Walking on eggshells

Hi everyone,

I have been with my boyfriend for just under three years. We live together and have a shared life. His family lives 6 hours away and we live in a fairly large city. My family lives in the same city we do. My boyfriend has always hated the traffic and people in a large city and wishes he lived in a smaller town. My boyfriend usually works away from home. He will go on the road from Sunday to Thursday and come home for the weekend. He has always wanted to move to a small town, but I am not willing to move away from my family and friends if he is going to be away from home. We agreed that we will stay put.

Now, he is working about an hour away in an even larger city, coming home every night. He has worked it out that he avoids most traffic, however, he still hits some traffic.

Anyways the issue is that my boyfriends mood is so affected by the traffic, or any inconvenience in his life. Instead of being upset for an hour and winding down, if there is traffic on a Friday, he will be angry the entire weekend.

There also have been multiple instances where he has had a slight disagreements with people in my life , for example, my best friend. He had a disagreement with her and doesn’t necessarily like her but it’s been over a year and absolutely shows no kindness towards her. If she says hi to him he just grunts. She is sick in the hospital right now and has absolutely no care for how she is doing. I’m a fairly compassionate person and would hope my significant other would should interest in the people I love.

Basically, the reason for this post is that he expresses a lot of anger and frustration over trivial matters and I feel like I have to walk on eggshells a lot of the time. I’ve started keeping track of the days in which he is angry and the days he is happy. I’ve started to feel nervous when he’s come home from a long ride, worried about his mood when he gets home.

Him and I talked about this this week and had a very constructive conversation about his anger. He agreed that he gets angry and then gets angry that he’s angry and its frustrating to him. I suggested he talk to someone. He picked up an anger management workbook and wants to try to work on it himself. Today, however, he immediately was getting frustrated with my because I came home from work and was talking over his video games. We were going to set up the Christmas tree and he was getting angry with me when I was getting started. I got upset and went to the bedroom to have some space. After he said, “just when you get home if you see me playing video games just don’t talk until it’s done. You know I turn it off as soon as you’re home and the game is done.” This is true, but still … wtf.

I stress that this is only going to get worse and I’m going to not be happy in my future. I worry that I will bring kids into the equation and I will feel alone because he is either away from home, or too grumpy to help when he is home.

I love him and he treats me as a person so well. However I’ve been having these feelings of doubt and would love some advice on whether you think it is worth it to stick it out and support him through this, or if this feeling of walking on eggshells is a huge red flag…

Thank you in advance.