The Magic

I've been with my girlfriend for nearly a year and a half now. We've lived together for nearly a year. The longest we've ever been apart since we started dating is about 5-7 days.

In other words, we're both very close to each other and a large part in the other's life.

I love her and care very much about her, but since we've moved in together I've started feeling that despite my caring for her, I don't believe she is the woman who I would want to spend the rest of my life with. We both graduate college next year, and it seems she's resigned herself to the fact that we will part ways, but I don't think she would be expecting any break up sooner than that and I'm really afraid it would devastate her.

Let me give some background. I'm a 21 years old college student. She's almost 29, and an international student working on her second degree. Because of her past, she doesn't have very much self-confidence and maybe still has a bit of depression issues or social anxiety. Couple in the fact that English is a second language for her, she hasn't made too many friends here. She has some friends that she retained from the dorm, but rarely sees/talks to them. Myself, I'm a bit of a hermit so I haven't made any good, close, friends despite soon finishing my third year at the same university. Because of this, the time we've been together we spend nearly all our time together.

I'm afraid of breaking up and leaving her all alone. She tells me often how much she loves living together and has so much fun together. After breaking up, she won't have anyone to spend time with and she can only talk to her family on the phone. I'm afraid she might feel even more self-conscious after breaking up and that she will close herself in more and face depression. It may sound like my fears are exaggerating the situation (and maybe they are), but my biggest fear is that she will feel so trapped, alone, and stressed out by her classes that she will just give up and return home. She spends quite a bit of time on her classess but it is still difficult for her because English being her second language. She gets stressed out a lot and worries a lot. She tends to worry about everything and often feels like she will fail at things. I'm really worried how a break up would hit her.

After reading this, a lot of you are probably wondering what my full reasons for breaking up are. This was my first relationship ever, and I foolishly believed since the beginning that with enough time people could change their character. I've wanted her to become more self-confident, and she has in some ways, but she has also come to depend on me very much during this year and a half. I feel trapped by our relationship and that I can't live my own life because she is attached to everything. I also have some of my own goals I want to accomplish before I graduate, but our relationship eats up a lot of my time directly and indireclty (stress) and makes those difficult. Last winter I also went to her country and stayed with her family and her for three weeks. Being different cultures, there were sometimes of miscommunication and small problems (I'm at a high-intermediate level of her language, but not fluent). In the US, I support her a lot and I feel like "Well, she is outside of her home and she has a lot of hard times so I should support her here". However, in her home country, if there were problems, despite me doing my best, she would cry and tell me how I need to try harder or things like I should've read more about culture before I came and we could have avoided all this. She did not recognize my effort at all or give me any support. This was sort of an eye opener for me; even if she had been very dependent on me in America, that was ok, but if she can't support our relationship in her own home country and keeps pushing everything on me, when will this let off? Also, could she ever support me if I needed it?

There are also some other things that I won't go into details about here, but recently I've just kind of looked everything over and kept thinking to myself, "is this how I want the rest of my life to be"? I really care for her very much and love her, but I can't resign myself to this kind of life. I want more. I've also considered living apart and just seeing each other less often, but I feel like now that the relationship will end sometime and that keeping the relationship going in such a way would only make things harder for her both that whole time living apart and in the end.

Anyone out there who can give me advice?