Hello ladies,

I have been dating my boyfriend for two months. He has a lot of HV qualities - always pays for dates, loyal, honest, attentive lover/doesn’t watch porn, things like this. I’ve been starting to see cracks in the relationship, namely that he has a hard time communicating about/processing things that I desire to communicate about. For example, my love language is words (he knows this), but he struggles to express how he feels about me beyond generic things like “you look good” or “I care about you”, often when I press him for verbal affirmation. Another thing is more serious issues that are important to a long term relationship, like having the same basic religious ideology (it’s important to me but not to him), and the fact that I’ve seen the tangible effects of some (pretty major) trauma he’s been through, that he has not really gotten help for because he says therapy/seeing a psychiatrist is too expensive (he did go to therapy once and anger management a handful of times, which was misconstrued early on as him actually having worked on things he’s been through).

All that to say, the biggest issue is the fact that he seems unable to really communicate or process about these things. I know he cares about me, but the past month I haven’t felt loved nearly as much as in the first month. I had a hard conversation with him a week ago in which we agreed to both think on the issues I spoke to him about. After not contacting me all day the next day, he told me he had been thinking and figured I was too. When I saw him yesterday, he said that him “thinking” was mostly him hearing the things I had said over and over in his head. I pressed for his thoughts, but he really didn’t say anything that far from his minimal remarks when we first spoke about it. I’m not sure what to do now.

TL;DR: My boyfriend has a lot of HV traits, but struggles with communicating how he feels about me (words are important to me) as well as on deeper issues. He doesn’t see any real issues with our relationship and is happy with me. I’m not sure what to do.