My Boyfriend Loved Me Too Much & It Ruined Us

You know those movies where the girl leaves the good guy because he’s just too good? That happened to me in real life. I found the elusive good guy who stuck by my side through thick and very, very thin for years… and I knew I had to break up with him because of it.

1. His love was too consuming. His love took everything out of me. It was smothering. Yeah, we say we want a guy to be all about us all the time, but trust me, it’s not a good thing. It was tiresome trying to reciprocate his energy and feign a level of love I just never understood. We were so young, so alive, with so many goals and aspirations to achieve and focus on. Concentrating on his love and trying to match it was getting in the way of that.
2. He tried too hard. Nobody likes a try-hard. When we would get into arguments or disagreements, he always just told me what I wanted to hear. He was constantly seeking reassurance that he was doing what I wanted him to do. It was like I was Regina George and he was Gretchen Weiners—if I told him to jump, he’d ask me where, how high, and if he was doing it well enough.
3. He was too nice. I know this one is going to make me sound like a major douche, but let me explain. He wasn’t just too nice to me by assuaging my ego 24/7, he was too nice to EVERYONE. Girls in malls, people in drive-thrus, strangers in stores—literally everyone we encountered, he chatted up and made acquaintances with. It was the most annoying trait of his that I ever had to deal with.
4. He was too affectionate. I love me some affection, but he had no romanticism. He would want to hold hands and feel me up at the most awkward times. Then he would attempt to use affection like a territory marker. Sometimes he would try to tongue me down in the middle of a store if he felt someone was staring too hard, and that’s not OK.
5. He was too accepting of my mistakes. Admittedly, I walked all over him. Mainly because he let me (which is another issue we’ll go into later) but also because I knew he would forgive me even if what I did really hurt him. That makes me a toxic individual, I know, I’m working on that, but it’s also a flaw of his too. No self-respecting person lets someone treat them like garbage and keeps going back for more. Some actions are meant to show you that it’s time to walk away, but not him.
6. He made marriage a HUGE deal. Family was a huge thing for him, so when it came to marriage and babies, he was very adamant about only ever getting married once and having kids with that woman. I love seeing couples raise kids and grow old together, but he would “jokingly” tell me all the time that if I ever left him, he wouldn’t ever be with anyone else. Who needs that kind of pressure?
7. He always bailed me out. Literally and figuratively. He never let me fall down and stay down. That might seem like a good thing, like the quality of a great guy, but here’s my issue: when you don’t let someone pick themselves back up or find their own way out of a rut, they become dependent on you. Even if I was wrong, even if I deserved to be in whatever situation I was in, he was always there with his white horse and shining armor to save me. I still think this is the reason I left. I needed space to struggle.
8. He was too afraid to hurt me. He had known me forever, since freshman year of high school. Though we weren’t always together, he never left my side. When I went away to college and I met different guys and had different relationships, he was always right there when things turned sour. Since he’d been around for so many of my heartbreaks, he was too afraid to hurt me even when I needed tough love. He hated to see me cry and would do any and everything to make it stop, but sometimes I just needed a shoulder to cry on. That was something he could never be for me, which sucked.
9. He was too much of a pushover. I told you I would get to it, right? He let me do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and always forgave me if I hurt his feelings. He did this out of love because he thought that’s what I wanted, but people need boundaries. Relationships need boundaries. Everything can’t be OK because one day your partner is going to cross a line that you never drew, and everything will go downhill from there.
10. He was too passionate in bed. Now, this sounds like it should be on the pro rather than the con list, but here’s what happens when they’re too passionate about you: it never lasts. He was so in love with me and happy about making it out of the friend-zone. Since he was so obsessive about making love to me, he shot the gun before he ever got it out of the holster, and that’s what killed him.