[questioveritas]

Hello everyone,

I'm a 20 year old woman and my fiance with whom I was in a relationship for 2 years just left me. Or rather he left me a month ago, but it has been a blur. It feels like yesterday. It hasn't been getting better, it's been getting worse and worse. We loved each other so much. We were going to get married. We told each other we love each other many times a day, we vowed eternity to each other daily. He told me I could hold on to him, he said he belonged to me and would be with me forever, he told me I could trust him.

I had such a difficult life before I met him. I was hurt by everyone who was close to me. I could not trust people, but I met him and overtime I learned to trust again. I learned to love other people. I was so happy. My life was beautiful and full of meaning because of him. I was so certain of our future, we were going to go to college and then marry and have children. Oh... :'(

But now he's gone. And he says that even though he still loves me we probably will never marry and have a future together. Religion is one of the problems. When he met me I was an atheist/agnostic and he was Catholic. But we fell in love nonetheless and promised forever to each other. We debated a lot about the existence of God and religion, and a year or so after meeting I started to think that perhaps God exists after all, and another half a year after that I decided that I would convert to Catholicsm. Things seemed so wonderful.

The only problem is that I am not a very mentally stable person. I've suffered from anxiety, obessiveness, depression for a while, and this interacted very badly with my Catholic faith. I began to live in constant fear of sin, and I was terrified of hell. This made my life a living hell. There were times when I felt like I couldn't avoid sin, would make giant lists of sins to confess, and would throw myself on the ground and hit myself in frustration. It was horrible. I saw my sanity slipping away and I realized that I needed to stop believing in hell to survive. So I started reading atheist/agnostic arguments again, and started to seriously doubt my faith. I am an agnostic/theist now.

My mental illness was very difficult for my fiance to deal with. I made life very difficult for him in the past half a year or so of our relationship. We were constantly arguing. There were times when I blamed him for introducing me to Catholicism, and even times when I told him I regretted meeting him. I hate myself for saying those things. In the end he ended up being unable to handle it and left me.

Right now he wants to be friends, but he doesn't think we will ever be able to marry. He is Catholic, and Catholics believe in dating only for the purpose of discerning marriage. So he feels he can't be in a relationship with me unless he thinks he can marry me in the future. He doesn't think he can marry me because I don't share his faith and because my mental problems would not make me someone who can be a parent and a supportive spouse.

I want to do everything I can to overcome my mental problems. I'm going to a psychiatrist in a week and I am going to do everything I can to recover. The only problem is that I just can't bear him having left me. I still love him so much. I feel that the vows I made to him (or rather the vows we both made to God) are binding forever. I will never be able to love another man or give myself to another man. I already belong to him. But he doesn't want me. :'( :'( :'( I feel like I don't have anything to fight for.

It's ironic because if he was still in a relationship with me I would have the strength to recover and to fight the mental illness, but because he's left me I don't have this strength and I feel like I am spiralling down to a place with no way out. It's terrifying. I don't know what I am going to do. I don't know how I'm going to survive.

Please tell me if you have any words of advice for me.