Two things are true at once. The risk may be real and must be taken seriously. And a threat delivered whenever you try to leave is coercion, whatever else it is. You cannot keep another adult alive by staying, and no one has ever managed it. Take it seriously by involving people whose job this is, not by staying. Their safety is not yours to hold.
This is one of the hardest positions a person can be put in, and most advice fails it by picking a side. One camp says it is pure manipulation and you should walk away without a backward glance. The other says a life is at stake and you cannot risk it. Neither is honest. A threat like this can be genuine distress and a control tactic at the same time, and you are not in a position to work out which. Nobody this entangled is, which is exactly why other people exist. Notice instead what the threat does, whatever sits behind it. It moves the whole weight of another adult's survival onto your decision about your own life. It makes leaving feel like killing someone. It ends every conversation on their terms.
None of this is a diagnosis, and it is not a way to decide the danger is fake. It is a way to see the shape of what is happening to you, so you stop trying to solve it by staying. Patterns people describe include a threat that only appears when you pull away, that is conditional on your behavior, that comes with instructions about what you must do to prevent it, that evaporates the moment you agree to stay, that is announced to your family or your children rather than to a doctor, and that never comes with any interest in actual treatment. Distress asks for help. A leash asks for compliance. Even when the despair is entirely real, using it to hold you in place is coercion, and saying so is not cruelty.
You can believe someone is genuinely in pain and still refuse to be the thing that keeps them alive. Those two positions have never been in conflict.
Threats of suicide during a separation are treated by advocates as a danger sign for your safety, not only for theirs. Someone who says they cannot exist without you is describing a world with no future in it, and that thinking has been known to widen to include the person they say they cannot live without, and sometimes children. This is not said to frighten you. It is said because people are routinely reassured that a suicide threat means the danger is pointed inward, and that reassurance is not reliable. If this is your situation, tell a domestic-violence advocate specifically about the threats. They will factor it into a danger assessment with you, and it changes how a safety plan gets built.
Sending emergency services to someone is a real option and it carries real risk, so decide with your eyes open. A police response to a person in crisis can escalate, particularly where there are weapons, and that risk does not fall evenly. It lands hardest on people of color and on people with a psychiatric history. It may also be used against you afterward as proof that you are the unstable one. Where they exist, a mental-health crisis team or a mobile response service is usually a better call than police alone, and a crisis line can tell you what your area has. What is almost never a good idea is going over there yourself to check.
You can hand the risk to people equipped to hold it and still go. Those are not competing options, they are the same plan. Practically, that means telling an advocate about the threats while you build your exit, arranging the goodbye so it does not happen alone in a room with them, expecting the threats to intensify at the moment you actually go, and deciding in advance who you will call instead of turning the car around. Write down what you will do if a message arrives at two in the morning, because you will not be thinking clearly at two in the morning. Decide it now, while you can.
It has to be said, because the fear of it is running underneath everything. If someone takes their own life, the responsibility for that is not yours, no matter what they told you beforehand and no matter what anyone says afterward. A person's decision about their own life belongs to them. Being told for years that you are the only thing keeping someone alive is a burden that was never legitimately yours to carry, and it does not become legitimate through outcome. If this has already happened to you, please get real support for it. Grief tangled with guilt and relief is heavy, and it is not something to carry privately.
The fear is understandable and the answer does not change: you are not able to prevent it by staying, and the people who love you would not ask you to try. What you can do is make sure others know, so the risk is held by people with training instead of by you alone. Staying does not remove the risk. It removes your life while the risk continues.
No. That thought usually arrives because you have watched the timing, and timing is information. You can hold both readings at once without resolving them. What matters is that neither reading requires you to stay. If it is real distress, other people can respond to it. If it is a leash, staying only tightens it. Either way the next step is the same.
Usually yes, if you can do it safely. Threats like this work by staying sealed inside the relationship, and telling their parents, a sibling, or a close friend both spreads the responsibility and removes the secrecy the tactic depends on. Expect anger about it. Be prepared for some of them not to believe you. Tell an advocate first if there is any chance the disclosure will provoke retaliation.