I'm not sure how to take this request - is it ever good news? He says he loves me, but his life is such a mess right now (it is) that he needs to "fix it" and then "come back for me".
Start off with saying we don't live together, we live about 40 minutes apart (kids in different schools) but we were planning to buy a place together in the summer and get married.
DP is prone to anxiety and withdrawal when he's stressed, but he's never wanted to not communicate with me before, even in very hard times. In fact, when I have not wanted to communicate if I was angry or upset, he's always explained he thinks doing that is the beginning of the end. So this has me quite worried.
We were in relationship difficulties over the last five months. I don't want to go off on a tangent but we had a huge fight over his ex wife controlling our lives and trying to undermine me and I told him it was over because I couldn't take anymore. He ended up talking to her about it over wine when he dropped off the kids that night, and the rest is history.
I broke it off for a while (he confessed), but he begged me to come back, said I was the love of his life and it was his worst mistake ever, and since then we've been having counselling together and he's pulled out all the stops to reconcile.
As upsetting and hard as it was (I was devastated!), we were doing really well for a few months with it. He was Mr "I am here for you, no matter how much anger and pain you have, I am here to make you feel better" and he was making sure my feelings and needs came first.
Our relationship actually became better than ever as he started to work out some of the baggage he was carrying from his divorce in counselling and understand the reasons he did what he did. We were both saying we were closer and happier than ever before, and that's when he proposed.
Then he found out he was being made redundant and he got really stressed about that. He's been looking for ages and made lots of applications and had interviews but keeps getting knocked back and he has been really down and worried about it. His self-esteem is shot to bits and he started being anxious almost all the time and saying that our plans to buy a house were scuppered and so on.
Then, maybe understandably, he lost interest completely in working on the infidelity situation and wanted all our conversations to be about how anxious he was about his job and the future and he was full of negativity and hopelessness (really out of character for him so maybe he is depressed).
Maybe also understandably I eventually got a bit resentful and irritated that he seemed to have shifted completely off my needs onto his own. I was empathetic over his worries, but I felt he was blowing it out of proportion because we are okay financially and he has six months left yet to find a new job. His anxiety was just huge though, and it really did turn into every conversation being about his job and I felt like my needs to process the infidelity were being disregarded.
So we started to argue a bit and he just kept apologising for being self-absorbed and reassuring me how much he loved me. I really have no idea if I was expecting too much but it was obvious he was struggling to meet my needs due to his own anxiety. I was very kind to him and patient, but at times I lost my patience when he was dodging counselling appointments and so on.
With this in the background, his ex wife was putting a lot of pressure on him. FYI he didn't leave her for me, but she wants him back. Before having too much sympathy for the ex wife, I should say that through counselling he has been working through that she severely emotionally abused him. The counsellor called it "extreme", so he was right to leave the relationship.
Anyway, she has been trying since he left to get him back and sleeping with her when drunk hardly helped the situation and she has been constantly trying to orchestrate getting him alone or disrupting out relationship. He seems to be simultaneously terrified of her (she uses the children and finances as ways to control him) but she also manages to make him feel sorry for her and like everything is his fault (see emotional abuse, she is very good at it).
So this added to the pressure on us as a couple, I wanted him to get tough on the ex wife and stand up to her as well as focusing a bit of time each week on our infidelity recovery work, and he kept promising to do it but then being too anxious to actually follow through.
So over the last two weeks, we both started to get ill. He came home in the middle of the day a few times last week with panic attacks after calls from his ex wife threatening all sorts as well as yet more job application rejections and he was crying a lot too (doesn't usually cry) because he said he was worried I would leave him.
Then he said a few times that he was worried he couldn't "meet my needs" or "keep me safe" and said a few times maybe I would be better off without him and maybe the most loving thing he could do is let me go. He said he didn't have the emotional capacity to give me what I needed because he was drowning. I tried to help him, I was very kind as I could see he was in difficulty. I asked him if he wanted to break up or give up and he kept saying that he absolutely didn't and fear of losing me was his worst outcome.
Then when I think we were both at maximum stress level already, the ex wife started issuing more demands and he ended up giving in to something he and I had explicitly agreed would absolutely not happen. I was fuming, he said he was just trying to keep the situation under control, the counsellor said she was bullying him and it all reached an ultimatum where I told him unless he did what was right by me and not his ex wife that I was leaving.
He cried loads but said he felt maybe time and space would be best for both of us because he said hurting me was a huge part of his anxiety. He says he loves me and keeping me safe is his number one priority and right now being away from him keeps me safe (???) and he says he needs to deal with sorting his problems one by one alone and then he will be back for me.
I said okay, and it's been three days of "time and space", but I am wondering what this means? We've always leaned on each other in hard times so this feels like it's the end. I've spoken to him briefly and he said he is ill with anxiety, having trouble sleeping and so on and he is going to use this time to fix all his problems.
I feel abandoned. I also feel sorry for him. I am confused. Is it over do you think?
I was baffled by all this and asked him if it was a nice way of telling me he wants to leave, but he said that is absolutely not the case