i (21f) have had a debilitating and unhealthy crush on someone (25m) for all 3 years of uni and am dreading it ending.

talks of SH and ED ahead

i knew i was doomed after meeting him on orientation, but could kind of foresee it being a harmless campus crush situation, or maybe even just a squish (aka a platonic crush). i was wary of how freshly legal i was (18 at the time), and wondered if his kindness was just doting. he mentioned that he was seeing someone, and it suddenly all felt out of the question anyway. no harm done. more than anything i was looking forward to being his friend.

lockdown kicked in and suddenly first year was a writeoff. i ended up back home and it's not like we'd built up a friendship that would justify staying in touch.

meanwhile i had an awful ED relapse for all of 2021 which went unnoticed by my family. i had thinned hair, really poor immunity, lost my voice every few weeks, and wore winter coats constantly just to keep myself conscious. i sought out recovery help as soon as i was back at uni.

in second year i felt really hopeful. he made the effort to say something to me everytime we crossed paths which is really special to me. i have no friends in my uni town and easily go 10 days without talking to someone face to face. the problem was i had spent the whole of the past year descending into mania and knew i was no longer friend material.

by the time i got refferred to a clinic and not long after discharged, that was basically second year gone. throughout it all, i'd had very unrealistic hopes that he was building up to formally asking to be friends. to make matters worse he was now single. i no longer felt any guilt fantasizing about spending all our time together.

as you can kind of see i am not a very mentally well person, but my self destruction slips under the radar because it doesn't really impact others. i've been "caught" though a few times, referred to counselling and discharged early on due to not being proactive, tried SSRI's once and nearly offed myself, and finally recently been advised to pursue an autism diagnosis. i fear the trauma of living undiagnosed and having no regulation methods in place has lead me to develop some traits of personality disorders or even mild erotomania. i think the next few details will show you what i mean.

it's very surreal looking back on the timeline and piecing together that the same era i deluded myself into thinking he was obsessed with me, i looked utterly dishevelled and was still getting weekly bloods and vitals done at an ED clinic. the few times he messaged me that year i would hit and cut myself for a good few minutes before even being able to read it. i was terrified of this huge responsibility i felt to make him organically fall for me, as though i had to say the perfect thing to get us in the "good timeline".

despite a track record of this all amounting to nothing, i spent the whole summer of 2022 convincing myself that i was going to come back recovered and radiant and we were going to be best friends or more, on a basis of nothing. we didn't even talk online or anything for 6 months. on the first day back it turned out he had been seeing someone else all summer and i began to feel myself going literally insane.

i know i need to f off and leave him be but i think about him constantly, and now it's all shrouded in this huge sense of loss. i never dared let on that i had a thing for him because i thought i was too young, only for the person he's seeing now to be my age, and similar to me in a lot of ways. they hit a huge milestone on my birthday which hurt to say the least, and i have inferred there's a high chance they met on a day in the summer that i almost called him out of the blue: if i had they may never have met. there are loads of weird synchronicities and it literally feels like i'm watching someone else live out what my year could have looked like, even just as friends.


one thing i've learnt from uni is that people just don't like me. i'm not claiming they should, but without even knowing me they interpret my silence and lack of expression for rudeness and take it as a personal threat, so i've heard. if i can't make a single friend when institutionally tied to thousands of people in a similar situation to me, then i fear i have no hope making connections as an adult at all.

i think this is why i get so hysterical when i realise we're almost definitely going to lose touch forever in just a few weeks. something that maybe i haven't conveyed properly in this post so far is that we get along really well. like, i have spent maybe 30 hours ever in social settings with him yet have told him things i've told no-one else. i'm not sure the same is true for him, but he certainly shares a lot with me. he's told me he suspects he's neurodivergent and i chose not to say anything about the same being true of myself, but sometimes it feels like i've met someone with a brain that can work alongside mine for the first time in my life. all my friends from school are ND so it's not just as simple as we're both (potentially) autistic. i still get really anxious before and after talking to him but i've never had a bad conversation with him. it's like our thought patterns slot together perfectly.

the problem stands that i make up maybe 1% of his positive social interactions meanwhile he makes up 99% of mine. i have thought about him for 900 days straight, meanwhile i back and forth between solemnly accepting that he has a wide friendship circle and barely remembers i exist and manically convincing myself the opposite. i catch myself doing things that can only be described as delusional. i get random dates stuck in my head and anticipate something huge happening on those days, like him inviting me somewhere or running into me by chance. or genuinely convince myself for a few days based on a gut feeling that they've broken up only for the glass to shatter when he mentions his partner on social media.

i can't seem to stop putting all my energy into just thinking about him and i hate myself for it. i suspect this is all some awful unhealthy way my brain has learnt to shove reality aside because it's too much to bare. i've had intense media fixations during rough times before but the complication of him being real and there being actual potential for a connection (as opposed to like with a celebritiy or character) adds this whole other very real element to it. in another world where i don't have to dedicate half my brain to obsession to cope with life, i truly believe i would still want to be his friend and even then still crush on him, but i don't know how to navigate those real feelings without entertaining the scary ones.

he makes it a lot worse without even knowing. he makes a point to end all our interactions with a very genuine suggestion that we meet up some time. not a flippant "catch you later", but sometimes even specific ideas of what/when/where. he's sent me messages saying we should talk more, hang out more, only for the text thread to go dead for the next 2 months. it's nurturing my obsession, and it's so suspenseful, which doesn't help. now it's exam season of third year and none of those things he mentioned ever happened.

i know the short answer. due to my mildly dangerous behaviour and thinking, it's better for both of us to be kept as far apart as possible. but he's been the only thing keeping me going for 3 years and it's going to be soul crushing and terrifying to let that go. i literally don't know who i am if not thinking of him.






TLDR summary: i can't accept the fact that uni has been and gone and i failed to pursue a friendship with someone i feel a huge pull towards. we lived in the same city on-and-off for 3 years, barely spoke, and now we'll probably never cross paths again. i am not very mentally stable and coping very badly with him being in a serious relationship and fear i'll continue to obsess over him for a long while after parting ways.