Replies to 'Balancing Marriage and Family'

Quote From: keepingcool48

I have been dating my boyfriend for almost 8 years and we are engaged to be married later this year. It seems about once a year he will vent his frustrations with me "things have to change or I'm leaving" and these frustrations of his always involve my daughter. I am a single parent with an 11 year old daughter and he has had issues with her from almost the beginning. He feels she is spoiled and I'm not a good disciplinarian. I agreed with him that I have trouble with discipline but I have improved so much over the years. He will bring up the fact that he feels like it's my daughter and myself against him. He feels "like a roommate", etc. So about a month ago we had a big discussion and talked about many many things, including having my daughter do more things independently, go to bed on time, she needs to stop arguing, etc. It was a very serious but helpful discussion and a lot of good things came out of it. Not one month later he flared up one evening because I was late by 10 mnutes putting her to bed. He feels that by doing that I am not respecting his feelings...he doesn't want her bedtime delayed even 1 minute because that is 1 minute he is missing with me. He threatened to leave. I told him that I messed up, yes I was late putting her to bed, but it wasn't intentional. He said that he didn't care - I should be thinking about it and not letting the bedtime interfere with us. He said that is the only thing he has asked of me. This is a lie and I told him that I have made changes to other things. He said that he basically didn't care about the other things, this one was the important one. I told him that my daughter and I are walking on eggshells, afraid to screw up on something and he'll walk. That made him upset too. I then asked him if he wanted his ring back - he answered "I'm thinking about it." Well, I took off the ring and have not worn it since. I know he notices that I am not wearing it but I don't feel that I should. I feel like I am on probation and being engaged isn't being on probation. If he leaves, my life will be upside down. My first husband left me without notice while I was 3 months pregnant with my daughter and the thought of going through that again makes me physically ill. I feel like I'm being bullied but again, I understand his past frustrations and I thought we were making great strides. But I feel that he is being unreasonable that if my daughter's bedtime routine is off by a few minutes that that is reason for him to leave. Any advice?