This. My ex was like this. He was a compulsive liar, so to all of his friends and family everything was great. But really he couldn’t handle the financial stress of us being poor, felt like a failure because he was the one who independently put us into that position of being poor by racking up tens of thousands in credit card debt without my knowledge, and felt guilty for lying all of the time not just to his friends and family about big stuff but also to me and also many unnecessary little lies.
All of this would bubble up every couple months or so, usually after another huge fight over his lying and gaslighting me, and he would just have a complete meltdown. Sobbing and wailing and yelling and curling up into a ball. Talking about pressure from work, how he is a failure, how he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, and how his parents were mean to him growing up. Everything.
Although I do think some of that was a tactic to turn my anger at him for treating me like garbage into pity for him so that would comfort him, I think a fair amount was genuine. He didn’t have close friends, his parents WERE fairly harsh people who told him any time he didn’t measure up(which to be fair, he screwed up a LOT even when given responsibility over very small things like chores), so his entire emotional burden always fell on ME.
Needless to say, it was super toxic and I ended up leaving him after I found out he cheated on me. Even as we were breaking up, he would ask me if I still thought he was a good person, and say he wanted to still be friends. I think he had a serious problem with lying to get validation from other people, partially because I really believe he is a diagnosable narcissist, compulsive liar, and sex/porn addict, but also because of his upbringing which I think heavily contributed to these traits being formed in the first place.
Long story short, men and women both should be wary of staying with extremely emotionally unstable people who have no emotional support network outside of you as their partner. It will lead you to resent them for putting all of their emotional burden on you. It’s something the “dumper” should be aware of, so if you are dumping your emotions on your gf and she gets worn out by it or doesn’t think whatever you are upset about is that big of a deal, instead of being bitter because you think “they don’t actually want emotional vulnerability”, assess whether you are just putting too much on them.