Dear Queenie,
My boyfriend wants us to be together, just us, all the time. He gets mad if I want to just be alone for a while and if I have lunch with a friend instead of coming home to have lunch with him he thinks I must be cheating on him. If we go to visit my family (he doesn’t have any) he sulks while we are there and quarrels with me when we get home because I was visiting with them and not paying enough attention to him.
Queenie, I try to understand that this is partly because he doesn’t know what it’s like to be close to your family but how much togetherness is too much?— Suffocated
Dear Suffocated,
I think you can answer your own question: too much is when you feel smothered.
Your boyfriend is behaving like a clingy child who cries when his mother leaves him in kindergarten for the first time – but the child (usually) learns to get over it and apparently your boyfriend has not.
Two adults in a healthy relationship spend a great deal of time together, but they are not “joined at the hip.”
Even if your boyfriend gets counselling and tries to change (grow up), it will take a long – and I mean looooong – time. I do not recommend waiting around for that to happen.
