Overworked girlfriend rejecting her life

[luke_lord]

Hello, if you want to help, get ready for a bit of reading.
I started this thread, on behalf of myself and my best friend, to ask for advice. My friend is in a relationship, but his girlfriend is acting very strangely.
Since it’s HIS girlfriend after all, he’s the main character of this horrible story. I’m more in the back. The only reason it is I who writes this Thread is simply because I thought about it first, and because it doesn’t really matter which one of us gets help.


His girlfriend is basically obsessed with school and grades. However, we are all at a higher education level (not going to bother explaining), and school is about as hard as university. This puts a lot of stress on my friend’s girlfriend, and she isn’t taking it well. She doesn’t sleep much (if at all), doesn’t eat well, often joked about suicide and rejects our help and even friendship. Every time she’s got a work to hand in, she’s extremely depressed, and no matter how much my friend helps her, she feels like he doesn’t care about her.

I have known my friend for many years, and there’s nothing I keep secret from him. Not even joining this forum. So when he told me his girlfriend was having problems, I naturally wanted to help.
From that day, and for the next year until today, the combined efforts of both my friend and I barely had an effect on her. The girl simply refuses help. Often my friend will do a homework for her, but she would say “Your work sucks” (yes, she used that word) and redo it herself. Then, the very next minute, she would actually complain he “never helps her”. Plus she continuously complains about everything, particularly her boyfriend; my poor friend is often getting blamed for how she lives her life.


Her parents are a problem, too. They are very, and I do say, very overprotective and have tremendous expectations. They scold her if she gets a “bad grade” (as in 85%, seriously). She often cries after getting a grade greater than 90% in an exam. And the times she scored a perfect mark, she barely showed a sign of satisfaction. The moment my friend gets a better grade than her, she envies him for studying 1 hour instead of 8, and makes him feel bad about himself.
My own performance in school is much worse. I tried cheering the girl up by reminding her grades beat mine any day. If she had a reaction, I must’ve missed it.


So, to conclude, this always happens: she can’t take anything well, and has IMPOSSIBLE expectations. No one in life can possibly be so perfect as to have no personal problem and score perfect grades non-stop. And I never heard of anyone else crying bitter tears because of a 92% at an exam.
Every time my friend tries to help her, often with me providing ideas, she just pushes us away. Thankfully, we managed to get her stop talking about suicide, although she still jokes about dying from other causes. Many times, she said she’ll make an effort to be more positive, but that resolution never made it past the night.
She’s acting so emo and pessimistic that we’re out of ideas. Recently we’ve tried talking with great honesty and strength: we were clear on how worried she makes us, and how she makes herself suffer. My friend literally implored her to accept herself for who she is, and stop working to get some sleep, for once. The words he said were powerful. Believe it or not, she didn’t even consider what he said. He had to ask why she ignored him before getting some answer.




And this forced us to seek help. Hours upon hours of thinking how to solve this problem didn’t help. I have no other friend close enough to ask for help. My parents rarely give good advice, and always end up blaming me for all help I ask them. None of us has any help nearby, so we decided to try the internet in a last effort.

I doubt anyone to find a perfect solution, but any help will be greatly appreciated by both of us.