I'm 25 and so is my boyfriend. I have been with my boyfriend for the past 2.5 years. In that time, things have generally been OK. This has been my first serious relationship, and so I have learned a lot about myself and about relationships, but I am still not sure about some things. Lately, though, I have come to feel like I have fallen out of love with my boyfriend, if not completely, then at least to the extent that he loves me much more than I feel I love him.
I have been having inklings of discomfort with my boyfriend probably for the past year, but I generally suppressed them, and didn't tell him about them, because I felt like they were just growing pains or that they were otherwise just a normal part of being with someone, but in the past few weeks, I have had flashes that the relationship feels wrong. For example, in bed, things have become boring generally, but I almost felt struck by lightning one night a few weeks ago when he was being extremely affectionate and telling me how much he loved me. I tried to respond in kind, but I felt almost zapped, and over the past few months, it has somehow felt more and more hollow and labored every time I have said "I love you" back to him.
My boyfriend is a good man who definitely loves me, but there have been other issues that have had me wondering if he is really the person I want to be with for the rest of my life. I have brought all of these things up with him at one point or another. One issue is that he is obsessed with his work. Maybe "obsessed" isn't fair, but he definitely loves his work a lot, and he loves talking about it with me in great detail. We are both graduate students; he's in chemistry and I'm in chemical engineering. As time has gone on, he has seen more and more success with his work, while I generally haven't (I've been doing well enough to graduate, but I don't have the makings of a star researcher, which I think he does have). The amount he talks about his work, and the level at which he describes it, generally has me feeling inferior to him. He doesn't do it to make me feel bad, I know, but I just cannot help but feel inferior, and the success that he is experiencing now I feel is going to separate us more and more career-wise...and I am afraid that I would be completely dominated by him if we ever got married. At the moment, he is talking about publishing three scientific articles and that it isn't good that he hasn't done so yet (at the end of his third year in the Ph.D. program), while I have a secondary authorship on a single paper and probably won't have my own paper for a while yet. This sort of complaining doesn't really help me not to feel like second banana.
There have been other issues that have bothered me, like his occasional need to put his intelligence on display in awkward ways (like with store clerks) and an occasional arrogance (which has improved over time but still sometimes comes out). The thing is, though, that I know that every person has issues of some kind. I would say that these do contribute to my feeling of not being in love with him as much as he loves me; I don't know if it's a legitimate feeling or not.
I apologize for the ramble, but what should I do here? I was thinking of talking with my boyfriend in the coming days and saying to him that I think that we have an intensity difference, using more ginger wording maybe. Is that reasonable? Are my feelings here reasonable?
Thanks for your help.