He failed to protect me and i can’t love him anymore

Hello dear Redditors,

I’m not someone who usually posts questions on Reddit, but I have a lot on my chest right now, and I really need some advice.

I’m not really a “love girl.” In my previous relationships, I cared about my partners, but I was never deeply, overwhelmingly in love. This is my third serious relationship, and for the first time in my life, I truly, deeply fell in love with someone. And for the first time, I genuinely don’t want to lose my relationship.

I met my boyfriend about four years ago. He had actually wanted to talk to me years before, but I wasn’t interested at the time. Eventually, I gave him a chance, and within two weeks we were officially together. Things were amazing between us.

We both come from Turkish families. For those who are familiar with that culture, you probably understand what I mean when I say that these can be very large, very involved families, with a lot of history, family dynamics, opinions, and sometimes very little sense of individual boundaries.

I left my family relatively young, at 17, precisely because that kind of life wasn’t for me. I love my family and I’m on good terms with them, but I needed distance, independence, privacy, and complete autonomy. I moved to another country, studied there, built my own life, and that’s where I met my boyfriend.

About a year ago, we got engaged.

My boyfriend is an incredibly kind person. Genuinely kind. Sometimes almost painfully kind. He is also quite naive. He’s 27, but sometimes I feel like he simply doesn’t see malice in people. The purity of his heart is probably both his greatest quality and his greatest weakness.

For about a year and a half, his family treated me terribly — often right in front of him — and he simply didn’t see what was happening.

He wasn’t ignoring me on purpose. He genuinely didn’t understand it. He wanted to analyze everything, make sure he understood the situation completely before reacting. He hates confrontation. His instinct is to say, “Yes, you’re right,” and move on because he doesn’t want to hurt anyone or create conflict.

I am the complete opposite.

I will defend myself to the death. I’m very direct, I’m very transparent, and I’m terrible at pretending everything is fine when it isn’t. I also have a pretty strong personality and I can be very sharp when someone crosses a line.

For months, I was being treated badly, and my boyfriend kept asking me not to react because he thought that would make things worse. His idea was basically that if I stayed quiet, kept a low profile, and didn’t draw attention to myself, people would eventually leave me alone — and then he would be able to protect me without creating a huge family conflict.

It had the exact opposite effect.

I constantly felt like I had to change myself. I was told, directly or indirectly, to be less visible, less outspoken, less “me.” And then, ironically, I was sometimes criticized for becoming too withdrawn.

After a while, it completely destroyed my confidence.

I spent months feeling like everything about me was somehow wrong. I was constantly adapting myself to avoid conflict, while also feeling like I wasn’t being protected when I actually needed it.

Eventually, other people started pointing things out to my boyfriend.

Friends, family members, and people around us started telling him that there was a lot of jealousy toward our relationship. He loved me very openly. He was affectionate with me in public, extremely generous, helpful, caring, and never embarrassed about showing that he loved me.

Apparently, some women in our community were jealous because they wanted to be loved the way I was loved, while they were in relationships where they felt merely tolerated. And because my boyfriend was so openly loving and generous toward me, it apparently created resentment.

I don’t know how much of that is true, but eventually enough different people independently told him similar things that he finally started seeing what I had been trying to explain to him for a very long time.

And he regrets it immensely.

He now understands what happened. He understands that he failed to protect me when I needed him to. He understands that asking me to shrink myself to avoid conflict wasn’t fair. And ever since, he has been doing everything he can to make things right.

But here’s the problem:

I completely lost my feelings for him.

Or at least, I lost the romantic feelings I used to have.

I still love him deeply. I care about him enormously. I don’t want to lose him. I don’t want another man. I don’t fantasize about leaving and starting over. I know that he loves me, and I know that he is genuinely trying.

But something inside me went cold.

I don’t trust him the way I used to.

When I imagine our future together, I don’t feel completely safe anymore. I find myself thinking that I will always have to be one step ahead, that I will always have to protect myself, that I will always have to recognize people’s bad intentions for both of us.

And that scares me.

Because I don’t want to spend my life feeling like I have to protect my husband from other people’s manipulation.

I know he is kind. I know he has a good heart. I know he would never intentionally hurt me.

But I also think, What if he never becomes capable of seeing the bad in people? What if I always have to be the one who notices it? What if something happens again and I have to wait months for him to understand what I already saw immediately?

And I don’t know how to get past that.

The hardest part is that he is doing everything right now.

He has changed a lot. He has taken responsibility. He is working again. He is trying to build a stable future for us. He is saving money toward a property project we could have together. He wants to be able to provide and build a life with me. He reassures me constantly. He makes efforts every single day.

And yet…

I am irritated by almost everything he does.

Sometimes I feel like even if he gave me the moon, I wouldn’t be satisfied.

And I know that isn’t really about what he’s doing anymore.

It’s about what happened inside me.

I think I spent so long feeling disappointed, unprotected, criticized, and like I had to fight alone that something in me shut down. I stopped seeing him as the person who made me feel safe, and started seeing him as someone I had to be careful around.

And I hate that.

Because I remember how deeply I loved him. I remember how excited I was about our future. I remember how naturally everything felt at the beginning.

And I want that back.

I don’t think the love is completely gone. If it were, I wouldn’t be writing this. I care about him enormously, and I genuinely want our relationship to work. We are each other’s first real love, and I don’t want to throw away four years of love and everything we’ve built together.

I also don’t want advice telling me to break up with him because the relationship is doomed. I understand that this is Reddit and that will probably be the first response from some people, but that’s not what I’m looking for.

I’m trying to understand something else:

Why did I emotionally shut down so completely after everything that happened, even though he has finally understood, taken responsibility, and is doing everything he can to repair things?

And more importantly:

How do I rebuild my trust in him and get my romantic feelings back?

Has anyone experienced something similar — where you still deeply love your partner, but after feeling disappointed or unprotected for a long time, something inside you just switched off?

How did you come back from that?

I don’t expect him to magically become a different person. I don’t want him to lose his kindness or his gentle nature. I just want to stop feeling like I have to be on guard all the time.

I want to be able to look at him again and feel what I used to feel.

So, Reddit, if you’ve been through something similar, what actually helped you reconnect with your partner after resentment and loss of trust had already set in?