What It’s Like To Have A Partner With No Empathy

He’s struggled with this since we met 6 years ago.

The other night my partner and I were settling in, and he squeezed me in close. He let out a big sigh, and it seemed like he had something on his mind. “How do I learn to have empathy?” he asked me.

I really thought for a moment. I told him that I didn’t know. I also said that I think empathy is something you learn in your childhood, usually. Silence fell over us until I interrupted it — “I think no one showed you empathy when you were young, so you never really learned it”.

A lack of empathy is something my partner has always struggled with since we met almost 6 years ago. It’s not something that stood out to me right away, but it’s also not something that went unnoticed for long.

Even in the strangest of circumstances, I have no trouble putting myself in another’s shoes. My partner cannot. Where I can feel the pain of a hurting person, my partner can feel bad for someone else when they hurt, but he only feels his own pain.

He also displays other signs of low empathy like: seeing others as overly sensitive, having an argumentative attitude, aversion to emotional situations, and surprising emotional reactions (rooted in impatience with other people’s feelings).