Why can't I make things work?

[TheGypsy]

March 9th will be 8 months, if we make it there.

 

My girlfriend and I hooked up last summer. She had a crush on me and we worked together. We started dating, and things took off pretty fast and we had really strong feelings about each other/were communicating all the time.

 

Now, I feel like I am in love with her, but we constantly break into arguments of varying degree and while she still seems to love me it feels like she has given up on our relationship working for one reason or another.

 

She says that she feels our differences make it so that we don't see eye to eye and that will cause us to continue to argue, and that whenever we argue she keeps feeling less and less like this can work.

 

I feel that differences only matter as much as anybody makes them matter, and instead focus on the good times we have and try to communicate respectfully through the bad.

 

Her birthday recently passed, and she asked me if I returned her gift, I asked her why I would. She said that she, "Didn't want to hurt me" and that she wasn't sure how much longer we'd be together - but that she wasn't breaking up with me, she wanted to see where things would go.

 

I feel like she has kind of given up on things and is trying to let me down lightly and not right away. I tell her we need to see each other more often and that it would help us (I am at college and she is at home, we see each other once a week if we are lucky, I always push to try to get us to do something, but she's pretty busy and sometimes stuff just falls through) but we talk all the time, and definetly keep in touch.

 

She just doesn't seem as interested as before, we used to be really close physically and emotionally but she says that for her, in relationships, she starts out being really passionate and then as she becomes good friends with the person she just wants to cuddle and spend time with the person - and is annoyed that I keep 'jumping her' when I am around her.

 

She says I don't give her the kind of advice she wants. She calls me and tells me her friend did something that made her angry, I try to diffuse the situation and make her less angry, but she says she feels like I am always against her and not taking her side and 'being too perky when the world really isn't like that' - I tell her I do support her but I am just being diplomatic and don't want her to do anything rash. She says that her friends 'deserve it' and thinks I am being unfair.

 

I've tried so hard to be sweet all the time, to agree with her and support her and try to help her and show her that I need her, but things seem to just end up offending her or she disagrees and we somehow argue or somehow it goes awry.

 

Does she need to find someone more like her? Am I a jerk? I am so confused ... I just want to make things work ...