even tho he hadnt done anything (i became convinced he didnt really love me), i hardly ever saw my girlfriends or did things that used to interest me, i was tearful, jealous, clingy, irrational, insecure - in short, the exact opposite of everything i used to be. i was also feeling physically unwell a lot of the time. but at the same time i could still act reasonably 'normal' a lot of the time, i still loved him, i didnt know what was wrong and didnt want things to be that way between us. like you he very rarely got angry back at me and didnt say anything about how i was acting. well, eventually, after a heated row last year, we split up. he said i wasnt the same person anymore, he didnt feel the way that he used to about me etc. AND he felt smothered by the relationship. it was such a shock for me at the time - i wasnt expecting it. i still couldnt see that there was obviously something seriously wrong with me. what was the worst thing for me was that he wouldnt talk to me about anything - he just completely shut me out. and because, like your girlfriend, i had become so dependent on this one person, i seriously couldnt deal with seeing him knowing that someone who'd loved me so much had rejected me. so i walked away from the situation. as i said before, i had never in my life before been the clingy, needy sort of person - none of it made sense. then a few months later i found out that i had actually been very unwell and suffering from stress and depression for over a year - and i got treatment. now, a few months further on again and i am almost back to my normal, happy, sociable self. but i have lost the man that i love in the process - he wasted no time in finding a replacement girlfriend and moving on. to sum up, what i would say to you is this: people dont 'change' their entire personality relatively suddenly - when this happens i think there must always be some sort of underlying reason. i know you say you dont want to deal with any crying sessions, but i think its desperately important that you talk to her AS SOON AS POSSIBLE and let her know how you are feeling. dont attack her, assure her that you love her and you want your relationship to work, but you are worried about the change in her. i would have given anything for my ex-boyfriend to have confronted me in this way, even although it may have been slightly awkward at the time. best of luck katie The Original Question and RomanceClass Answer
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