Major apologies in advance for this wall of text.
I'm hoping someone can help me out with an issue, but I will get the details out first. I've been in a long-term, long-distance relationship with my partner for about two and a half years now. She lives in America, I live in the UK. There is an issue which I need to try and find a solution to, and I don't know how I can. On 17 September last year, I did something really stupid, but got into a fight and during some of our fights and disagreements, she would threaten to leave me. You would say things like, "It's over, I'm done, that would be it." At this point, we'd been together for well over a year. But she would still say these things, and it would get to me, and we would resolve our fights and solve our problems and everything would be great, but this time it just got to me. I couldn't take the constant, constant threats of leaving or actually leaving and to be clear, when we would, "break up" it would last maybe an hour at best before she would phone me up and apologise or ask to continue off or whatever. I'm not trying to make out that it was all her fault. I'd made a few mistakes and we'd had some arguments like other people do. This was different. I had enough, so I did something really stupid, I did something really mean and hurtful.
I ghosted her.
I sent her a message to say enough is enough. I'm done, and I blocked her. At this point, we'd been connected on multiple platforms, social media platforms, gaming platforms, and I blocked her and removed her from pretty much all of them in the space of 10 minutes. I went around and wiped her out. She tried to reach out to me but couldn't, and eventually I just disappeared. I think it was about a day later, that she finally sent me an email, a good old-fashioned email, the only thing that I didn't block, begging to talk, saying, how upset she was and devastated she was I just abandoned her like that, I just left her. And she's right. My attitude, what I did was absolutely disgusting, to ghost her in such a nasty, cruel way. But when she did reach out to me, I was still incredulous, I was still rude, I was still mean. I was saying things like, "You needs to change, things need to change if I'm gonna be with you anymore."
Another terrible thing was that during this process she was at her lowest point, I had abandoned her completely. So, she had a suicide attempt. And during this process she went to hospital, turned out that she decided that she wanted to unalive herself on the train tracks. Someone had stopped her, the police were called and she was taken to the hospital and kept an overnight observation.
She did keep it to herself. We did reconnect, then opened up on WhatsApp and began to speak again. Over the next six to seven hours, things were starting to get better. I was benevolent, it would seem, and allowed her back into my life. I was still being an arse, I was convinced she needed to completely change her ways. It was her that's the problem. The breakup I was well within my rights to completely ghost her.
She was apologetic, she was comforting, she tried her best to resolve the situation. She was devastated that I had abandoned her in that way. She informed me that she was in the hospital once she was messaging me, and after some pressing, she finally told me why she was in there because of her attempt. I gave her support and comfort and told her when she's out, we'll talk, and I love her.
But then I made another mistake. I went on to Reddit and I posted a similar situation. I posted what had happened, and I posted my concern over the fact that I didn't believe her that she went to the hospital. Things didn't seem to add up in my mind at the time. I thought she was lying about going to the hospital about this. Turns out she wasn't. But I thought she was, so I asked the question on Reddit, and because it was from my perspective, I suppose almost like this message, it was from one person's perspective. As a result, a lot of people were coming back, and saying that I should just leave her. There's too much trouble, too much baggage. She's damaged whatever the replies were, I forget now.
I took all that on board, and my own insecurities and fears. And so I messaged her. I messaged her why she was on the way home from hospital. A friend had picked her up and was taking her home. And at this point, she'd read messages from me, how I'm gonna be there for her, that I'm gonna comfort her. That's gonna be okay when she gets back and we can talk about our future. Instead, she received a blob of text from me that was, I can't do this anymore. I hope she has a good life, all the best, basically. Another devastating blow from me to her. I abandoned her when she needed me the most, so I disappeared for another 24 hours. I can't remember how we reconnected again. I think she sent me an email, or I think one of her friends reached out to me and begged me to talk to her. And I did. And we made up. And over the next few days things got repaired and healed. The damage I did those past few days were massive. There was something that I do regret every day. My behaviour, what was I thinking? Nasty behaviour. Evil. The way I treated her. She may have been snappy a few times and threatened to break up with me, or at most, in one incident, broke out about 20 minutes, while she was really stressed. But then rung me again and started talking. But I absolutely ghosted her out of my life, wiped her from everything. Delete her from all accounts, removed her as a friend from everywhere I could. Wiped out of my life.
That was nearly a year ago. We're coming up to the year anniversary of that event. Since that time, we have had major arguments like couples do, fights and tiffs. But a lot of those have what I did as a backdrop. She can't seem to move forward from it. I'm not expecting her to, not necessarily. I understand what I did was so painful. But that's why I'm here asking for advice. Because I don't know if I'm being awful again by expecting her to get over the incident.
I don't know what else to do. So cold and icy veins, and she's right, I did those things. But now a year in, this has got to be the 30th, 40th maybe even more times that we've had a fight and September has been used. Her fears that I'm going to abandon her again every single day seem to stick with her. I'm just going to leave her if I argue and get too spicy. I'm going to ghost her one day when I've had enough. Every day she seems to live with this anxiety. And now we're coming up to the one year, and the reason I'm posting this is because last night we had another one.
I was asleep. We had a great day, because of the time zone sometimes I usually go to sleep before she does. So I went to sleep about 3 am my time. We stay connected on the phone most of the time, during bedtimes. Whether she falls asleep with me or she just does other things and then falls to sleep, but most of the time we connected.
This time I remember waking up to her weeping. I asked her, my sleepy state what's going on, what's wrong. She told me about September. It's all her mind again. She can't stop thinking about it coming up to the year of it as well. The fact that I did this thing and abandoned her on a mother's birthday and a mother passed away many years ago. That really hurt her that they happened on the same day. I didn't even realise when I did it at the time, it wasn't on purpose, but it happened. So now those two are associated, those two are linked.
She got upset and was crying about the September and the memories and I tried to reassure best I could in my half asleep state that everything's going to be okay. And first it went fine. She felt comforted and she seemed okay. But the longer it went on, the worse it got. I was exhausted. I've got to get up for work in the morning. So I needed sleep and she would just ring me and ring me and message me. I look at my WhatsApp and it's just like an entire page worth of message has been deleted. Missed calls from her. When I answer she'll say things to me that I'm not there for her that she's got to watch ASMR videos of comfort to feel supported. These similar things that she's sent to me in the past during conversation, especially when September comes up.
So my question, am I expecting too much for an event like this to be gone over in a year? Is she taking this too far in a year? It is a fundamental cause and issue and even by product of most arguments, I don't know what to do. I don't want to file like this anymore. But I almost want to scream at the top of my lungs and just say get over it. It's been a year. If you can't get over after a year, I don't know what to say. It's been an entire year and this is still looming large over an overall relationship. And I'm not perfect in this. I'm not trying to make out that I've done nothing wrong to her. But I don't know what to do about it. That's the worst part. I don't know how I can tell her about it to say this needs to stop because we can't survive.
I don't think the relationship can survive if this keeps coming up. I have been with her and tried my best to support her and love her every single day since and I have made him her. But no matter how many times I say I'm not going to leave her and no matter how many times I say I love her and no matter what I say, she gets depressed. She gets on this downward spiral and I can't pull her back from it. I can't do it. And to be honest, I'm getting too old and too tired to have to keep doing this. On a almost monthly basis, since that day, I've got to defend my actions and explain them. They were heinous, horrific, awful. But month on month, week on week, I'm having to explain it to her. Tell her how sorry I am, how much I regretted, how hurtful it was, how much of a prick I was for doing it. And it still happens month after month. Not all arguments end in this, but in majority. September is brought up.
I don't know what to do, what can I do to move forward from this? How do I do this? I don't want to talk about leaving her. I want to be with her forever and I know that we will, but it's this issue and we are days away from the anniversary and I don't know what to do. And you advise you can give me would be incredibly appreciated and I understand that was a lot to read. And that's just a tip of it, but hopefully in all that mess you can have a flavour of what's going on. I am not innocent in this at all. But when does this September stop? When does this issue with it end? Because at the moment it's not. I was hoping not even that after September 17th. It would go away and maybe it will. But what if it doesn't? What if it continues for another year or another six months that I abandoned her a year ago?
TLDR: Long term relationship of 2+ years. I ghosted my partner almost a year ago and she still feels the effects of it. She doesn't seem to be getting over it and its nearly been a full year. It is making me miserable to deal with this each week/month.