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The original was posted on /r/twoxchromosomes by /u/crispyapplee on 2023-07-29 06:06:16.

This is a weird, complicated situation but I’d really appreciate it if someone could tell me whether I’m making the right choice here.

  1. My East Asian bf grew up in a conservative culture. He came to my country for higher education.
  2. Over the years he would have narrow-minded opinions that weren’t too surprising. E.g discomfort over LGBTQ+ folks topics in the media but tolerating it. Thinking the All Lives Matter movement makes sense because all lives do matter, and not taking the time to understand why this was at its core problematic
  3. We had a heated argument today where we spoke of feminism. His country has extremist feminist groups so he has a warped view of what feminism is like. There is a literal gender war in his country. He thinks the average woman is a misandrist and because of the news he’s read (extremist feminists insulting men that serve, etc) he’s not comfortable with the word feminism. He thinks it should be called equalism. He brought up how men in his country are required to serve, how men do physical labour jobs but the women in the same factory get paid more for packing boxes. He empathises with his male friends that had to go to the army and got abused. He got physically abused in the army as well by a senior. I’m providing all this context to explain why feminism is a totally different concept there.
  4. I spoke on the importance of feminism and hate crimes done to women every day and he said that ultimately it’s just bad people doing bad things. I said that by reducing it to “bad people” it erases the identity of women and the struggles they face because of this identity. He said that he doesn’t like how feminists portray all men to be evil and that I am implying the same thing and making him feel like he’s just another trash man. He said that I’m just reducing people to one characteristic and that ultimately it’s not men vs women it’s just good people and bad people. He brought up male victims of SA hurt by women and said that I don’t care about them but they exist. And that his argument is that anybody can be a victim and he empathizes with everybody that struggles and naturally sympathises with other males because of his lived male experience.
  5. He accused me of painting all men as evil and making him feel bad about himself for not wanting to call himself a feminist. The trigger was when we spoke about my experience with SA and he felt extremely pained that he wasn’t there at the time to help me. And that he does care when women struggle but he hates that society doesn’t care enough about men’s issues either.
  6. The argument got heated and he just wanted to break up. A few hours later after he calmed down he called me again and apologised. And said that he’d do more reading up on diverse news and not just news that he wants to read or news that affects him only. But I was so hurt by the things he said and the way he just flippantly broke up to hurt me and then changed his mind.

I decided to just go through with the break up because I was crying my ass off at that point. He’s also Christian, I’m atheist. That was the fundamental difference in our relationship that I also sometimes felt uncomfortable by.

But I’m starting to regret it. I don’t know if I was being too harsh and not giving him a chance to grow and better himself. We are momentarily long distance and we were going to get engaged in December when I planned to go to his country.

I really really love this person. He saved me from my abusive family and has given me so much in the past 5 years. I am starting to regret my choice. He begged me to reconsider and cried and it tore my heart apart.

I feel like I’m not giving him a chance to better himself especially considering the environment he grew up in and he still lives there where there is a literal gender war. I haven’t had to live his experience of going to the army and throwing away 2 years of his life. I haven’t had to be exposed to extremist feminist groups (there are quite a lot there, literal misandrists). Please give me some perspective. I really care about this person. And my mind is in a frenzy right now where I’m panicking from a 5 year relationship with my best friend going down the drain.