Myself (31F) and my partner (32M) been together 3 1/2 years, feeling distant:

TL;DR: stay at home mom and overworked partner not being intimate and it's crushing my feels. I feel totally hopeless.

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I'm feeling down. I am a SAHM of a 5 year old, homeschooling and dealing with disability. My partner works full time. We are very low income. So there's always some level of stress. He's also autistic and I have ADHD, plus we have differing attachment styles. I really love co-regulation for one and he likes to run and hide. I like to communicate and sometimes he gets a bit...prickly.

Things have been tense recently. I know he is bummed because he didn't get the job transfer he has been waiting months for. They took him off the schedule in preparation for the move to his new location, just for his replacement to no call no show. This has happened at least 3 times now of them getting his hopes up and then him getting stuck. They tried to appease him by offering to give him rides to work 3 days a week (because he bikes so far), when that really isn't the issue. It's not about biking. It's about the fact that he works across town 5 days a week and when you add the working hours, the lunch break and the commute time, he's gone from 9am til 8pm. Just to clarify, they're offering to give him a ride to work an entire hour before his shift starts so it saves literally no time. In fact, he loses time. After work, he comes home to me wanting to talk and my kid wanting to play or her wanting us to stop talking to each other because it's boring.

We ask a lot of him at home too. He does a lot of the cooking and dishes, for example. Between that, work and being around an energetic kid in his only spare time, it just seems like too much for him sometimes. I want to try and find ways to help him meet his needs. But I also need my needs met. And I'm just feeling like an afterthought lately. I've made multiple attempts to connect with him intimately, offering to buy protection, which he has rejected and each time he goes to the store he comes back with just food. I get that we are broke, but that $10 would last us weeks, if not months, with how little alone time we get, and it would show that he cares about connecting intimately. I'm getting real tired of putting out these bids for affection just to be constantly rejected.

And yet I'm not being 100% rejected. We have little sneaky moments of fun here and there. But, just the nature of things, it ends up being mostly about his pleasure. So I get all excited about connecting and then he has his moment and we go our separate ways. Part of it is we don't get much time alone. Part of it is my kid has been staying up until midnight. But part of it is...idk. Me asking if he wants to try tomorrow night and him saying, idk lets see how we both feel tomorrow. Logically, duh. Yeah, we should be able to check in with how we feel in the actual moment. Or maybe he doesn't want to get his hopes up because our bedtime schedule has been so funky. But the lack of effort, the refusing to buy protection and the -yeah idk maybe- in response to -do you wanna hang out?- is all kind of.....draining.

I just feel idk, sad, I guess. It makes me want to be more distant because I've been trying to be closer and he's not going for it. And really, I KNOW how hard it is in our household. We have close to zero moments to even make the attempt at connecting. Let alone enough time to ourselves to decompress and reclaim our spoons. But even if I just heard him say that he wanted to put in the effort. The effort to buy some damn condoms and have them in the closet just in case we happen to find a moment...that would be enough.

Anyway, he went to the store for groceries again. I told him earlier today he could use my card for this purpose. But we are broke. And he never said he'd do it. So, I'm mostly just waiting to see what he comes home with. If he comes home empty-handed again, I'm probably going to just go hide in my room and mope. So there's my petty relationship drama of the day.