I have been developing and working on my spiritual beliefs quite a bit more for a while now. I have always been somewhat spiritual and my boyfriend has always known this. He is not spiritual at all, and that's fine with me, not an issue.

The issue is, that I want to be able to be open and share this part of my life with him. I don't ever try to push my beliefs on him, and I actually do not talk about it that much at all. The times I have tried to share something with him, I am met with " haha, that isn't real", " That's just made up" , or "if that was real then (x) wouldn't happen". It leaves me feeling rather invalidated, and I feel like he thinks it's just silly. Honestly it hits me on a level of not feeling respected.

I have already told him that I would like to be able to share some of my thoughts with him, and that it is an important part of my life. I really don't know what more I can do, I don't want this to come down to me having to keep all my spiritual beliefs to myself, and not even be able to talk about it a bit. Which is pretty much how I feel at the moment. I am not fanatical, and I am not religious either. When he talks about his beliefs I do listen to him and ask questions, I am interested in what he believes, even if it is different than my own beliefs. I would like to feel supported in the same way.

Do any of you have any ideas on how I can communicate this ?? He tends to be quite defensive about stuff like this, and I really try to approach things in a way that avoids confrontation, but even then he still perceives it to be an attack. However I feel like when I try to hard to avoid conflict in communication with him, that a lot of times he doesn't really hear my message at all.

Thanks for reading, and any input, ideas, thoughts are appreciated.