u/Anon221986

I'm 25 years old. Been dating this girl (long distance), and due to much trauma and failed friendships, she ended up becoming my main emotional support and source of human connection. This has been putting strain on our relationship because when she is hanging out with other friends for extended periods of time (like going on a trip for several weeks) I start to panic. I'm terribly afraid that if she spends enough time with other people her feelings for me will change and she will leave.

Asking for reassurance has gotten draining on her, and the whole situation makes her feel guilty for spending time with other people, which wasn't my intention but nothing I did helped with the panic attacks I was having. I unfortunately live in a place where therapy isn't an option, and I'm not in an environment where I can connect with people irl (only job I've been able to find has me being alone in an office for 90% of the time), and even when I am around people, I struggle to form meaningful bonds with them. With online connections I do occasionally talk to people but can never maintain a close one. Too many experiences being rejected or abandoned makes it extremely draining.

I don't know how to overcome this without any kind of professional help. I also don't really have a support system cause my family is religious and I'm a closeted atheist, which is a whole other can of worms, but the point is that it's impossible to talk with them about any mental health issues without it turning into a "You should pray harder" kind of conversation. Besides, my parents are the source of much of my trauma in the first place.

Long post, I appreciate if you can read it to the end. Please don't suggest breaking up, as well as therapy since that isn't an option where I live or with my current financial situation. I'm only seeking an answer to the question and any advice on how to directly work on fixing this problem with our relationship.

Me (M25) and my girlfriend (F23) have been dating long distance for almost four years now, and before that were very close friends for about a year. We have yet to meet irl due to some difficulties in planning and lack of initiative, but we are planning on having that opportunity soon. We're pretty committed and want to take it to marriage at some point.

My girlfriend is the type who likes to travel often, she usually goes on several trips per year, each trip lasting a few days to a week at most. I have a lot of abandonment trauma and so often the reduction in our interaction/time spent during those trips can be a little difficult for me, but I mostly manage through distractions and talking to other people.

The problem started when my girlfriend started meeting with other online friends, this fueled my anxiety to the max because I felt so insecure and jealous about the fact that despite being her boyfriend, all these other people get the chance to meet her and spend real life time with her. In particular the worst case of this was a trip that just ended recently, where she visited her current closest friend, let's call her X (mtf), for three whole weeks while staying over at X's place. I also want to mention that I've been already generally stressed due to my inability to find a job and lack of social interactions (any friends I made had already moved, and making new friends is such a herculean task for someone with AvPD in the kind of country I'm in).

Before this trip, she and X were already getting very close and were spending much time together, sometimes their daily calls would last longer than mine with hers, and it would on more than one occasion even cut at our calls. Generally I felt a clear reduction in our daily interactions. X got her into certain media (movies, games, etc) in a very similar way to how I did, which was how we bonded in the first place. I brought up that I felt lonely because of this, and we kinda were stuck on what to do because she felt pressured by my needs and that if it continued she would feel suffocated and guilty for spending time with other people, and obviously I don't want that either.

Time passed and eventually she went on to visit X, which started my paranoia in full force. Our interactions were reduced to a few texts per day (compared to the usual hundreds), and every several days we may have a 10~ minute call where we barely are able to talk about anything, and it felt like she did it more out of obligation than a desire to talk with me. She would otherwise spend 24/7 with X, going on all kinds of activities and adventures. I tried to distract myself as best as possible, talking to multiple people and playing games, but nothing was particularly effective.

I'd become emotionally dependent on her and required constant reassurance, and I understand that this isn't exactly a fair position to place someone in, but it wasn't intentional on my end; it just happened on its own and I don't know how to change that, I have AvPD on top of everything and struggle at making any lasting connections with people in the first place, so I end up emotionally dependent on the person I spend the most time with. This all strained her and made her feel guilty (even though I always made sure to say it wasn't her fault), at the same time she was also upset that I wasn't happy for the fact that she was experiencing such a big trip. On my end, I was hurt that she didn't seem to miss me at all, or if she did, it was a very small feeling that she could ignore, whereas on my end it was constant panic and pain.

At some point I also started having intrusive thoughts and fantasies about her and X being physically intimate (this is the part where X being a mtf comes into play, since she hasn't exactly physically transitioned yet, and since my girlfriend knew her for a longer time when she still identified as male, I couldn't get the thoughts out of my head even though my girlfriend is straight. At the same time, this does not play a role in the general abandonment anxiety), but I would say this is more of a result of the immense amount of stress rather than being the core of the problem, since it's not like I doubted her faithfulness. The core of my anxiety is the fear that her feelings will change, and that there's nothing I would be able to do about that.

There are several things that added to that anxiety; the fact that this happened during her previous relationship, where even though she had a boyfriend she had lost feelings for him and started developing feelings for me instead, so this made me fear that what happened once can happen twice. Another is that she herself suffers from OCD and did mention that she is also anxious at the idea of her feelings for me changing.

Then there was the amount and type of affection she showed towards X; see my girlfriend and I are different in this aspect where I normally don't display affection to people, but with her I'm very affectionate, on the other hand she is affectionate with many people. During our honeymoon phase she would show me far more affection than anyone else and it made me feel very special, that I was her undisputed favorite person, but over the years she stopped doing that and it started to feel like I was just one of several people she cared about equally. Because of this difference in how we display affection, it made me feel like I was losing my place in her heart to X. Didn't help that one time she referred to X as "The person I love" and not just "someone I love".

Another contributing factor is that during our honeymoon phase, we would exchange very sexually charged texts, but over time her libido dropped significantly (to the point that she thinks she's borderline Asexual), while mine is still very high. I respected her boundaries and stopped sending those kinds of texts, but I can't lie that it did leave my needs unmet for years, and made us feel less "couple-like" if that makes sense.

Then she would be uploading posts on social media about her time with X using lines and music from media we like that have romantic connotation, or at least the context of which is between two people who care the most about each other. Lastly X herself would occasionally send me photos of my girlfriend sleeping or sitting on X's bed (all with good intention and consensual on my girlfriend's part), which didn't help my paranoia at all.

So in this situation where I'm not receiving special affection, sexual messages, and there's X who is receiving an equal amounts of affection, and is spending so much more time with my girlfriend than I am, and even getting to see her in such contexts I wanted to be the first one to see her in, it was hard not to let the anxiety and intrusive thoughts overwhelm me. I would say that my panicking mind essentially interpreted this entire month as though she had broken up with me and I was watching her move on with someone else.

This reached a climax towards the end of the trip where I had a feeling that my girlfriend would be depressed about having to leave, and I knew that if she said that to me that I wouldn't take it well in my present mental state, and so in anticipation I told her that I would appreciate it if she didn't mention that where I could see it. Even though at first she accepted that, she ended up displaying the full extent of her heartbreak at having to leave X's place (she literally described it as feeling like her heart was shattered into a million pieces and that someone punched a hole in her heart), I tried to be supportive but couldn't hide how much that hurt me, because in comparison it didn't seem to bother her at all that we weren't spending time together at all for those three weeks, and on top of that she wasn't happy at all at the idea of returning to our regular amount of interaction. I was honestly under the impression that if she had the choice she would certainly choose to move in with X permanently even if it meant us not being able to talk regularly again.

Now logically I understand there are reasons for this, she was mostly sad at having to go back to her home country and irl friends that she feels deeply dissatisfied with, and also because of how I was behaving throughout the trip she wasn't exactly looking forward to us talking again, so I suppose it kind of became a self-fulfilling prophecy. She was upset that I wasn't happy about her trip and that instead I seemed overjoyed at her coming back, and didn't feel comfortable with my displays of affection (I did kind of overdo it a little, as I felt that if I kept showing her how much I loved her she wouldn't leave, but it backfired).

We had a long and exhausting talk about how if I can't find a solution to this then our relationship is no longer healthy for either of us and we need to end it (not exactly a fun ultimatum for someone who is already suffering from abandonment anxiety). However, shortly after that call, and in spite of her uncompromising attitude during it, she started to feel extremely guilty, that she was a horrible person and partner, and that she might have committed "emotional cheating" with X, seemingly an intrusive thought from her OCD. I myself feel very guilty about how my meltdowns affected her, but at the same time can't help but feel like my only other choice is to just pretend to be okay when I'm not? It's not like I consciously decide to panic or feel hurt at seeing her having a life with someone else.

Personally, I don't believe it qualifies as emotional cheating (even if my own intrusive thoughts and anxiety tell me it is), but I do think that she took my feelings for granted and I wish she was more willing to compromise even just a little to meet my needs, like sending unprovoked reassurance or similar messages to those she would send during our honeymoon phase, or perhaps spending just a little less time with X during the trip and using that for us. So I guess I wanted to see if with all this context anyone else would consider what she's been doing as emotional cheating? Or is it just that she took me and my feelings for granted?

Thanks if you read to the end, and I'll repeat what I said above: Please don't suggest breaking up, as well as therapy since that isn't an option where I live or with my current financial situation. I'm only seeking an answer to the question and any advice on how to directly work on fixing this problem with our relationship.