Am I naive? **TW: Suicide**

I turned 15 in April of this year, and I’ve been dating someone for almost 9 months now. I just want to know if I’m the only one who’s felt this way.

Background, for contextual purposes, feel free to skip this part. **TW: Suicide**

So I’ve had a lot of mental health problems since I was 12, which have gotten worse until I was about 13 1/2. I’ve had issues with my body, my personality, everything. I have trust issues due to the way my family treats me at home, and I was suicidal for about three years. I’ve attempted a couple of times but I managed to talk myself down before doing anything rash. Since then I had been pretty alright, getting better slowly and didn’t think about taking my life as often.

In September of 2019, I met my current boyfriend online, through a rather amusing circumstance. In short, I posted something on my story with a typo on accident, corrected it, but somehow he didn’t quite get the memo and thought I had biked 45 miles in 4 minutes. We started talking after I cleared it up, and we became friends really quickly. A couple weeks later, after he had earned my trust, the suicidal thoughts came back around midnight, and I started crying and pushing him away, telling him that he didn’t have to worry about me anymore. He kept talking to me for about an hour while I sat on the bathroom floor with the Swiss army pocket knife my father gave me the year before. I started getting worse, and then he called me. He called me at about 2am to say “Give me one chance. Please give me one chance to show you that there’s a lot to be living for, and there are people in your life that love you”. He kept begging me to give him only one chance to find me a reason to live, and I agreed. There was just something about the way he would go through all that effort for someone he had known for only a couple weeks that hit my heart. After that, in late October, I met him in real life for the first time, and a couple days later we agreed to try out long distance.

It’s not actually long distance, he’s like four miles away from me, but I’m not allowed to date until after I graduate, and I’m never allowed to go out with friends, so I don’t see him. Even before we started dating, he was unrealistically perfect. The type of guy who relentlessly tells me I’m beautiful, and even tells me specific parts of me that he thinks are beautiful, like my eyes or the way I smile. Over the past nine months he’s pretty much erased most of the insecurities I’ve developed over the previous four years, and he encourages me to focus and do well in school.

I admit, he is a bit of a distraction, but I think it’s okay because I’m starting to put my mental health before my education. I’m young and dumb, is this okay? I feel like we’re soulmates, trying not to sound naive but it’s just such a strong feeling, like I’ve never been so sure of anything! He does affect my schoolwork, but without him I’m afraid my mental health will start to decline eventually. I don’t think it’s a dependency thing, I don’t rely on his validation at all, but he’s like the one thing that I know will always be right next to me if I start spiraling again. Do I sound stupid? Is there a chance that we’ll last forever?