I have come to realize that I don't love him as much as he loves me

[WashedOut14]

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.

[basilandthyme]

It's Ok to leave a relationship which is no longer meeting our needs. If you're no longer feeling it anymore, then staying around is just time wasted time. And sometimes it's quite difficult to pinpoint exactly what is wrong - so don't push yourself to find good reasons to end it.

The only thing I'd suggest you think further about is comparing your career to his. My best friend is an academic and I left school at 16. She has an education and career which I can only dream of and sometimes I do notice my own lack of education when we speak. But this is my problem and nothing to do with her. Provided he's not rude to you about your lack of comparative progress and doesn't speak down to you at all, I'd suggest that he's not doing anything wrong.

That being said, if he acts like a dick around others, I can see that it would totally blow your attraction to him.

[Rebeccaa]

If you are feeling like this now it is definitely time to end the relationship. All of those little things that annoy you will only grow over time and if it regarding the treatment of other people, I would say even more so.
It sounds as though you know in your heart of hearts that it is over. The next step is the hard one.