Loving Someone With Chronic Suicidal Ideation

Loving someone who doesn’t believe you love them — and who lives with chronic suicidal ideation — isn’t just about crisis lines and quiet prayers.

It’s about living in a house that holds your fear, your love, and your rage all at once.
It’s about bearing the unbearable — not just their pain, but the accusation that you are the reason for it.

For over a decade, I have loved someone through suicidal threats, emotional manipulation, weapons, silence, and disappearing acts.
This isn’t a story about how love saved him.
It’s a story about how I had to save myself.

This letter is for the women who’ve been there —
loving someone who can’t or won’t believe they’re loved,
and blaming you for it anyway.

I love someone who doesn’t believe I love him too.

And no matter how many times I say it,
show it,
stand in the wreckage with my hands bloody from pulling him out —
he can’t see it.
He won’t.

Because if he believed I loved him,
he’d have to face the truth:
that it wasn’t my lack of love that broke things —
it was his behavior.

It was the knives.
The AR-15.
The broken windows.
The pills.
The bridge.
The silence.
The blame.

It was the way he looked me in the face,
told me I didn’t love him enough,
and swallowed the pills —
as if that would be the proof he needed.

As if my destruction would finally validate his pain.

But here’s what I’ve learned:
You can love someone with everything you have
and still not be enough to make them believe it.
Not because your love is weak,
but because they’ve built their identity around not being lovable.

Because they’ve made you the villain in a script
where they are the eternal victim,
and no amount of devotion rewrites that role.

And the hardest truth?

They’re not committed to healing.
They’re not committed to accountability.
They’re not even committed to staying alive
if dying lets them make their pain someone else’s fault.

And so you start building walls.
You start setting boundaries.
Not because you don’t love them,
but because you’re drowning inside a love that’s slowly killing you.

And the moment you stop playing your old role —
the comforter, the forgiver, the fixer —
they go silent.

Weaponized silence.
The kind that’s meant to punish you.
The kind that says, “If you really loved me, you’d come find me.”

But this time?

You don’t.
Because this time, they crossed the line.
This time, they actually took the pills.
This time, they tried to turn your love into a murder weapon and hand you the blame.

And there is no going back from that.

This time, you remember who you are.

And it’s not his savior.
It’s not his scapegoat.
It’s not the loving wife who bends until she breaks.

It’s the woman who survived loving someone
who refused to believe it was love
because it didn’t look like pain.