Relationship troubles

Hello, I am using a throwaway account since I don't want this account publicly associated with the rest of my Internet persona. Some identifying info will be fudged for the sake of keeping as anonymous as possible.

Me and my partner of nine years have been constantly fighting about little things these days. The fights have started from shallow stuff. From my perspective, it usually starts out of silly things. One recurring thing is that sometimes, working from home, I want some hugs every now and then during the day. The problem is he's watching Netflix or whatever and doesn't want to be interrupted midmovie. He complains I asked for them too frequently, which is fair. But I think the cause is when he does accept my proposal to hug, I'm just the one hugging him and he's still watching the movie. Gives me a tap in the back of what objectively could be a hug but there is just no emotion.

Alright, getting annoyed is one thing and should be easy to fix. However, he does some variant of "escaping the conversation". Whether it's leaving the room suddenly or answering questions in what I think is bad faith. All of these, in his head, I know he has a rationalization. Leaving the room, according to him, is good for calming down. And he's read that somewhere. Can't refute that. But what I try to explain, and am probably not explaining well, is that he just can't leave me like that because it feels like he doesn't care about it. I find it very disrespectful, it makes me angry, and it just elevates what could have been a quick discussion to some big blown-up fight where no one is really sure anymore how it started or why it dials up to 11 very quickly.

I've recently started opening up to friends out of desperation. He "does not like" that our friends know about our business. Relationship troubles and all. I understand, and I tried to respect this wish for the nine years we've been together. But now I'm desperate, I did start talking about it with friends. They gave me a lot of insights that I didn't have before and they pinpointed that the biggest obstacle we have is proper communication.

In the beginning, I talk and let him talk. But his responses are one-liners like "yes" or "sure". Which is completely ambiguous if it is in agreement to what I just said or if it is just to signify that he's listening. This gave me the tendency to talk more. Because either the conversation finishes there, which according to him is already concluded because he agreed to what I wanted. The thing that is lacking is some sort of feeling of warmth or empathy. In principle, "yes" already does the "admin part" but "yes I understand what you mean and I will try to do better" takes care of the emotional side. This is something that I have tried explaining but unfortunately in vain. Maybe it's his blind side.

I don't think anything of what he's doing is malicious or intentionally done to make me angry. I think it's just how he is. I don't think he realizes it. And as someone who cares for him, I hope he does.

The status now is that we are "broken up". I'd like to mark that with an asterisk because our fights these past few weeks end up with someone saying they want to break up. It has since elevated to "we are breaking up". It's getting tiring. I know that this relationship is down in the gutter. However, I am still optimistic for that Disney ending where we all realize our problems and live happily ever after.

But yeah. I really don't know what I want in posting this. I think I just need to pass the time since we are both currently in the same apartment. It's big enough that we have our own rooms for these trying times. Advice and analyses and opinions are certainly welcome. Obviously, there's bias for me since I wrote it. So yeah. Open to anything. Thanks for reading in any case.