How do I do that while being a good boyfriend? I always want to make her happy.

We don’t live together so these usually start with a FaceTime right when I’m off work and her in tears due to whatever issue she’s facing that day. If I was like “I’m sorry I have to go” I can almost guarantee id get a text that said “are u mad at me?” as soon as I hung up. I don’t think I’d be able to pull that off without seeming cold and distant and likely exasperating her sadness because she’d take it as I don’t care about her or her feelings.

I honestly attribute it to how she was raised. She had parents who would call the teacher or coach if she did not make the team or get what she wanted. I think it’s made her very fragile as an adult, which she is also self aware of at least. She is also not entitled luckily but I think she just isn’t able to handle when shit happens.

I may bring up therapy and getting checked for hormone issues. She also has a stressful job so if I had to guess your probably right about things bubbling over.

In the application example, I had to suggest that she email someone from where she was applying for assistance. This completely fixed her problem and she was super happy it got resolved and also stopped her crying. Had I not helped her work through it, I’m not sure she would have ever gotten it resolved or at least not as quickly as she needed to get it done.

She definitely wants my help. The crying usually starts with something like “I am overwhelmed and don’t know what to do, this is so hard”. She’s not really the “I can do this myself and figure it out” type. She’s more of a “ugh this is so hard, why is it so hard (cue crying)” type. I really wish it wasn’t like this though but some of these stuff I don’t think she’d ever be able to do on her own.

Another crying example was she has a technology assignment for her education masters and couldn’t understand how to use the tools she needed to use. She said she spent the last 3 hours crying and the assignment was due in a couple hours and she wasn’t close to finishing it. Im pretty good with technology so I came over and helped her with it and she was extremely appreciative.

Just little stuff like that where her first instinct is to cry and come to me instead of solving stuff on her own. I like helping her but it definitely bothers me. What do I do? Do I just sit back and let her fail? Do I just say “wow that’s really hard, sorry to hear that” over and over?

When people say “sometimes people just need to vent and aren’t looking for you to solve their problem” what do they mean? There’s only so long I can sit there and say “yeah that’s hard I’m sorry you have to deal with that” (I’ve gone like 30 minutes straight of this) before I just start offering solutions because that usually ends the whole fiasco much quicker.