This is a tough one. You love your boyfriend, but you guys are not compatible on many issues. Read this on compatibility. You and he are very different on many key variables: introversion/extroversion, pet ownership, messiness, planning ability, marriage, and kids. You didn’t say anything about money or sex, but neither may be as much of any issue at this early stage. However, later on, people who differ on how orderly they need to be in life often disagree about financial management, and people who are hard to please in other areas can be hard to please in bed.
Your boyfriend sounds like an anxious and/or highly sensitive person. You may be a little ADHD or just super laid back. Either way, tethering yourself to him for a lifetime (along with kids that you are ambivalent about having) would not be the best idea. You might easily end up feeling like the men do in this article.
The most common personality-level reason that I see for divorce is that one partner no longer wants to tolerate the rigidity and overall “difficulty” of the other. The next most common is that one partner no longer wants to tolerate the irresponsibility and “childishness” of the other. (Here are some examples; you’re usually the gender-inverse of these examples as it’s more common for women to struggle with anxiety overall) These two types of people usually find one another and try to change each other. When this works, great, and both partners end up more in the middle of the spectrum. When it doesn’t work out, people spend their lives endlessly irritated and frustrated, and/or divorce.
Also, let’s be clear. Your boyfriend is correct to be worried that you want to move out, and you were correct to freak out when he wanted to. Both of you having the idea to live separately is not a good sign for the future of the relationship by any metric. Let’s also be clear on that your boyfriend has had plenty of time to adjust to living with a dog, and it didn’t work for him. If he has children with you, he will likely be highly organized and anxious about them, which you will likely see as rigid and un-fun. If he does not have children, he will likely regret this, as the majority of people do who sacrifice having kids for a partner’s desires.
I believe that your subconscious told you to move out because you realize there isn’t much future here, but it was too scary to make a clean break. You are not married, there are no kids, and you don’t even live together anymore. There are many men who would treat you kindly and undramatically, love your dog, love your laid back messy self, and not care either way about kids. Find one of them in your new city, along with meeting new friends and generally having fun. Or get a new job somewhere totally different, because you were probably more inclined to take this position because it was his hometown. Enjoy your life and don’t lock yourself into a dynamic where living together is a struggle.
As an aside, since you read my blog I know you like to delve into the deeper meanings of things. I am guessing that your parents had a dynamic where one was messy and one was neat, or one was anxious and one was not. You may then assume that all people need to struggle with these types of personality differences. Let me tell you from clinical and personal experience, life is a lot easier when you match up with your partner on personality style. Opposites attract is better for rom-coms than marriage.
Note: for all the people who say, “But my partner and I are opposites and we have been happily married for decades,” I say, I bet you anything that you are similar on KEY VALUES, like the value of marriage and children, or you have similar thoughts on big issues like education/politics/religion. Often compatibility on key values can override personality trait differences. (In this case though, you and your boyfriend don’t match on many biggies including marriage, kids, or pets.)
Best of luck, and keep me posted. Till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, You Are Young, And Many Guys Love Dogs.