I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m involved with someone who keeps disappearing. She has a difficult home situation so I’m really understanding about her vanishing. But she’s giving me emotional whiplash which is driving me to self-harm. I am losing count of how many nights I’ve cried myself to sleep over her. She tells me she loves me more than anyone, then tells me that actually we aren’t “together”. She tries to ‘check in’ and says she never wants me to feel like she’s using me, then says I’m her “number one person”, then does whatever I told her hurts me again and again. She took me out of her bio on the one app we chat on, sometime in the last 2 weeks while I’ve been sick, and I’ve spent the last 24 hours very nearly suicidal. When I asked two of my closest friends if they think I’m letting myself be mistreated, they both said yes.
I don’t know how to deal with this. I wrote this girl a 15 page note which might be the sweetest thing I’ve ever written someone which I had told her I’d show her today and instead I find out she’s taken me out of her bio and there’s no sign of her at all (she hasn’t responded to any messages in 12 days). We’d talked about her moving in with me in the future, and she seemed to want it very badly, but we’re not “together”?
I am so hurt and confused. I don’t know how to deal with this. I’ve trusted her in a way I hadn’t trusted anyone in a long time and now it feels like that choice could have been a mistake and if it WAS it will destroy me.
That sounds terrible I’m so sorry. Ending this would be devastating. I want so so badly to be there for this person who is so sweet to me in person and clearly NEEDS someone to be on her side for once. But the thing where she took me out of her bio really feels close to a last straw. That’s like… taking away even the token gesture that I mean anything. At least, that’s how it feels. And I’m the kind of person who really breaks down without an affectionate partner in my life.
This is a good thing to recognize, and I think I struggle with this myself, but it is indicative of work that you need to do. Dependence on a partner for emotional stability is always going to fail.
It’s a hard truth, but nobody is going to care about your feelings and support you in life like you will. Nobody is going to advocate for you like you will. Taking care of yourself and making yourself happy is ultimately your responsibility, and offloading that onto another person is unfair. And if this relationship makes you feel like killing yourself, I’d suggest to you that it’s not making you happy, and it’s time to investigate in therapy why you’re thinking about killing yourself at all.
It’s extremely difficult, there may be some white-knuckle moments, but you will get through it. And on the other side, there is nothing hotter than a partner who is in tune with their emotions and responsible with them. It just takes a lot of work, and, yes, failure, to get there.
edit: My personal opinion and experience with romance is that there is more than one right person out there for you, which is lucky, because you will fuck up a few times. I have met many wonderful and kind people with whom I could see myself having a loving and stable future, and one or both of us fucked it up because we were young or silly or ignorant or whatever. I don’t think about those people every day anymore, but I do carry that love with me. Sometimes the love I’ve lost feels like an incredible weight, but here’s the thing about carrying weight around all the time: it makes you fucking jacked. I am so much more equipped to cherish and uplift a partner today from those experiences.
I’m sorry but this isn’t how it works for me. I strongly believe that some of us were meant to be in partnerships. I know it doesn’t come off at all with all the macabre stuff I’m into, but I’m sincerely a hopeless romantic at heart. I don’t buy that people have to learn to be happy alone or that it’s even a good thing to feel complete without a partner (aro comrades willingly excluded of course). I do think there’s a lot to the idea of being the best version of yourself that you can be in order to be the “you” that your future partner deserves, but that isn’t quite the same as being happy without a partner.
Also, just for what it’s worth, it isn’t the relationship that makes me want to KMS. It’s the times that i’m worried for a week plus that I’ve lost her to circumstances totally out of my reach because of how things are going in her life. It’s the absences. When she’s there, in person, it’s amazing. Like… everything I ever wanted amazing.
I hope all of that made sense and doesn’t feel hostile. I know this can be a touchy subject for me, but hexbear being hexbear I want to engage you as a comrade.
No offense taken comrade, it’s a challenging situation and emotions are on the surface, I totally understand that.
I largely agree with you; I know I want a partner to share life with. I hate being single just because it feels like a waste of time when I know I could be sharing a loving relationship with someone and building something, and even in my most stable and happy times, if I’m single I feel like there’s something missing in my life.
I don’t want to be prescriptive towards you and your situation, so I’ll only speak for myself: No matter how much a partner might help me, and be part of my support network, I know that my mental health struggles are mine and mine alone to deal with. That does not mean that I am alone in dealing with them, but that only I can do the work to cope with them and enforce healthy cognitive patterns to keep me afloat and functional. Only I can decide that I want to continue to live, and then work to make that a bearable situation in my mind. My partner cannot extract the suicidal thoughts from my head, cannot protect me from them, and cannot resolve them for me. It is very scary and traumatic for people to be with someone who thinks about killing themselves, and so whether I am single or not, it is my and only my responsibility to be in control of my mental state. That does not mean being OK all the time, but it does mean that I am not presenting my partner with problems for them to fix, I am just leaning on them for support and affirmation when I am tired or discouraged from the task of working on myself.
So that’s what I mean. And now to be a bit prescriptive, but only out of love, and you can take it or leave it: Thoughts of killing yourself are no joke, and while they might passively cross everyone’s mind from time to time, if they are a recurring problem for you, it’s something that you really owe yourself to address seriously. And the process of addressing why you have suicidal thoughts can be really challenging and ugly and dark, and taking a partner along with you on that journey might only serve to make it more difficult for the both of you, because while reckoning with that demon, you may not have the capacity to devote to another person what they deserve, and worrying about that takes away from the attention and energy that you deserve.
Just my two cents from my own personal experience of falling in love while struggling with depression. Even if you read this and say, “nah fuck that,” I’ll be glad if it helps you find some kind of truth for yourself.