Hi, ive gotten so desperate lately as this issue has been dragging out for over a year, and this is the second time in my life (as far as i remember)
that i am experiencing such a problem. I befriended a person i thought was very cool a year ago, they live very far away and our friendship is online, but i think i developed an obsession with them? It begun early on, I wanted to know everything about their interests and what they are like, and they consumed my mind right from the start.
The problems begun when they started disappearing for days.(the longest they didn’t talk with me was for a whole week) I always grew anxious of doing something wrong, they would assure me that i am not doing anything wrong and it is their problems, but as our friendship continued they would almost always hold conversations with me, then suddenly stop replying and disappear for days again. All the while id see them post online on their platform. I told them all i wanted was for them to inform me when they will be busy, so i wont have to overthink why they were not replying. However they rarely did. My mental health in the meantime horribly deteriorated everytime they would take more than two days to talk to me. I would have these outbursts of crying and feeling horrible everytime id see that they were online while i waited. All the while they kept reassuring me i am not the problem, but i couldn’t shake the feeling that not talking with me equaled abandonment. Every interaction we would have id immediately be extremely happy, anytime my phone buzzed i hoped it was their text and id get disappointed if it was somebody else. I would be outside with someone and subconsciously re-imagining what it would be like to experience this with them. I couldn’t put my finger on whenever the affection i felt was romantic or platonic, but all that mattered to me was that we remained friends. I never took my anger or sorrow out on them because i am aware it is not their fault, everybody responds differently, however what always bothered me was that they would just disappear instead of warning me.
Our friendship begun to take a weird turn in february, where I felt like a lot of our interactions were beginning to sound flirty, i would send them pictures of “us” and they would always agree upon it, we would kind of tease each other and compliments suddenly begun falling out of the bag more than ever. Especially from their side. I got greatly confused about this, consulted with my other friends who agreed with me that it seemed romantic. At the end of march tho they suddenly told me that lately they felt like our interactions begun to be romantic, and assured me what they felt was only platonic. It hurt, because i felt quite lead on, but at the same time i didn’t take it hardly, and we continued on talking even more than usual suddenly, until now where i cannot help but feel abandoned by them.
Other things i have to be honest with are that i did get jealous when i saw them talk with somebody else, and cried at the thought that they might like them more than me. And often times i tried to sabotage myself by convincing myself they didn’t care about me and i was a chore, but i know that is not true. In my free time, the majority of what i wouldve been doing was drawing them, them with me doing some things, or fantasising about their company. I remain aware that they are free to have other friends, i do not detest them for that or im not upset with them, its my own extreme anxieties that come crawling on me. Anytime i felt bad and texted them, somehow them expressing concern for me already made me feel better, and i liked that this was sort of my assurance that they care. But, I did not purposefully put myself in situations where id be seeking their attention via threatening myself or something like that.
In all honesty, i do not know what i should do. I have been trying to distance myself, but i feel that to be impossible as of now, i do not know why i experience such turmoil in this situation. Please help me out, I am already in therapy, but i do not know what to do.