Thank you a lot Annika. I hesitated a lot before posting my story on a forum and i didn’t really where i could find a place which would fit to what i expected. I’m so thankful to have found this site and mostly you.

Many people told me that i didn’t have to figure everything out and that i should simply follow my way. There is a part of true here. But this is not how i work. What if a problematic situation could be solved instead of being directly thrown away? What if we just missed out something? What if some behaviors were just driven by a specific situation or a disorder? Nothing is all black or all white after all. I hate the fact that most part of people simply tell me “it is just the way it is, there is nothing you can do, stop wasting your time”. We are so much more complex than our appearances and some people are worth to be “dug down”. Not because we feel the need to save or rescue them but simply because we primarily value them as human being i guess. I need to understand, to solve the puzzle. Maybe it’s a flaw, i don’t really know. In my situation for sure it would have been easier if we had split up after a fight or if the mutual interest (both physical and intellectual) would have faded away. To be fair i don’t really know if i’m being too optimistic or no.

Anxiety kicks really hard in all of these disorders. To be honest, i used to think that it was an independent disorder. I don’t really remember hearing my therapist talking about that when i got diagnosed. (To be honest when i attended my therapy my ADHD was reaching a pic extremely high and i couldn’t focus longer than 5min literally and i was pretty young so..). OCD is also something which is extremely new for me. I had the cliche of the person who spends his time cleaning after her without really understand what could cause that behavior. But now i realize that it’s so much deeper than that (like every mental disorders actually).

“in light of this diagnosis (assuming he received this diagnosis?)” => Yes he did, he has been officially diagnosed OCD last week. I would gladly hear your input about what he said/did.

So to start off, many times when we talked about more or less imaginary situations, he always saw the negative/worst side of them (e.g: once we were walking and we saw a car randomly doing round trips, he said “yeh it must be a drug dealer and he’s doing that because he’s hiding drugs or i don’t know what..”. Another time we talked about hitchhiking, i told him i practiced it a lot when i traveled around the nordic countries a few years ago. He replied by “ehh.. i wouldn’t dare neither doing it nor taking someone, in the first case i would think that the person won’t depose me where i want and in the second case, i would think that i’m being trapped by different people”. And on a deeper level which affects the relations, “when something with someone could be serious, i automatically think about wedding and i panick”, “i don’t want children because what if something bad happen to them? Or they turn into killer/rapper?”). I’m someone extremely optimistic and i tend to see only the good and positive in people and situations so sometimes when he acted this way i was a bit confused so obviously i tried to make him see the good side of the stories. Although i know sometimes i didn’t have the will to do it so i just embraced the spiral with him.

Second, he had some food-habits at university (nothing concerning, he just liked a lot eating vegetables for his snack-break) but someone told him that it was unusual and that person haven’t seen someone before doing that. He talked a lot of time about that, i was wondering why until i realized he was low-key asking me if i found that weird or no (which i told him definitely no). To be fair it was a part of the micro-attractions i got toward him haha.

Third and maybe the most delicate part concerns the relation itself. He knew i wasn’t really the hookup or a simple fling type. The first time he panicked (“yeah i want to see you but as friend”, “when something could get serious with someone i automatically…”) he was the one to talk about commitment. I told him and i quote myself “i would like to take things easy and just see how it goes at the moment”, never i talked about being committed. And when he decided to stop everything he once again talked about commitment and WEDDING. And i quote myself another time “i didn’t want that you feel it became a burden and it was just about following what you wanted to do, if you wanted to talk and nothing more” (related to his issues showing up). For a longtime i thought “why the hell on earth did he block on that? i’ve never talked about that and.. logically, being serious toward someone doesn’t mean in any way expecting a ring after a few month or whatever..”. Now, what if the idea of commitment became an intrusive thought since the first time he got his panick-attack? Is that even possible? I told him “we talk a lot, there is a good flow between us, i’d like to give a try” and nothing more really commitment related. But i know he overthought a LOT during that short period. What if he couldn’t get rid of that idea of “being in relationship means that we’ll get married but i’m not ready for that but her yes”? To be honest sometimes it feels like, he wants a relationship yet he’s not ready because he doesn’t have the energy for (all his issues and starting a therapy are valuable reasons for me tho..) somehow.

Four, after he got called out by his mother about his feminine side, he talked a lot about his masculinity, saying many times he was a hetero-cis male. But the most important point here is that he became to be physically detached, he started to isolate himself and act in more “bashful” way (he got shy to show some part of his body for example).

Also, after we got our final grades (me being valedictorian, him not passing), he started to talk about our personal achievements and he had a lot sentences such as “again, i’m sure you have plenty of achievements, merits and good grades to show”, “yeah but also i’m 23 and i still live at my parent’s house” (here this is more about the tone he said the sentence). But i told him that my goals were kinda high because of my final purposes and what we studied was the thing i wanted to work in while he was going to follow another study path.

I think there are more examples but those are the only ones i can think about at the moment.