I have been in a relationship with my boyfriend for around a year. We met when I was in a tough place socially, in the last 4-5 years I was really unlucky when it comes to the people I was meeting and there was just a 6month period, when i did an internship abroad, during which i had great friends, apart from that I really really struggled to meet people my vibe. And i really did everything i could to meet more people and make new friends, from joining sport clubs to using apps, but i guess i was just unlucky because i kept meeting people not so much my vibe anyway. For that reason when I met him, some part of me knew that we are not a perfect match (I also told him that, to be transparent with him), but i was surrounded by people who i was not compatible with anyway and 1. I started to think that this is the way life looks like and i should just accept it 2. compared to many people I was friends with, he was actually one of the most compatible people in my life at that moment. He actually said he didnt mind if i was not 100% sure about him, so then i said if it is not a problem for him, I could give us a try.
Time has passed by and we actually had a good time together, i still could see that in some ways we were not a match made in heaven and there were some things about him that bothered me, but he is a good guy in general and we both put some effort into it so it worked. Now i have got a new job in another city, where i am commuting every day and I LOVE IT, i again met amazing people, so much my vibe, I dont remember last time that i laughed so much every day. It made me look at my relationship with my boyfriend differently, I do not have this feeling any more that relationships or friendships are meant to be hard or boring and it is your job to make it work. I can see now clearly that I gain more happiness from the friendships at work than from the relationship with him.
But now here is the issue. He is a great guy, just like i said before, but he has a bit of victim mentality and deals very badly with rejection. I think he started noticing lately that I am not as engaged into our relationship as I used to and tbh i think he is just waiting for me to break things off. Even though some things are the fault of us both, for example he was now gone for two weeks and we barely talked but its not that i was not picking up his calls or ignoring his texts… he was equally unengaged. He joked yesterday out of nowhere about whether i want to break up with him. And then nevertheless tells me every 5 mins that he loves me, like if he was trying to "convince" me to stay with him or make me feel bad, idk. I know that once I break up with him, he will say something like "I knew it, I could already see you not caring about me" and I will be the bad one while he will be the poor guy dumped by a girl. I do not care as much about what he will tell other people, I would want some advice on how to deal with the conversation about breaking up… I think he already knows that I am about to and that makes it so much harder for me? How should i do it?
TL;DR I feel like my boyfriend knows that I want to break up with him but I do not know how to do it.