What happened to our relationship?
Here’s the story… and it’s a long one…
My boyfriend and I have been dating for 2 years now. The first 6 months, we were long distance and causal – we saw each other maybe once/twice a month, and maybe talked once/twice a week. Then he moved down for a job (which he was already planning when I met him). Then our relationship really started and we got closer and closer.
Two weeks ago, he said he wanted to talk. He wanted to talk about our relationship and where it was going. He said that there was something that was bothering him, but he didn’t know what. We talked, and found that we both didn’t know where the relationship was going. I said that I loved him, but was not in love with him. He said that although he had said I love you to previous girlfriends (we had never said it to each other), it was always in response to them. He said he thought that he had never really loved anyone before. Other things were said, but this is what sticks out in my mind. In the morning he felt a lot better that we had talked, and went on his merry way thinking things were fine. He just wanted to talk about the relationship. But I was left with an uneasy feeling. I text him and asked him “Do you still want to be in this relationship?” He thought about things, and later that night we talked and he broke up with me. He said he was very confused and didn’t know why. He said he was happy, and that there was no one else. He said that he had never been single before, and felt that he needed to be single before he thought about and committed to marriage. He said that he wasn’t ready to commit to us in the marriage as a possibility sense yet, although I had never placed any pressure on him. He said that if things weren’t moving towards that, then what were we doing in the relationship? He was confused and bothered by something but he didn’t know what, and needed time to figure it out. The next day, I left for a 10 day vacation.
3 days into my vacation, I received an email from him. He said that he wanted to talk about stuff when I got back. It was a response to a text that I had sent him after we broke up, “I really care about you and I don’t want us to end. Can we talk?” We had exchanged text messages that night, but he essentially said the same thing as when we had broken up.
When I got back from vacation, we talked a few days later, the minute he got back from a business trip. Essentially, it was a time for me to say what I needed to say, because during the first breakup talk, I didn’t say much and was very angry. I told him that during our time apart, I realized that I not only loved him, I was in love with him. I told him that I didn’t expect any kind of reciprocation, but that I just wanted to be honest with myself. I told him that I didn’t say it before because I was scared of being hurt. I told him that I couldn’t believe we were breaking up when we were perfectly happy and a lot of other mushy tug at your heart strings kind of things. He started crying, which I had never seen before. The only things he said were essentially the same things as the first breakup talk. He said that he didn’t want to date anyone or anything like that, that he just needed to be alone to think and figure things out. He also mentioned that this feeling of confusion that he had is a similar feeling that he has had in other relationships, but that he always brushed it off and then things got bad and then they broke up. He said that while I was gone, he went back and forth on getting back together and breaking up. He knew that breaking up was the right thing, that it wasn’t fair for either of us in the relationship if he wasn’t in it 100% because of this thing that was bothering and confusing him and that he couldn’t figure out.
Can someone tell me what happened? I’m just so confused, and I can see that he still cares for me so much, but how can he throw something away that he was happy with?
