Need help. Boredom or obsession. Also need an outside opinion on my situation

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Amaluna
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Need help. Boredom or obsession. Also need an outside opinion on my situation

I'm hoping someone can post them inside into this and give me answers. I want to post this as factual as possible so I don't sway any emotions.

Background
I am 39 with two kids and a divorcee. My ex was not a good person and had a diction issues of his own with internet browsing and pornography. This essentially broke the relationship down. I did not have a good upbringing and due to my past experiences with my ex and my family I have complex PTSD. I do know I have attachment issues and I know I don't want to. I am a huge people pleaser because I'm scared of being alone. I am now engaged and I've been with my fiance for 5 years this December. I knew he was a gamer from the start I just didn't know how intense.
In the past I would only be able to see him on the weekends. At first it was great because we would spend a lot of time together however he would always be pulled back into playing his video games. At that time he was into rocket League. He works in IT and doesn't seem to have any in person friends that he hangs out with just his online friends. I was worried for him at first but he assured me that he's just not very social. Our weekends together became more of him ignoring me and playing video games for hours. Found a compromise by helping me upgrade my own current computer and bringing it with me so we could play video game side by side. I didn't say anything then but I hated that. It was his solution to a problem because I was starting to be more vocal about him playing all the time. I don't know if at this point I became an enabler. I didn't like talking about it to him because he always got defensive. In the weekdays he would come home and play video games until midnight or so everyday. I couldn't wrap my head around why he needed to do it on the weekend when he had me there. Eventually we moved in together and I thought it would be great because he would spend more time with me but not a lot changed. He still resumed the same schedule of playing games and they'll sometimes I would get to play with him I was mostly forgotten. Many arguments have stemmed from this. In his defense he says he likes to be able to come home after a crappy day at work because his job at that time was not that great and just unwind and play video games with his friends. It was usually his first go to. I would say he was forced to adapt to the fact that he now lived with the lady and her two kids but still found the time to continue his Hobby as he calls it. He does eat he does take care of himself so it's not like this hobby is blocking him from his day to Day activities. He has told me that he would call in sick because he didn't feel like going to work and then he would play games all day plus I've seen it firsthand. He also has a son of his arm and when his son would come to visit he was still very similar where he would play a lot of video games. That also became a huge argument and now he tries to spend more time with his son but also one of his solutions is sitting his son beside him on the computer handing him a controller and pretending they're playing video games together or letting him watch YouTube beside him. My kids are older so his child can hang out with my kids and I personally believe he took advantage of that. But that was just my opinion and my kids shared it with me. I personally don't think this is a hobby but again that is just my opinion. I don't understand his need to play games all the time and is defensiveness when I bring it up as being a problem.. most of these issues happened early in the relationship and continue to happen but now it's evolved into something else. The section of my post I would like some insight on if this is truly a hobby or someone who's in denial with an obsession.

My second part of this post is more recent. Due to covid we can't really go out for date nights and date nights have already become a rarity because usually we just stayed home. I'm going through a lot of issues right now and because of all these issues I've developed depression. I'm scared. I do not have a support system other than my best friend who lives five and a half hours away. I don't feel like I can go to my partner with my problems because he doesn't seem to have the empathy to deal with them and I feel like I'm a burden. I have a psychologist and I brought all these things up to the psychologist and they all keep saying that this is not a person I should be with that this is a person who is hurting me more and I don't see it because I'm just so desperate to feel loved. I really do want to fight for this I just don't know anymore if I should be for my mental health. My fiance has hinted throughout the years that he wants to play world of Warcraft or as I will call it wow from here on. I am hugely against this game as it is designed to pull people in and get them addicted. I have friends and family that broke up with their spouse because of this game. I simply did not want to play it at all and the first few times he asked if I would it was a hard no. I even explained my reasons and feelings behind it. When things got really bad for me and the Depression hit really hard he suggested it as a date night thing. Something for us to do together since we can't do date nights. I was very suspicious at first but this was a trick. I told him I didn't want to play it and he said there would be rules around playing it so that I wouldn't have to feel worried and anxious about it. I asked him if he was ever addicted to it in the past and he admitted he was but was proud to say that he just v cold turkey quit it. The rules were that we would only log in together and that we would only play together and not play with anyone else. It would just be our thing. I agreed. Soon after his friends found out we were playing and we ended up starting to play with his online friends. I was livid but he convinced me that sometimes playing with them was okay. And sometimes it was but when I asked to just play with him he would get moody I felt. We played as two characters a&b and he would complain that he didn't like his character a so he insisted that we start all over and he got to play his character c. I had to change my character entirely and we now became characters c and d. I didn't want to change my character but the constant complaining was too much and I just wanted to have fun times with him. Eventually we ended up going into the newer version of this game wow retail. Started as two characters all over again a and b. We leveled them to the top. That was our goal however during that entire time he would insist on playing with his friends and it seemed like our one-on-one time was going down. Some days I just couldn't say anything because I didn't want to deal with him being upset with me because he did it in a passive way. He kept talking about his old Glory days when he played this game and wanted to look at his old account. I asked him not to and one day he came up to tell me that he was showing his online buddy all the cool areas in the game with his old character. I felt smashed. I told him this I told him he went against the rules and I was not okay with it. That ended in an argument where I was told that I was being too sensitive and that it wasn't a big deal because it's not like he was actively playing with that character and his friend. He couldn't see that he was playing with his friend as they were flying around to different areas in the world. That was the first big fight. Every so often if I walked by his room I would notice him playing without me and if he heard me he would change monitors so I wouldn't see he was in the game. I caught him a few times doing this but didn't bother saying anything. He does it during work hours because his job doesn't give him enough work to do. Eventually the rules evolved to suit him again and I allowed him to level up his old character but only to the current level that we are at on our other characters so that he had an alternative but that was it. He would forget the rules. He would reword the rules and he would just keep going online every so often. One time I had to stop by to tell him and update about something and there he was playing without me again. He was in a dungeon which means he would get really good gear and critters. He knows he's not supposed to be playing that. I just walked away. After my appointment he came up stairs and I asked him if he got anything out of it. He was defensive and told me he didn't get anything out of it at all. Everything in my body told me he was lying. Everything. But he insisted and had excuses for it all. Then he said that he wouldn't do any dungeons without me. I might add that I'm doing dungeons has nothing to do with leveling his character. Later that day I nicked my nail on my desk and I needed a nail file which was in his office. I went to go and grab it but he wasn't in his office and there on his screen was him boasting about getting a new mount from the dungeon that I caught him in with his friend. And also joking and saying LOL she is going to be so ****ed and his friend replying that he had an unmountable amount. They were joking about it. They were laughing about it. To me this is not something that someone was remorseful about. I didn't say anything because again this always leads to arguments and defensiveness but then it happened again he was playing the game and I snapped and I told him I was upset with him because he's changed the rules in such a way that suits him completely and that it's nothing like what it was supposed to be in the very beginning and it makes me incredibly anxious. His response is that it's just a game and that he can quit it at any time and he even threatens to uninstall it. I say threatens because he knows that I actually like playing the game now. To me it feels like a manipulation tactic but I don't know. For me this game is become a little bit of an outlet. Something I can log into and feel like I am able to get something done. I can take my anger out on monsters and the world is essentially beautiful. This game and playing this game with him became my happy place in my world of misery. He knows this I've told him this. Anyway that last argument I finally brought up the mount that he caught that he lied to my face about and I told him how I have lost so much sleep because he just stood there and lied to my face about a video game. He tried to explain it away. He tried to give excuses for it. He didn't like that he was caught. He was defensive a bit and I wasn't having it because in the end it was a lie and I will not be lied to like that. I must add that these arguments over this game have become so intense that I end up having a panic attack because of how he talks to me. I'm finding it harder and harder to handle it. Now we're up to the present. He plays the game more than he works some days and it's really hard for me considering that my home business is extremely hello and I am struggling financially and to hear somebody say that he makes a large sum of money each week just by sitting in his office and playing games all day really takes its toll. Yesterday I saw that he was logged in and was playing in an area that he had no reason being in. The current rules are that if he wants to play he lets me know what he's up to. Much different from what the original rules are and not something that I was ever happy with but he keeps pushing for more and I'm so tired of arguing. Anyway I asked him why he was playing there and he instantly got defensive. I told him that I'm not comfortable with him putting so many hours in that game for the reasons that I mentioned when he first tried to introducing that game and again he got more defensive his solution was to stop off and threaten to uninstall it. I was asking why you couldn't go back to the main rules and he told me that he shouldn't have rules. But I shouldn't have control over him and what he does with his games. That he feels like he has my thumb on his head. He's now apparently uninstalled the game. I can't talk to him. I'm disgusted by the entire thing and I feel like I'm harboring a level of hatred towards him for taking away something that was supposed to be our thing together. The equivalent of quality time and playing it on his own and doing what he wants was more important. I don't know what to make of this. I don't know if this is okay but I feel in my gut that it's not. I feel that I was tricked into this and that the rules were modified to suit him. If I played the game and wanted to do something different he wouldn't want to do it because it would take so long like getting a special mount. I would ask permission to do it and he would graciously say yes but now that's been thrown back in my face saying that I would play and do what I wanted to do therefore he should be allowed to have free reign. This is turned into a nightmare and I'm so confused because as I said I like the game but like what this game is notorious for doing it's destroying a relationship. And I'm way more sensitive about this game because it has a reputation for doing this. If it's not this game it's another game just not as bad. He has played games with me in the past but as soon as he gets bored with it he abandons me and this happens quite a bit.

Polga
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Joined: 02/17/2014 - 11:33am
Welcome Amaluna

Welcome Amaluna

I posted a reply in the private forums.

Take care

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