Quite a long post ahead but it’s definitely a circumstance I’m struggling with:

I (22F) met this guy through mutual friends while he was visiting my city and wasn’t particularly interested in him initially, but he gradually grew on me as he continued to try to talk to me throughout the night. He pursued me quite firmly and we ended up going home together. I felt surprisingly comfortable with him and really enjoyed his company – he expressed that liked me for qualities that I like about myself including my sense of humor, which I find to be rare when most guys I hook up with are for more shallow reasons. I do have defense mechanisms towards hooking up with guys, and automatically assume that they’re only interested in something casual and try really hard to act casual in return without ever clarifying. I was definitely the person who acted a lot more nonchalant, while he was alluding to wanting to explore something more serious, but the possibility never crossed my mind since we had met the night before he was set off to leave again.

We started talking – texting, calling, FaceTiming – and I liked having his company but I struggled to let my guard down and was still worried about getting used for sex, despite the fact that he kept maintaining that he wanted someone who was interested in him for more than just sex. He opened up to me out of the blue a few times drunk, but also would pull away immediately after. Also, we had both been cheated on in the past, so while I initially didn’t want to let my guard down because I didn’t know how many girls he was talking to, he didn’t want to let his guard down because he seemed to expect girls to hurt him. This probably was not helped by the fact that he knew I had slept with/talked to few of our mutual friends – I wasn’t really interested in any of them the way that I was interested in him, but these were definitely complex situations since most of them had wanted something more serious with me before things had ended.

One day out of the blue, he decided to cut me off. He told me that he wasn’t ready or interested in things going anywhere with me, and I was pretty upset because I felt like he wasn’t being genuine about his reasons for doing so and I realized that this probably happened in a large part because of how I acted so indifferent towards him. I reached back out to him after a few weeks and told him that I didn’t care whether or not he was interested in things going anywhere necessarily, and just wanted to have him in my life. He told me that a large part of why he cut me off was because he felt as though I wasn’t really interested in *him* or invested in talking to him, sort of the opposite of what he had said initially when cutting me off. He also mentioned that he was fearful of trust issues because they had burnt him in the past, which is definitely something I struggle with.

We got back into contact with each other, but things were definitely rocky. I didn’t really know where we stood or how he felt, and whether or not he was really interested in things. He came to visit my city shortly after and we made plans to see each other. We had both been drinking and he almost immediately started to open up to me about trauma in his life that he hadn’t told many of his long-term friends, and I felt more close to him than I had ever felt to anyone in my life in that moment. At some point in our conversation when we were discussing us, I mentioned that I was frustrated at how I felt like communication was a big challenge for us and that he confused me. He replied saying that he didn’t think I’d be interested in him if he wasn’t confusing, and mentioned that I have a “certain effect” on men to make them fall for me. He called me perfect, asked me if I could ever fall in love with him and even asked me to try romantically, but also purposefully put up arbitrary boundaries to “avoid getting attached”. I told him that I wasn’t ready to try romantically unless he tried to work on communicating, which he refused to do.

The next day when he left, I had never felt more distant from someone and didn’t even know if we were on talking terms – I was so amazed at how I could feel so close to someone opening up to me, someone they hadn’t known for long, about things that pained them and suddenly feel so distant from them. He ended things later, and while I told him that I was invested in his wellbeing, genuinely cared for him, and didn’t care if things were to go anywhere, he told me that he didn’t want anyone to care for him.

He has really bad self-destructive tendencies, especially drinking and drugs. I initially was interested in how carefree and fun he seemed, alongside his professional drive. I had no idea he was so damaged and can definitely sense that he’s dealing with a lot of pain, and I feel guilty for exacerbating that in acting so nonchalant/indifferent about him. It sounds like he might not be able to see his own self worth and couldn’t believe that I could be interested in him unless he was confusing/played games. I also feel as though he didn’t want to put in any effort to grow while we were still talking because he didn’t want to deal with him investing effort with the risk of things not panning out.

Beyond whatever was involved between us romantically, I’m just generally worried about his wellbeing. He’s been in a bad place for months now and it seems like most of his friends are unaware because binge-drinking and drug usage is so common at our age. He’s cut me out of his life and I feel guilty for worsening the pain he must feel, but also have no way of knowing if he’s going to reach a breaking point. How do I trust that he’s going to reach out to his friends and ask them for support when he hasn’t for nearly half a year of dealing with shit, especially when he pushed me away despite me expressing that I didn’t want to put any pressure on him romantically and just wanted to support him?

TL;DR: Guy has bad self-destructive tendencies, I probably worsened them when I acted romantically indifferent towards him, and I don’t know how to support him from afar when he’s cut me off