She’s work stressed and can afford downtime for illness. Whether a cold, or if your cold is flu or Covid. Not seeing you for a week is not unreasonable. You need to deal with your depression. See campus health service/counseling. The depression is making all of your concerns seem worse. She may be worried that you are leaning on her too much. She can’t be your whole world at college. Join a campus activity, find some friends. There are a lot of lonely freshmen looking for a friend.

@ron thank you I think I needed to hear that, that’s a very honest and reasonable response. Sometimes it’s hard to know if my concerns are actually valid or because of my mental heath problems, so thanks for providing your perspective I appreciate it a lot

To me it sounds like you put a lot of pressure on your relationship with her. You stated you only have her and your parents or are only close to those three, or something like that. That’s too much for a college aged relationship. You should have other friends, interests, hobbies, clubs, a job or things keeping you busy other than “your first love.”

That is probably why she’s pulling back. She doesn’t know how to emotionally support you in the way you need her to, actually-you want her to. You need professional support. It’s a drag to be someone’s girlfriend and always be told you’re doing it wrong. It’s fun to be in a relationship when it’s light and happy, but when one person is severely depressed and needs more support than the other person can healthily give because they are not a therapist, either- it’s off balance and no longer seems like a romantic relationship. You’re expecting too much for someone too young.

Break up. Treat your depression. I do think that is the key to this entire thing. Good luck. Meds and a good therapist changed my life.

I feel like there’s a lot going on here, and I probably won’t get to all of it.

The first thing that jumped out at me:
There’s nothing mean about not visiting because they’re sick. People can prioritize their own health. Reading this really made me wonder if there are other things that you’re taking personally and shouldn’t be.

It sounds like the two of you have very different expectations around texting habits. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but you really need to recognize this. It’s not unreasonable to ask her to text you more frequently.

Have you told her you’d like to see her more often? You said you had an expectation that you spend more time together at university. Did you share that expectation with her? How frequently would you like to be seeing her? There’s no standard amount.

If you’ve told her you like to spend more time together, what was her response?

When you DO spend time together, do you enjoy it?

To your main question:
You’re entitled to your feelings. It’s fair to feel neglected. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the other person is doing anything wrong, but it’s possible that the level of contact that they want in a relationship doesn’t match what you want. It’s not unreasonable to end a relationship because of this (though in truth, you can end a relationship for any reason that you want, there’s no particular bar that has to be met).
Should you end it? I have no idea.

Hi, I’d like to clarify some things:

1) she was not sick, I was sick (I don’t know if I worded this wrong in my initial post to make it sound like she was ill, if so im sorry for the confusion) and I didn’t feel like she cared as she actively avoided me because (in her own words) she didn’t want to have that inconvenience of potentially catching a cold and wanted to get on with her course. She apologised for this , but it’s this lack of support which upset me, if she wanted down time while sick I’d completely understand that
2) the expectation to see each other more was initially her idea, which is why I was so confident in it happening, she told me about how much fun it would be to live near each other and hang out more frequently and I agreed with that, and this is why I had the expectation
3) I didn’t want to press on the texting thing as I’m aware we have different schedules and she is a busier person than me (she is doing animation which is more work intensive than my course) which is why I didn’t address it, but I did mention a few times I was upset with the distance and she said she didn’t see a problem with it but she apologised to me. I am optimistic though as she said we could eat dinner together sometimes, which would be nice.
4) what I’ve gathered from the thread is that yes, I really do need to work on my depression. I’m on meds but I’ve really struggled to get therapy due to waiting lists but I will soon. And yes I need to expand my social circle considerably. I have nice flat mates who I’ve been trying to talk to more, and I am going to try and join societies.

I’m not sure about the direction our relationship is headed, but I think I owe my girlfriend an apology for unintentionally leaning on her, I in no way meant to put that on her but regardless of intention it was wrong of me. Thank you for everyone’s advice, it’s very valuable to me and gives me perspective on the problem.

My apologies, I was just careless with pronouns. I understood that it’s you who got sick.

But my point is that staying away to avoid getting sick is totally reasonable, and I don’t understand why she’d apologize for that. I agree that it’s shitty that she didn’t call or text though.