Hi folks
I posted this in the “relationships” thread essentially but all responses were “leave the bastard” which I understand and accept to an extent but I’d be keen to get a view from some people with a more sympathetic lense toward mental health issues!
I’ll try to summarise...
My DP has always been a bit shy, lacking confidence and believed he wasn’t good enough. Came from a wealthy, overachieving family who largely base “success” on money, promotions and material things. He went to a private school where he felt very out of place in an “alpha male” environment.
We met at uni and I was immediately attracted to his looks and witty sense of humour. He was also very caring and considerate and when he asked me out it was a no brainer. It was immediately obvious to me he was very shy but this was ok, I didn’t really mind. I found out I was the only girl he’d ever asked out which surprised me, and that he’d had sex with “only” 3 people, which to me wasn’t a reflection on his looks or attractiveness, just his lack of confidence in hitting on girls growing up.
Fast forward to 2.5 years ago (together 4 years at this point), we’re both lawyers in high pressured jobs and we own a flat together. A colleague of his commits suicide and DP goes through a period of intense stress at work. He falls into a deep depression. It gets so bad that he attempts suicide and ends up in A&E on a number of occasions, saying it would be better if he’d never been born and that he’s worthless and the world would be a better place without him.
During this spell an attractive female colleague hit on him at the office party. He kissed her and was upfront with me about it afterwards. Given his worrying state of mind and the fact he was so low he was actually a danger to himself at this point, I moved on from the kiss pretty quickly and put caring for him at the forefront of my mind. This girl also said some things to him after the event which he took to mean he was “repulsive”, for example when he tried to speak with her because things were awkward in the office she said “You and me could never get together” further fuelling his belief he isn’t good enough (despite her hitting on him in the first place which he seems to ignore..)
He saw a psychiatrist and got put on meds (150mg sertraline and 0.5mg risperidone). He took the meds for 12 months and largely improved in that time, and came off them last summer (of his own accord).
Since then he’s been up and down, largely better, but recently he’s back to talking every single day again about how he’s not good enough, how he’s so ugly and unattractive to women, how he’s a failure and how no women even looked at him growing up.
Now I know it is utterly ridiculous for a girlfriend of 6.5 years to be reassuring her DP about other women, especially when he cheated with someone who does modelling on the side, but he seems to have this ridiculous engrained sense of self hatred that he backs up with the “evidence” that girls didn’t hit on him growing up and he only slept with 3 people.
He doesn’t understand the way society works, that girls expect men to hit on them and if you’re a shy man with no confidence obviously that’s going to be hard. He thinks there are men out there who have girls “falling” all over them - which I just don’t think is true!! His lack of confidence has caused all his problems from day 1!
Things are not awful all the time and we still have a lot of fun together. It is just a daily conversation now we are having where I have to reassure him constantly and he doesn’t believe me or listen to me. He wants “definitive proof” that he’s attractive or he won’t believe me... what does that even mean?! Last night I told him I can’t keep reassuring him every day of his life or be responsible for his mental health and he hasn’t said a word to me since, just in bed with the door shut, he even punched himself really hard in the face last night.
So basically... HELP!! What do I do?! He’s starting a new course of therapy on Wednesday and part of me is tempted to see how this goes and if it doesn’t work, I don’t see what other options I have. I’m 28, we’ve been together over 6 years so a large portion of my 20s. DP is not currently the man I started going out with, but he is also ill and so messed up in the head! I feel in a total mess, somewhere between loving him and worrying for him all the time, and wishing I was just with a man who had an ounce of confidence in himself (not cocky, just a quiet sense of self belief would do me fine!). Any advice?