looking some objective views

temporary11

So this is a bit of a long one.

So my girlfriend of 5 years broke up with me last Thursday. Via email from London. I live in Amsterdam. She was there on a work trip. She suffers from pretty extreme depression and is on medication for it. Her therapist also thinks she might be bi-polar, but there was no definitive diagnosis on that. She definitely gets manic sometimes, and crashes pretty seriously after.

So the story is that I met her in Amsterdam when she was an intern here. She then moved back to Dublin and we did long distance for a year and a half, and then she got a job here and moved back, and we moved in together.
Things didn't go so well then. Most of that being my fault. I got a pretty serious injury which meant I couldn't play serious sport, which was a big thing for me. I got a bit depressed myself, ignored her, didn't treat her well and got completely stuck in a rut of feeling sorry for myself and didn't give her the support she needed.

So a year after moving in she got fed up with this and just walked out one morning. Gave me a serious shock and really jolted me out of the rut. We met a few days afterwards and talked about stuff, and I promised to cop on and work on my issues. So we got back together and everything was really good for three weeks, until she had a complete breakdown - apparently there was loads of stuff building up in her head and it just exploded. She broke up with me, and looking back I think I slightly broke down myself. Sending her long agonized emails saying that I loved her, and wanted to fix everything. These didn't help. Her head was melted and I was just making things worse.

That went on for a while, and eventually I headed of on a holiday with my family, with my head completely melted. While I was there we started emailing, and I was delighted. We agreed to meet after I got back to see how things were. We did, and got back together again. I was delighted and thought we were all good, and was putting pressure on her to move back in again. Her head was still in a bad place though, and 3 months later she dumped me again. It was out of the blue for me. There were signs there alright but I was completely oblivious. This happened exactly 1 year ago.

So yeah. Back to misery for me. I was in a really bad state. Confidence was completely shaken. I thought things were going really well, and I just got the legs chopped out from under me.
I left her alone this time. Just struggled along. Christmas was a bloody disaster. Then it turns out she was on the same flight back to Amsterdam as me after Christmas. We talked in the airport and got along well. She seemed to be on top of things mentally, and after a few emails in the week after that, she turned up at my doorstep one evening out of the blue. We talked a bit and eventually got back together again. I was very very wary though. I didn't really trust that the same thing wouldn't happen again. But no - it was all going well. The lack of trust faded and everything looked rosy.

She moved in again in August. But there were clouds on the horizon. She was started a new really stressful job, and there was a trip back to Ireland where we would both be meeting each others families for the first time since all the drama started. Lots of stress and she doesn't do stress well.
Also with all the trips and people visiting we didn't have time to do anything together - just the two of us.

The trip to Ireland was stressful. Not good. Then she went off on two week trip to London for work - apparently it was very stressful. Her therapist told her she shouldn't have done it - and came back a different person. Avoiding me at every chance. I forced her to talk about it, and it did seem that she was getting better, but then we had people staying over for the next two weekends which was pretty stressful as well, and then a week after that she got drunk - a complete no-no on her meds. This was two weeks ago. She basically completely ignored me and blanked me after that, went back to London, no texts or calls, until her breakup email on Thursday.

Thoughts ? It seems to me that this latest breakup is mostly driven by a stress induced breakdown again. I told her this in a long email pointing out the evidence. She hasn't gotten back to me though.

I guess the best thing is just to leave it, try and get over her and move on. Even if she does change her mind, this could happen every time she gets stressed - not good. I'd like to get some objective insights though.

I would forget about it and try to come to terms with this breakup being permanent. If she does come around, it seems like your relationship would just continue in the current trend, which isn't good.

It sounds like you'd both benefit from some space, so I'd advise no contact.

CarMe

I would definitely urge you to make a clean cut break now. Delete numbers, e-mails etc. It honestly sounds like there's been more stress and heartache than anything good at all, you seem to get on well over e-mail but not so much in real life.
From what you've described I would definitely move on and not waste anymore time or energy on it.