Hello, and thank you for your time. Ok, where to start…i have an extremely hard time with girls, and I’ve always been a very lonely guy. I’m a good person, i have a good sense of humor, and I’m smart, but i always find myself alone, isolated, and lately I’ve been feeling suicidal. i just don’t want to be lonely anymore. i want a girl to hold, and who will hold me. I’m very uncomfortable around new people. I’ve been trying forever to step up and attract a girl, but my efforts always leave me with nothing. I’m twenty one years old, and the only girl I’ve ever been able to create a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with was sixteen years old. i loved her with all my heart. i gave her everything i could. i got comfortable enough around her to reveal my true personality to her, and i got her to fall in love with my wit, charm, and creative talents. We spent a year and a half together, and she saved me. She was young, but she was smart and beautiful, and after being miserable for so long, I’d finally gotten someone to fall in love with me. She loved snowboarding and Mexican food and jelly beans. The year and a half was intense and extremely intimate because she connected with my feelings of loneliness and isolation. We were desperate for each other, we wanted to get married, to move to Australia, we’d even come up with names for the children we wanted to have with each other. Though her and my parents were extremely serious about trying to keep us completely separated, that only added to our intensity and desperation toward each other. Every night I would drive out to her place, and she would sneak out her window, and we would be together again. it was the best feeling in the world. It was the amazing feeling of love and connection and companionship i had been desperately longing for my entire life. We talked for hundreds of hours over secret phone calls. When it was too difficult or risky for us to talk, we kept a secret journal in which we would write about how much we loved and missed each other, and we would exchange it when we would meet. She told me I was her best friend. That I was the man of her dreams. That I was amazing and she promised she would never let me go. We told each other everything, our pains, our fears, our hopes, and we exposed our souls to each other. We lasted through some extreme trauma. Because of our age difference, when her parents found out, they hated me and put a restraining order on me. I completely understood how they felt, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the girl I loved. I just couldn’t. So we could still communicate, I would buy her a secret cell phone. Because her furious parents kept finding them and confiscating them, i ended up buying about seven total. Each time evidence of our communication was found, her parents threatened me more and more severely with jail threats, but I had to keep seeing her, had to keep talking to her, had to keep telling her how much I loved her. When my parents found out about the restraining order, they forced me to move from California to Florida with my grandparents for four months. While I was there, I cried and cried and thought about here every day. For four months, from the moment I got up at 3pm until bed at 7am, I sat at the computer with my guitar and mic and recorded love songs for her. I put them on the internet where I knew she could find them. I sent her a check so she could buy a phone, and we managed to sneak some phone calls. She would start crying as soon as she heard my voice, and she said she wanted to run away and get on a bus to come be with me. She said my songs made her cry every time she heard them. After Florida, I had to move to San Francisco for school. By this point, I had risked everything for her. My freedom, my future, my reputation, my heart, everything. I needed her, and she needed me. Two or three times a month I would be able to get on a bus and secretly go see her. The bus would drop me off in the dark of night, and I’d walk across the cold, silent town to our meeting spot. And there she would be, waiting for me in the moon light, the girl that made my tears run and my heart race and inspired me to go to school and make something of myself. She was the cure to my lifelong sickness that no medications or therapy or friends or parents had been able to help. She would jump into my arms and we’d both start crying, two fugitives finally together again. We fought so long and so hard to have what so many people take for granted. And then, suddenly last week, she called and told me that she didn’t love me anymore, that she was over me, and that she had found someone else. And that was it. I’ve heard about betrayal and heartbreak before in movies and songs, but this is more than I can handle. I’ve never felt so helpless, hopeless, and worthless in my life. I invested everything that I am in that girl, and after the most powerfully intimate year and a half of my life, I have nothing. I wake up feeling like I’m going to have a nervous break down. I cry uncontrollably. Our promises and our memories are eating me alive. I met the love of my life, and once again I’m alone in the world. All I can think about is how much I want to end myself. To get rid of this horrible feeling once and for all. I just can’t go back to this prison of agonizing loneliness. I believe that happiness is the only thing that makes life worth living, and now my happiness is gone. I understand that everyone i know, including her, would be shocked and devastated if I killed myself. She would blame herself, my parents would be torn apart, and my close friends would not even believe it. But why should I wait around and suffer for them? It’s such a sick paradox. If I live, the people that care about me are happy that I’m alive, even though I’m miserable. If I die, the people that care about me are miserable that I’m no longer alive and feeling miserable. But MY life is about ME. And I’m tired of being scared and lonely and wanting to crawl away and hide and feel like a miserable worthless loser. I’m twenty one now, and I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to stifle and defeat these feelings for ten years. Today I looked online at possible suicide means.
What I am concerned about is the intensity of emotion contained in your letter. You poured your heart and soul into making the relationship work. It’s fine to love and care for another person but what you described seems more like an obsession.
In fact, your entire well-being and functionality as an individual was dependent upon whether the relationship worked. You were happy when the relationship was going well but you essentially fell apart when it was over. It’s not healthy psychologically for your well-being to be reliant upon others. This is the heart of the problem. This is not a healthy way to behave in a relationship.
Ideally, your happiness needs to come from you. When it does you have control over how you feel. It also minimizes the chances of being hurt by the actions of others.
Counseling could really benefit you especially because you are considering suicide. It’s never okay to harm yourself because of another person. It’s possible that that the girl you were dating was not ready for an adult relationship. She was only 16 when you dated her. Developmentally, a 16-year-old may not be fully able to engage in a serious committed relationship. It’s also possible that maybe she was not the “girl” for you and in a year or two you’ll meet someone new. But if you decide to end your life you’ll never know what the future holds. Suicide is never the answer.
Counseling can help you learn a new, healthier way to behave in relationships. It can also help you learn how to be happy with yourself. If your happiness is dependent from others you will forever be at the mercy of the will and actions of other people. That is the worst way to live.
