Dear miyoid:

A little background: you’ve been living with your boyfriend for a year. At one time, while living together, he looked into your computer records and found some photos and messages between you and ex boyfriends, and he started to obsess about those photos and messages, feeling tormented.

In August 2020, he wanted to break up with you “because he is sick of himself for harming me emotionally”.  in December 2020, he wanted to break up with you again because “he’s harming me, himself, physical objects as well”.

On December 30, 2020, he was “considering having an affair or flirting with another person just to stay alive”. He told you that he “wants to be by my side but he also needs stuff to try to feel alive. He is sure that he still loves me. But considers all the stuff I did with my ex-boyfriends (such as camping…) as ‘living’. And he thinks that he didn’t do any of those in the past, so he feels left-alone”.

Less than two months later, Feb 10 or 11, 2021, you found out that he cheated on you, “he flirted with that girl and that girl came into our house.. I was at the office.. He says that he was only trying to ‘feel something’. It didn’t work.. he was not sincere at all”, and you cried a lot, just as you cried every time he wanted to break up with you (“I have to get up in 3 hours and try to make my eyes look better because of all the swelling crying will cause”, Feb 11).

In December last year, you wrote that he mentioned that he might have Borderline Personality Disorder, that he read about it and it fit. You then read about it and compared the symptoms you read about with his behavior. You wrote that “a single word can change his mood enormously”, that he “doesn’t know what he wants.. he questions that so much that he decides he just doesn’t want to exist.. dwelling on that indecisiveness”, that he is “very much” acts impulsively, self-harms and has suicidal feelings. Previously you shared that while living with you, he tried to commit suicide/ made suicidal gestures repeatedly, was hospitalized following one of those attempts, and that he is been put on various psychiatric drugs.

Your very recent thoughts and feelings: “I don’t know what to do… My fears, abandonment issues are all freaking out and fighting with the self-respect.. I feel, idk, burnt out.. empty, shocked.. I desperately need this support to stay alive”, and you figure that “his behaviors are just some trials to feel alive. He wants to be dead almost every second. I’m sure when he wakes up.. he’ll want to kill himself. I doubt he’ll do that. But I know he’ll feel terrible for making me cry again”.

My current thoughts and feelings:

(1) He is angry at you from time to time for having had relationships with other men before him. He obsesses about it, seeing images of you with this or that man as if they were happening now. I am guessing that he wanted to get even with you by being with another woman now, to .. kind of balance the unfairness of you being with another man with him being with another woman.

(2) I am guessing that in addition to being angry at you, he also feels guilty for hurting you, feeling responsible for you crying a lot. And then.. maybe he gets angry at you for feeling responsible for your pain.

(3) He is far from being mentally healthy. No woman can have a healthy relationship with a man who “wants to be dead almost every second”, a man who is very impulsive and suicidal.

(4) On Oct 2020, you started this thread choosing the title: “I’m addicted to nostalgic feelings and it only makes me feel worse, I guess”. In your original post, you shared about the nature of the nostalgic feelings: “a longing I may say. I thought that was the feeling of loneliness, yearning for a sincere love or affection“.

In June 2019, you wrote regarding the boyfriends in your life: “I pick whomever that I can get affection from. I crave affection, not the person… my anxiety appears when I don’t get that affection”.

Today, I am suggesting to you that you are addicted to getting affection from a boyfriend. It doesn’t matter who the boyfriend is. When you are in a relationship, and the boyfriend expresses affection for you- you feel relatively okay.  But when you are separated from a boyfriend’s affection (he withdraws from you emotionally)- you feel very bad.

When a boyfriend breaks up with you- you go through severe withdrawal symptoms: “Between the relationships, there was always suffering, mental breakdowns. I simply didn’t want to continue my life in those moments” (June 2019).

No wonder then that you never took the initiative to end a relationship before, no matter how bad the relationship was and no matter how bad your current relationship is. Like I suggested before, and you agreed: you suffer from severe separation anxiety. You are afraid of being separated from your drug= a boyfriend, afraid of the withdrawal symptoms that follow separation.

You wrote yesterday that you “desperately need this support to stay alive”, referring to your boyfriend’s support/ his affection. You desperately need your drug.. to stay alive. That’s how a drug addict who is separated from his drug feels.. desperately needing it to stay alive, and therefore, he/ she will do anything to get another dose of that drug.

Is this how you feel?

anita