My girlfriend is furious that I think spending 12 hours per day every day playing with her seven year old would be boring. Am I wrong to feel that way?

393 points•173 comments•submitted by viizio to r/relationship_advice

I'm home from basic training for holiday block leave and staying the two weeks at my girlfriend's house by invitation. Her son is seven with special needs and is non verbal with little motor functionality so she has stayed at home taking care of him since he was born living with her parents. He loves spending the entire day watching young kid shows like Dora the Explorer, Bubble Guppies, etc. We started dating two months ago and I fell in love with both of them. I adore him and could happily spend hours every day reading to him, playing with his toys, watching him enjoy his shows, etc.

The problem came in once I got here and started spending 24/7 with them. I'm a software engineer and have always spent my time pursuing entrepeneurial goals as a developer, solving complex challenges with code, planning, learning, creating, etc. She spends her day pretty much busy feeding him and medicating him 4 times per day, changing diapers, cleaning medical supplies, laundry, etc, so she doesn't have much time to really interact with me until she puts him to bed, especially since her parents are here too. And I'm ok with that, I understand. But once I got here with no access to a computer (my things are all packed up in another state) and nothing to put my mind to aside from her son, I tended to spend a good amount of time on my phone while in the living room with nothing to really do. It's sort of my only source of (somewhat) mentally fulfilling entertainment with ebooks, news, study, and coding.

She got upset by this after a few days and told me she misses seeing me interact with him more and I explained that it's easier to focus on interacting when I'm with him for 3 or 4 hours rather than 24/7 and I need something more mentally engaging than interacting with a young kid all day long, that I do spend at least 2-3 hours throughout the day playing with him. I asked what her expectations are exactly, 4 hours of playing? Six? Eight? Ten? I said, as an extreme example just to see if we could find some common ground or starting point, that I honestly would get bored if my life consisted of 12 hours of playing with her son every day, although I would love to play with him for 2-3 hours per day. She got furious that I "said I would get bored of the people I love" and it seems clear that her expectations are that I literally be happy with spending every waking hour playing with her son if I have time to do that like I do now.

Is that really what it means to be a father? She says it is. Isn't that unreasonable? How can I explain that there should be healthy limits even on interaction with people we love and that I need a reasonable amount of time doing things aside from playing with a seven year old?