My needy girlfriend wants more affection than I can give: what do I do?

‘It might be that your girlfriend’s are words of affirmation and physical touch, while yours might be acts of service and quality time,’ says Kenny (Photo: VioletaStoimenova/Getty)

My first question: what is your ideal level of affection? You say your girlfriend would like to live in a world where you tell her you love her regularly. How frequently would you like to affirm, celebrate and recognise your love? I ask this because it’s very hard to know whether you have a girlfriend who needs lots of reassurance, whether you might be at least slightly love avoidant, whether your love languages are different so you’re both left with a feeling that your need for love isn’t currently being met by each other, or whether there’s a mix of all of the above.

Love languages are the ways we receive and express love in a relationship. These are split into five groups: words of affirmation, touch, acts of service, gift giving and quality time (which tends to be uninterrupted by phones and distractions). I’d recommend that you find out both your own and each other’s love languages, as this might be the root of your “incompatibility”.

It might be that your girlfriend’s are words of affirmation and physical touch, while yours might be acts of service and quality time. Quality time for you might be different to her, while yours might be doing an activity together, hers might involve spending time hugging and talking – at some level, being together.

If you know your partner’s love language, you’ll know how to communicate in a way she’s receptive to. So rather than, for example, showing your love through thoughtful fixing things, if she’s more receptive to words, you can spend time talking.

If you want to give her a gift, then engrave it with kind words so she feels safe, loved and appreciated. You might decide you need dedicated cooking time to talk. Is this something you could dedicate some time to? Relationships are like gardens: they become weedy and wild if they’re not tended to.

From your girlfriend’s perspective, is she behaving normally and you’re the love avoidant? What happens when you are affectionate? Does it reassure her? Or is she always wanting more?

Were you smothered as a child, and expected to be responsible for the needs of the women? Were you free-spirited and didn’t really need to think of others because everything just seemed to fall into place?

Or wasn’t it your problem as you opted out of the family dynamics and let them get on with it? It will surely be insightful to examine your own, as well as your girlfriend’s needs and behaviour, so you can see the dynamic – then you’ll have options to change gear.

Does this stem from her history: was she neglected as a child, or betrayed by a previous boyfriend leading to her need to check she’s safe; or has she suffered a trauma in her life where physical touch – the hugs you say she craves – makes her feel safe and brings her back into her body? How comfortable do you feel with that role in her life?

Whatever the reason behind the imbalance in your relationship, I’d recommend that you address it firstly by communicating in your girlfriend’s love language, and asking her to communicate in yours. I suspect that so much of the tension, feelings of overwhelm and sense of duty from you, and feelings of neglect and abandonment from her, will fall by the wayside.

It is then that you can find common ground to really explore whether or not you’re compatible in the long term, or whether your relationship has been the perfect catalyst for you to find out who you are, who you no longer need to be, enabling you both to love yourselves and each other enough to let each other go and grow.