i broke up with a guy i’ve been dating pretty seriously for five months.
there were some attachment-related issues on my side that i’ve been working on in therapy (and making progress with over the past few months) including specific things he and i had talked about needing to change in our relationship.
in short, i broke up with him because he was very disengaged and closed off after threatening a breakup and then “making up”, and it was really negatively impacting my mental health.
we talked about a week after because i knew i wanted to work on things, maybe not jump right back in immediately but definitely wanted to give it a chance.
it wasn’t until this talk that i got a glimpse of his true thoughts/feelings/struggles with these “attachment-related issues” – specifically how deeply harmful and impactful they really were to him as they happened.
they’ve had a much stronger impact on him than i realized throughout our time together. which is completely valid and i was so sad to hear that. he was really struggling and i truly really had no idea to what depth.
instead of telling me in the moment when i did things that triggered him, he mostly kept it in. he would kind of turn down his energy with me for days to weeks at a time and i’m very sensitive to those shifts so i’d ask VERY often if anything was wrong and he would always respond “nothing is wrong! i feel great! we’re having totally different experiences” which i had to take as truth at the time, but now it’s so clear that was false.
whether or not he knew what he was feeling or not in the moment, those feelings and experiences were so painful for him. unfortunately, we didn’t talk about it enough. i knew they were important and i felt like i was doing my best to work on my part and check in. looking back, feelings were rarely shared besides a small handful of conversations we had about changes we needed to make.
2 of those conversations were less conversations and more of him breaking down with absolutely overwhelmed feelings of hurt. the last of those 2 conversations is what prompted the breakup.
outside of these triggering events, we had the best time. he and i are very aligned on maybe all things in life, what we want, how we want to spend our time, how we want to live and show up in the world, etc. he is my best friend and someone i literally cannot see life without.
anyways, back to our post-breakup talk, he shared that there’s no chance of us getting back together or working on things.
i’m struggling to make sense of it because it feels like i’ve been blindsided because of how abruptly this feels it all happened (from my perspective). i felt like we were on the same page, communicating, i thought i was working on things and improving (he even told me a few times during our breakup talk that he noticed).
when i asked for feedback, 98% of the time i was led to believe i was just being anxious in my head and overly sensitive because when i’d ask what was wrong it was “nothing”.
therapy has NOT helped me come to terms with the end of this relationship. my therapist just wants me to acknowledge why i’m feeling like this, and accept it for now. but my intense sadness is not getting better. i’m so overwhelmed with sadness because it feels like it shouldn’t be happening.
coming to terms with the end of the relationship feels like our connection, all of these amazing trips, memories, things we’ve done together, and future plans we shared were not real at all. obviously they were real. i know the care we have on both ends are real.
i also know it’s a huge communication issue. and he definitely can’t see his part in that which i am closer to accepting. and maybe that’s all it will ever be so i’ll just have to accept that we really don’t have a chance.
but it feels impossible to believe that given the other parts of our relationship that were SO good for a huge majority of the time. i can’t seem to let that go.
i’m wondering if anyone can share some advice on how to look at the context of our breakup more objectively so i can start to move past it because i am so broken i can’t even function.