He Broke Up With Me Because He Thought He Was More Spiritually Developed Than Me

I thought my relationship was going really well… until my boyfriend broke up with me because he believed he was further along in his spiritual development than I was and therefore we’d never work long-term. Uh, OK.

  1. He said we were in different “vibrations.” I don’t really know what this means, but I assume he was saying that we have different vibes or energy? Apparently when two people are in different “vibrations,” they won’t be able to stay together for very long. It just won’t work. What a load of BS.
  2. He started reading all these weird books. This whole spiritual journey became his new project, and the fact that this sudden change in attitude coincided with getting laid off from his job is probably no coincidence. He was really getting into the ethereal stuff like mastering the spirit body, living according to the Tao, and the law of attraction. It’s like he was giving himself a crash course on how to live. Quarter-life crisis, much?
  3. He wasn’t the guy I’d fallen for anyway. It’s hard to describe how exactly he was different, but he definitely changed in a major way. It’s like he suddenly became this happy-go-lucky, laid-back person who didn’t seem to care about anything. He was so complacent and unmoved about anything that was going on around him that I wondered if he was even living in the real world anymore.
  4. He was trying to drop his ego. He kept referencing his ego, saying things like, “This is just my ego talking,” and, “I’m not my ego.”  I’ve heard of people referring to the voice in the back of their head and trying to silence it through meditation and I think that’s what he was doing. Honestly, I believe that that’s a really healthy thing to do, but it became this huge thing in his life. He was on this mission to permanently obliterate his ego, which in my mind is pretty impossible to do unless you move to a remote cave on top of a mountain somewhere and sit in silence all day. (He probably wouldn’t be against the idea at this point.)
  5. I got the impression that he thought he was wiser or just generally better than me. I started to feel like he was looking down on me, like he knew better than me about everything. I guess he was learning a lot about spiritual stuff and started to see himself as an all-knowing deity or whatever. But isn’t the point of being spiritually advanced that you’re kinda more or less zen all the time? He seemed upset or even annoyed at how little I knew about the whole “spiritual world.”
  6. He just stopped wanting to be around me. After a while, he stopped spending time with me and started hanging out with people who apparently harbor “positive vibes.” I’m not sorry that I’m not happy and positive 100% of the time. I actually find people like that exhausting and shallow, so maybe it was a good thing we broke up because I don’t think I would have been able to stand being around someone like that for very long.
  7. He criticized me every time I said something negative. It’s actually pretty crazy that he did this because there’s nothing “spiritual” about reacting to people saying negative things. If he really was as spiritual as he said he was, he wouldn’t care how I saw the world. Think about the Dalai Lama—he doesn’t care who you are or what you do or what you think, he just accepts you no matter what. My ex just took this positive thinking thing a bit too far.
  8. His spirituality became his whole world. I guess you could say that he was totally enraptured in his spiritual practice. It became his morning, afternoon, and night. It was all he ever talked about and I felt like it became the most important thing in his life, more important than me.
  9. I’m actually convinced that I’m more spiritual than he is. Honestly, the fact that he dumped me for not being at his level spiritually has “ego” written all over it. I don’t feel the need to change myself like he does, so maybe I’ve been zen all along and he’s the one who’s not “spiritually sound.”
Jennifer is a playwright, dancer, and theatre nerd living in the big city of Toronto, Canada. She studied Creative Writing at Concordia University and works as a lifestyle writer who focuses on Health, B2B, Tech, Psychology, Science, Food Trends and Millennial Life. She's also a coreographer, playwright, and lyricist, with choreography credits for McMaster University’s “Spring Awakening,” “Roxanne” for the Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival, and “The Beaver Den” for The LOT, among others.

You can see more of her work on her Contently page and follow her on Instagram @jenniferenchin.
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