She says she fears she is relying on me too much.

[tacticalcraptic]

My girlfriend expresses, from time to time, that she thinks she relies on me too much or is afraid that she relies on me too much.
I don't know how to respond to this. And she is generally inconsolable for a bit.

Yes, I am here for her and supportive. Yes, I always lend an open ear when she has something to get off her chest, yes, I pay for meals and such 90% of the time when we go out on dates. Yes, I help her with computer problems cause she doesn't know a command prompt from PCI-E. But too me, these things do not seem excessive.

She has her own job, makes her own money, we don't live together, she hangs out with her own friends often, she has her own hobbies, she is pretty independent.

So when she says this to me it kind of baffles me. I'm not sure how to respond. I want her to know I will be there for her if she needs anything. But when I say that in response to her fear, it does not help, it makes it worse.

Any advice here?

[ConfusedAlex]

I try not to psychoanalyse people I don't know, so I wouldn't venture to say whether this insecurity might be the result of some previous experience.

My advice, if you've not already done so, is to ask why this particular issue troubles her in the way it does? Its important to differentiate whether she's worried that you think she relies on you too much, or whether she's quite independent and it is her own desire not to be too dependent, in the way she sees it, to the man she is with. Reassurance might not be enough, I would want to find out why this issue is so important to her.

Whatever the case is, she can take great reassurance that she has a boyfriend who cares enough about her feelings and emotions to want to help her through this in any way he can.

[tacticalcraptic]

Thank you for the advice Alex, I read your post and she called me 3 minutes later to have me look up some directions for her online cause she was lost. So I asked her why she felt that way about relying on me. She said she feels like she is to dependent on me emotionally. I asked what she meant and she says, she has had it with many people in her life where she is too dependent emotionally upon them and when she feels this way, she starts to take everything they say too harshly or for more than it was meant to be or overly critical.
I guess I am more confused than before, she has been saying this on occasion ever since about a month after we started dating. Here it is 6 months later and she is still bringing it up as a concern from time to time.
It seems to happen more often when have spent alot of time together. I have been with here about 70% of the time since Friday. Which has really felt good to me and has made me feel close.
It does worry me that if we start feeling really close she would feel this way though. I guess I am just yammering at this point.

[ConfusedAlex]

No, I totally understand what you're saying. This is a difficult issue, one that's actually from my experience something that crops up a lot in relationships between men and women, however, its entirely natural.

I think that in the modern day, people forget just how profoundly different men and women are. What they provide to each other in a relationship require different qualities, there are certain things that men can provide to women in a relationship that other women can't, and that women bring to the table that men don't.

Some of those qualities are innate to men, some to women, and then some of the balance of who does what in a relationship is unique to the relationship.

If, for example, your girlfriend was a lawyer, or something like that, you would rely on her opinion and advice when it came to legal things. The same with any other example of a quality that one partner has that the other doesn't. Your girlfriend may rely on you for some things like helping her with her computer, or paying for dinner when you two go out, but there are many things you rely on from each other, that you both provide to each other.

You both rely on each other for love, a sense of security, physical intimacy, companionship, romance.. all these things that are what relationships are about, both of you provide to each other.

As you said, she has her own job, you two live apart, she has her own hobbies and friends. She's pretty independent, a lot more so than many people I know in relationships are on their partner.

When you mentioned what she said about being too emotionally dependent in previous relationships, what I took from that was that she was, in a way, saying she loves you very much, and she fears losing you. If she's been in a relationship previously where she loved a man deeply, and he broke up with her unexpectedly, this feeling she has could be a reflection of that, or a fear of it happening again. Or that a friend or family member whose advice she values is convincing her she is too dependent

Either way, alls ya can do is talk to your girlfriend, reassure her, hold her and tell her how you feel about her... and find something that she's good at for you to rely on her for lol People love it when you ask them for help, it shows them you have confidence in them, their abilities, their capacity to give you the right answer or outcome. Maybe this is something that will allay her feelings of dependence.