My [20M] girlfriend [21F] is clingy. Can I get space within the relationship, or do I need to leave?

My girlfriend is living proof that too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

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**TL;DR** My girlfriend wants my time and attention 24/7. I love spending time with her, but I don’t love spending *all* of my time with her. All she wants, all the time it seems, is me. I have to fight tooth and nail for time to maintain friendships, study, relax on my own, and invest in my career. I’m trying to decide whether this can be managed within the relationship or whether I’m better off without her.

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With the exception of scheduled time apart, we spend all of our time together. When we’re together, we’re interacting with each other. We live together, we work at the same lab, and we share a car. We very rarely do our own thing when we’re both at home – we’re almost always actively engaging each other. I want to do my own thing sometimes. But when I’m at home, she’s pulling me to help her, or hang out, or do something with her, or chit chat. When I’m at work, she’s texting me about how she misses me and all the things she wants to do with me when we get off. When I’m with friends, she’s texting or calling asking when I’ll come home, who I’m with, and what I’m doing. I can’t get away from her.

When I do anything, she wants to do it with me, and when she wants to do anything, she waits until I’m free to do it with her. When I’m hanging out with her, she’ll keep hanging out with me en perpetua and never pull away to do something else on her own. When I pull away to study or work or just chill, she’ll come by me and show me memes and tell me all the random things that pop into her head. No matter what I do she won’t go away – she won’t take a hint and leave me alone if I’m nice about it; if I ask her directly, she’ll cry and beg I stop what I’m doing and insist I take hours to reassure her I love her and mend our relationship. I can’t get a break from her.

I’m exhausted and annoyed. Granted, she is sometime I usually enjoy being around. I started dating her (over a year ago) because I liked spending time with her. I moved in with her because I wanted to spend more time with her. Being around her wouldn’t bother me, except – I’m *always* with her, and I can’t get a mite of space or time to myself without us having a fight, and then her begging me to finish up soon the whole time I’m not hanging out with her.

I understand why she is this way. She’s been rejected, lonely, and ignored a lot in her life. As a result, she hates being alone. But I have other things in my life that aren’t my girlfriend that I want to give time and attention to. This causes us to be in a perpetual dynamic where she’s trying to make me spend time with her and I’m trying to get space.

My friendships, academics, and career have suffered because I struggle to balence her constant need for attention with everything else. We’ve talked about this at length, and she seems to understand everything I’m saying, but when we try to practice spending time apart, or spending time together while doing our own thing, before long she’s blowing up my phone or tugging at my arm begging me to spend time with her. I wish she would find someone else to spend time with.

She already goes to therapy, we’ve already talked about this with each other and with the therapist many times, she is medicated for bipolar, she does have friends and family (she just wants to be with me all the time instead), and I’ve already broke up with her (we missed each other and got back together; now I’m trying to decide if I can make this work or if I’ve got to break up with her again).

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What do I do? I’d like to go back to the stage in our relationship when we didn’t live together and saw each other once or twice a week. Is there a way to get space from her without ending the relationship?