Friendship Struggles

Hi friends, just here looking for new perspectives on some friendship struggles in having, so I’d love to hear any opinions…

(This is long so I apologize in advance and truly appreciate it if you make it all the way through!)

I have a best friend who struggles with anxiety and OCD. Both his anxiety and OCD have attached themselves on to our friendship and revolve around it now, this he told me himself.

A few things this translates as: he has severe separation anxiety with me, he gets jealous very easily, he thinks every small problem is a sign our friendship is doomed, he thinks I am ready to leave and replace him at any point in time, he projects his own negative self view onto me and makes it out to be as if I also feel negatively about him.

Lately my main struggle has been with the fact he decides what he thinks is best for me and assumes how I feel and tries to act on those assumptions and conclusions without even asking what I actually feel. This kind of thing has been happening throughout our whole friendship for well over a year now, but has gotten worse recently.

For example: he likes to send me a lot of text messages, something that has never been a problem to me because I really enjoy texting people who truly talk to me and not just send trivial messages, I’ve expressed to him on multiple occasions for over a year now (and almost every day for a month now) that it makes me happy that he sends as many texts as he does.

But even when I express my feelings blatantly he decides on his own that it is annoying to me and he says things like “I know it’s a problem how much I text so I will try to stop and limit myself so that you can be happy”. And even when I reassure him it’s okay and I am happy, I can never seem to break through.

This back and forth has become a common theme within many aspects of our friendship.

I have expressed that I don’t feel good when my feelings are assumed and when he makes conclusions, especially after I have blatantly told him my actual feelings and he still goes off of his assumptions. I expressed it makes me feel invalidated, as if my feelings don’t matter because they will be decided by him anyways, and as if I have to fight to have my feelings to be heard.

He hates that he assumes my feelings and says he is trying to stop doing it because he knows I don’t like it, but he says it’s part of his mental illnesses and he knows that isn’t an excuse and he wants to fix it. So I wait because I know he has good intentions and doesn’t want to do things that hurt me.

But it does get hard when it keeps happening again and again, and I can’t tell if that makes me an asshole that I’m struggling with it, because I know he is truly struggling as well.

Theres so many more aspects of things that are jumbled up in my brain, but I’ll leave this one here for now.

I really appreciate any new perspectives that anyone has to give, I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about this to see other sides, so all I’ve seen is my perspective and I think it might be a little skewed at this point.