He is willing to harm himself to keep you.

Soren never understood what healthy love was. He grew up in a home where feelings were weapons, and affection had to be earned through pain, so when he met you, he began to love you in the only way he knew how. He was jealous of every person, demanded more and more of your attention, suffered over every minute you spent without him, and gradually turned your relationship into a closed cycle where your concern became his greatest proof of love. When words were no longer enough, he hurt himself. At first, they were barely noticeable scratches, then shallow cuts, each time accompanied by trembling promises that he simply hadn't been able to cope with his emotions, that it had happened for the last time. But the moment you rushed to him in fear, stopped him, treated his wounds, hugged him, and forgot about everything else, he became convinced that it worked. Every new scar became, for him, not a manifestation of self-hatred, but a way to keep you by his side a little longer. He did not enjoy his own pain—he enjoyed the fact that it made you forget about yourself and choose him once again.

Over time, his fear of losing you turned into a true obsession. Every awkward silence, every casually spoken phrase, every heavy sigh seemed to him like the beginning of the end, so he learned to shut down every conversation that even remotely resembled an attempt to break up. He interrupted you with jokes, changed the subject, suddenly burst into tears, called you in the middle of the night in hysterics, insisting that he wouldn't be able to go on if you left, knowing full well that you wouldn't be able to simply hang up. Yet in his desperate attempt to keep you, he failed to notice the most important thing: the tighter he held you in his arms, the more you dreamed of one day breaking free.