Thread: Taking "Space"?

My boyfriend and I have been through a lot together and have a very close relationship, the type where you can tell each other anything and everything with absolutely no embarrassment.

In February, we both quit smoking marijuana together due to legal issues. Now the legal matters have passed, and we've decided to stay quit just for our personal well-being. I had been smoking pretty heavily for about six months, and he'd been smoking heavily for six years.

A few months after quitting, he started struggling with some major anxiety. Our theory about this is that he's just always been an anxious person and that marijuana was a kind of self-medication that kept it at bay for a while. The anxiety got worse and worse to the point where he was worrying about anything and everything. He had unrealistic thoughts of how I would react to certain things, and so stopped hanging out with his friends out of fear that it would distance him from me. He started worrying about being gay, which confused me, but he ended up deciding that he was just confusing envy with attraction and that he knows he's attracted to women.

Then, about a month ago we both had to deal with the blow from the suicide of a mutual best friend. After that, the anxiety got worse, as of course we were both blaming ourselves for the tragedy, as people left behind by suicide often do. We helped our friend's family through the pain, went to the funeral, and found a way to get through it together. But the anxiety kept getting worse.

It got to the point where we didn't talk about anything but his anxiety and how horrible and uncomfortable he felt all the time. He's started counselling and it has helped a bit, but it's still really bad. I'm a very sensitive person, and very susceptible to the moods of those around me, so I ended up telling him a couple of weeks ago that it was hurting me and I couldn't stand to see him like that. That upset him a lot, and of course just contributed to how he was feeling because now he was worried about hurting me.

This past week it's been nearly unbearable. He was finally put on some anti-anxiety medicine on Friday, but of course it hasn't been long enough to have an effect. I go to his place, hoping to relax and enjoy my time with him, only to be greeted by an unstable, insecure, anxious environment. After seeing how miserable I was, he decided that we needed space so that I could be away from him while starting college. He called a friend to drive me home at 11pm.

I can't stand it. I've been through the whole "I need space" thing before, and it always ended up as a break up. I love him, and I want to be with him, I just can't stand to see him in such a state all the time. He's now changed his mind, apparently, about why the space was needed. He recently said something along the lines of "I need space to think and get my head on straight before I can deal with anything else."

Is this a breakup in disguise? Should I insist to him that we work through this together, or just give him his space and continue to do nothing but stare at the wall and cry in the meantime? I start college in a week, and I'm scared out of my mind and can't focus on anything but how much this hurts.

What can I do?

[Sorry for the huge wall of text, and thanks to anyone patient enough to read through it all.]