Originally tried posting on relationship advice but Reddit suggested posting here instead.

I 34F have been dating my boyfriend 26M for almost four years now. I am miserable. I want to leave him but it’s so hard. We live together with my parents, and although we don’t have children together I have a 10 year old son who is pretty close to him.

I keep going back and forth deciding to leave him, I just don’t have the courage.

I’m not happy. I don’t want to live the rest of my life like this. I feel like I’m in an emotional abusive relationship. We have plans to marry and buy a house. But I’m not excited at the thought of him proposing. It feels like a duty or something like that. I’ve invested so much into this relationship that it feels like a waste to just leave. I’m almost $10k in credit card debt that I know he will not help me pay if I leave him. All the cards are under my name. I want to wait to pay it off but at the same time I don’t really care. I just want out. Our relationship started with lies, one major one being him letting me believe he was older than his actual age.

He uses other girls as a way to make me jealous and hurt me. My self esteem has gotten so low, I’m no longer myself. I’ve turned into a person I would feel sorry for. My brain tells me to leave but my heart says to wait and see.

I think he’s a narcissists. He has an anger problem. I don’t like the way he treats me and he doesn’t make me feel loved. He doesn’t smile when he sees me, he’s not happy or excited to see me. I don’t think he loves me but every time I ask he says he does.

When things are good, they are great. He’s sweet and affectionate. He says he needs therapy, and actually just booked his first appointment. This was after years of me telling him he needed to go. He doesn’t want to do couples therapy, he says he wants to fix himself first. I don’t know what to do.

Should I leave him now or wait and see if he changes with therapy? I don’t even know if I want to wait that long even if it does work. Our whole lives are intertwined. He has a relationship with my son, we live together and we work together (different departments but still same company and bosses). I feel like I owe it to him and my self to see if he changes but at the same time, I’m so done with trying to make this work only to go back to the beginning. What do I do? Stay or leave now? How do I get the guts to do it? Would I be an asshole to leave him when he’s trying to get better? And if I do, how am I going to deal with the feeling of loneliness at my age? Most of the people I know are married with children and their own houses. I feel like I would be robbing myself of that future i so desperately want.

Edit: because several comments have mentioned the age gap. We met at a company, the company is made up of people either in their late 20’s and older. When I started working there I was 28 and considered the youngest person there. I assumed he was in his late 20’s or even 30 when he got hired. That’s on me.

What also led me to believe this was the way he spoke. He is so well spoken and at the time seemed pretty mature. He wouldn’t get carded when out in a groups but I would. Even now people are surprised to find out his age because he does look a lot older. When talking to him it sounded like we had the same goals (advance in our jobs, have a family and establish a good home). He knew about my son and he was ok with it. As I mentioned in another comment, his emotional intelligence should have been my first clue. That’s on me. In retrospect, yes I should have left when I found out. But at the time, my thought process was “well we’re already here so might as well keep going”.