 (Nick Galifianakis for The Post) | Dear Carolyn: I'm having trouble navigating through an issue with my boyfriend. I feel as though he sees spending time with me as an obligation and not something he WANTS to do. He's generally pretty deadpan and hard to read, so I tend to hurt my own feelings quite a bit before talking to him about how things are affecting me, but I struggle with bringing up these issues sometimes because my stress response is always to just burst into tears. I wish I could learn to control it but years of therapy have done nothing for that specific issue. But this tends to derail all meaningful discussions because his only goal is to get me to stop crying in the moment and long-term things don't always improve. Some people have told me to write him a letter, which I've tried, but the result usually ends up the same during the follow-up discussion. I don't really know how to move forward in a constructive way at this point. — Waterworks | 
