I've been struggling really hard and I would appreciate any help so much.
Short story:
My boyfriend was pining after me and super kind whilst in a long distance relationship for years and then suddenly flipped on me and has been on and off cold and loving, not interested in sex anymore and just closed off in general. I don't know the right ways to go about it since he does not give me much feedback. He tells me he wants to marry me and love me at times then just closes off and seems like a different person other times.
Long story:
I met a guy online years ago who immediately fell in love with me. I was 18, struggling and depressed but I wasn't into it at first. He talked about killing people and watched edgy videos and seemed so out there. He obsessed over me and pressured me and I was never receptive to a relationship. However, he'd call me so much that we started to bond and he started to change. He became kind and loving, got very spiritual, claimed he was a medium. He told me he had acted like that before as a defense mechanism and it was just him being super numb. He had tried to commit suicide before we met and cut and hurt himself.
For years he kept up this sweet guy persona but he would overdo the compliments and love: telling me he loved me more than his family, that he'd die without me, he loved my energy and more than I could ever know. He would call me a goddess and gave me a sense of worth I never oculd find in myself as I had a difficult foundation of life. Things got harder in my life and worse and worse and my depression and anxiety got bad. I started to cling too much but i managed to still go to school and friends and manage a life. However, he'd get anxious whenever i wasn't there, if I left because i was upset he'd spam call me. He made a strange moves sometimes like using my pictures to catfish people on a game, lying to me, telling me he loved me but never really made moves to do anything nice for me much other than be there for me when i was sad. He was a great friend when i was upset and i won't knock him. I don't know where i would be without the support he gave me.
The last year i started to become more receptive to the relationship. He's in his early 20s now and he hadn't been to college or worked much. He lives in Canada and me in the United States and I wanted to see him progress his life in order for me to take the relationship seriously because long distance wasn't something in the books for me but I had fallen in love anyway. He came to visit me in August and it went well for most part other than him acting a bit childish in ways and that turned me off and confused me.
However we started to argue more. I really needed comfort and support and he wasn't the best at giving it. I'd ask him to sit and talk to me and he'd get distracted and not be able to give me much.
It was confusing and at the time i didn't understand. Sometimes the littlest thing would send me over and I would break down and i was just suicidally depressed the last year.
PLEASE READ just was going wrong in every direction and it felt like at moments my mind just shut down and i'd curse at him to push him away and leave but then I'd want him to call me back so bad to comfort me. I lost my kind and patient self I grew up with and I'd actually get mean with him and it hurt me a lot. I didn't understand how this side of me had been brought out. It felt like I could shut down and feel nothing and feel like at that moment nothing mattered because i had decided 100% suicide was the answer.
Then i broke down one day to him when he told me he was very depressed and needed him because I had been pushing him to get help and to take care of himself for years and he just wouldn't care. I told him we needed space and to be better friends to each other and he needed to definitely get help but I just was rough and harsh about it and I don't know why. I had just been desperate I guess. I also felt like I couldnt get help myself and im sure it frustrated him because I felt my family had too many problems and was too sad for me to add to it and like we couldn't afford therapy anyway. I had tried antidepressants and many of them made me feel sick or didn't work so I had given up on them.
Then on Valnetines day we agreed to be valentines and work on our relationship. But something was off about him. So i called him crying that night and then he screamed at me that he had been waiting for me to get therapy for 5 years and the more i cried the meaner he got, telling me my crying made him frustrated. I was so freaked out since he had always been so kind and gentle with me and he was so different it made me puke from stress. Then he broke up with me and I was crying, unable to eat and more hurting than I'd ever felt in my life for week. He talked to me on and off and suddenly that guy who liked villainizing himself was back and he would say edgy things about killing and such again. I was so confused and upset. Two weeks in from the breakup he messaged me that he missed me and wanted me back. I agreed, thinking he was going to therapy still.
Then corona happened so he didn't. He would on and off be really sweet again, telling me he loved me and wanted to be with me, marry me, etc, but would show more excitement towards a video game and play it for hours, show more excitement about talking to random new people from the game. He seems to be perfectly okay with not spending much time with me at all and it feels like now i'm doing the chasing and trying. We had been two peas in a pod and best friends for so long that I didn't get it. I had always wanted him to make some friends of his own as he had none but I didn't expect to mean so little because of it. I wrote him a love letter apologizing for the things I did wrong and how i'd fix them, got into therapy, been really feeling more like myself personality wise actually since the breakup. It was like something lifted and I could control my emotions again. I bought him premium for his game when he asked, which I found strange of him to ask his girlfriend. I started playing it with him since i like games and he seemed to relaly enjoy having me with his friends so he could just hang with us all at same time.
He got nicer and nicer again as time progressed but the excitement of before was still gone. I could probably not talk to him all day and he wouldn't care. He's very moody with his affection, going into phases where he talks about how angry he is. He shakes and get so anxious when it comes to the game and being in group voices and will want to leave me to go back when he's alone with me. He says its only thing keeping him sane but it seems to have become his reality. He no longer wants to do anything sexual with me and says he lost his sex drive. I've been trying my best to be kind and supportive as I do really love him, but i had almost broke up with him since last week he said he wanted to make a chaturbate account, something you masturbate on for people to pay you on a live stream, to make money for "better food." He said this in front of our friends we had been talking to and I was embarrassed. They knew i hadn't said I was okay with it so i messaged him that he had made me sad and he said he was sorry and that he wouldn't do it.
He told me he also feels nothing towards the future and its hard for him to fully grasp marrying me and though its ideal, it doesn't feel real. He said he only lives in present and that even his family members don't mean much to him unless they're there with him. Sometimes me giving him attention seems to push him away and I find myself yearning for his attention again since the inconsistency is frsutrating. i feel stressed out and awful all the time and I'm not sure how to deal with this situation in a way that's good for both of us
