Posted 6/19/2013 5:47 PM (GMT 0)
Hello all! Firstly, thank you for your time. Secondly, I need some advice.
My wonderful boyfriend and I have been together for roughly a year now, and it's been a pretty great year. Despite not having had any huge problems, however, I’ve recently come to an impasse regarding our relationship. Every now and then I am able to get him to talk about his troubled feelings honestly, (he does not do this often) usually directly after we’ve resolved a disagreement. It’s like a weird post argument full disclosure thing. Earlier this week he started talking about his general views, and I was struck by the nature of some of them.
These involve the following:
-Believing in one’s own potential is futile and will not help that individual in anyway. (So basically success is all left up to chance, life is cruel, etc.)
-He is constantly sad. He believes he will never achieve true happiness and has no desire to do so at this point.
And when I say he is constantly sad, I mean there is always an undercurrent on sadness. He explained it as going through “bouts” of happiness, but sadness was his "emotional constant."
Obviously the latter concerns me more than the first one, but I suppose they kind of go hand in hand, as these are huge tell tale signs of depression, or at least, they certainly seem like it. Apart from that, he told me that he felt ‘neutral’ about suicide! So that he doesn’t want to commit it necessarily, but he did he wouldn’t really care? I didn’t really understand that one, but it was and still is extremely alarming.
I’m pretty upset, as I’ve always known that he has a sort of melancholy soul, but I thought things had gotten better in recent months and definitely weren’t this bad. I was obviously wrong though, and I want to be able to help in any way I can, and to be able to understand him better. When we had this discussion I tried telling him that there’s always hope, things like that, things I’m sure a depressed person isn’t really interested in hearing, so since then I’ve just taken to making sure he knows how much I love him and doing little things that make him happy. He insists that he loves me, and that everything involving "us" makes him happy, just not himself in his own life, I suppose.
Despite this, I don’t think it’s enough, and I’m so scared that I might lose him (emotionally, physically..). What’s particularly scary is that he has made no indication that he wants to get better. He says he’s perfectly fine feeling this way. I don’t want anyone else, and I will not leave him, but I am fearful of what this is going to do firstly to him and his life and secondly to our relationship. How can someone be truly happy in a relationship if they are not truly happy with themselves? How do I deal with this and how do I help him without alienating him in some way or making him feel as though I'm nagging?
And to give any readers a bit more insight: Our sex life has been suffering as a result of this. He doesn't not eat healthy and rarely exercises. I would like to include him more in these things, because I feel it would help, but I don't know how to do so without making him upset?