My boyfriend(21M) and I(20F) are a long distance couple. We were high school sweethearts but him and his family moved out of state during our sophomore year in high school, making us long distance since, only seeing each other about a week or two at a time every 4-5 months. It’s difficult but we make do because we’re both gamers and that’s how we spend most of our free time together.

A couple weeks ago he told me about this new game called Schedule 1 (S1) that he’s been seeing all over the place and it seems like a fun game. He bought the game for me and himself and we began playing on a world together. We were instantly hooked. I did most of the planting and packing while he did the sales and deliveries, we had a good duo dynamic going and I had a blast while we played. He asked me if he could keep playing on our world while I went to work, but I told him I’d prefer if we progressed together. He respected that and started his own solo world to play on when I wasn’t on. After a few days straight of playing S1 together in our free time for hours and nothing else, I began getting a little bored because we usually have some diversity in the games that we play. Before he had the chance to suggest playing S1 again, I told him I was a little bored of it and asked him if he would be down to play Fortnite (our usual game before we found S1) instead. He ignores my request and says, “oh, well maybe you can switch to doing deliveries instead?” Feeling awkward about this response, I just decided on not playing anything at all and continue with a show we were watching. The next day he asked to play again and I replied, “I’m kind of bored of S1, but if you want.” He could sense my tone was unhappy but went along playing anyway. I was feeling awkward for the rest of the night because I felt I wasn’t being taken into consideration. Eventually this awkwardness spiraled into me getting visibly upset and just heading out for the night without talking about it. This upset him and would be the start of a 3-day long fight via text message because he felt I shut him down by not being open about my feelings, and I felt he wasn’t being considerate about what I wanted to do when we hang out. In the midst of this fight, he decided to play on our world that I explicitly told him i didn’t want him to play alone on and proceeded to make a full day’s worth of progress on it without me. He kept saying it was justified because of what I did that night (left without discussing what’s wrong.) I felt betrayed. After a day of arguing about it I got him to admit he was wrong for it and had him delete the world entirely as I felt it was now spoiled and I wouldn’t want to play on it again knowing the progress he made was in bad faith. To this day, I haven’t played S1 with him again but all he does is play on his solo world. I had today off, and this morning he was supposed to have work but he didn’t have any jobs ready for him so he remained on call, though later he found out that he actually just had no work for the day. He typically leaves for work early in the morning so I woke up thinking I’d see his life 360 notification that he left for work like usual but I didn’t. I realized he was and had been playing S1 from the moment he found out he had no jobs and didn’t even text me that he wasn’t going in to work today, which he usually does. When I asked him about it he claimed he forgot to tell me. He later admitted that he actually didn’t want to tell me because he wanted to keep playing S1 and knew that if he told me he had no work I’d want to spend some time with him. I was pretty upset about this because I thought that after those long days of fighting he’d want to spend some time with me to rekindle our relationship, but instead he claimed he wanted to make up for lost time spent on the game.. mind you, he had been playing alone basically the entirety of the days we were fighting. Meanwhile, him and I hadn’t talked or hung out in about 4 days.

Idk guys.. it sounds like he’s addicted to the game to me. AITAH? Let me know.