It’s easy to break up with someone you hate, but breaking up with someone you love is a lot harder. Still, it’s sometimes necessary if we care about our own happiness… and the other person’s. Ending what we had was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but this is why I had to do it:
- I was being mean to you. I felt my temper getting shorter and shorter with you. I’d get mad over the stupidest things, and instead of putting me in my place, you’d just apologize. I got away with being a jerk to you way more than I should have, and you deserve someone who isn’t going to walk all over you just because you’re too nice to call them out on their short fuse.
- Your quirks became real problems. You weren’t perfect either — no one is — but your imperfections really clashed with my personality. At first they were endearing, but after having to deal with them for nearly two years, they became too much to handle. Each time you did something that bothered me was like a little pebble, and eventually they formed a mountain that I couldn’t climb over.
- We had no sexual chemistry. Sex isn’t all of a relationship in the same way that sugar isn’t all of a cake, but both are necessary if you want the final product to be good. It’s frustrating when you’re sexually attracted to the other person but can’t have good sex with them… but there we were. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t me. It just… was. We’re both too young to be in a long-term sexually unsatisfying relationship.
- The bad times were outweighing the good. Sure, we had our fun times, but even those were often marred by an utterly stupid argument that should have never happened. We were tolerating each other rather than enjoying each other, and that’s not what a relationship should be about.
- My love for you had changed. I will love you until the day I die and beyond. But it isn’t the same kind of love I had for you a year ago. I love you the same way I love my closest friends, the people who know everything about me, the people I can sit in silence with and still feel comfortable. But I’m no longer IN love with you. I felt nothing when we kissed, and if I had to make the choice to date you all over again, I wouldn’t have done it. Regardless of whether or not you felt the same way about me, you deserve to be with someone who is absolutely crazy about you.
- We didn’t go well together. We were like those two puzzle pieces that KIND of fit together, but only if you force one piece into the other. We didn’t have the worst or most toxic relationship out there, but it wasn’t good enough to justify staying together. It didn’t have anything to do with how you are as a person or how I am as a person, but just how we went together. Ice cream and pizza are both awesome, but you wouldn’t make a pizza milkshake.
- We had different futures in mind. We had so many problems that needed to be ironed out, but you were still telling our friends how you’d like to marry me someday. Meanwhile, I was having literal nightmares about marrying you and immediately realizing it was a mistake. You were thinking about forever, while I was thinking about right now. Even though the thought of not being with you tore me apart, something inside me told me I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment yet.
- I knew you’d never be the one to pull the trigger. Anyone could see that you were unhappy in this relationship, but we were both dragging our feet when it came to just ending the damn thing. I knew that if I didn’t do it, we were destined to be stuck together forever… and that thinking of ourselves as being “stuck” in a relationship was a red flag in itself. It was unbelievably painful to rip off that band-aid, but it was amazing how relieved we both felt once it was done.
- I deserve to be happy. With you, I fluctuated between being content and being miserable. And when you pick one person to be in a relationship with, you should feel something a little more positive than that. I have plenty of faults, but none of them are so bad that they should disqualify me from having a happy life, whether that life is spent single or in a relationship. Breaking up with you was hard, but I knew that it needed to be done. I was setting myself on fire to keep you warm, and I finally realized that I shouldn’t be doing it anymore.
- You deserve to be happy. I love you so much that I would have stayed with you forever despite my own misery if I thought it would have made you happy. But I could see it in your face that you weren’t happy with me. I could hear the exhaustion in your voice when we argued, and I could feel the pain radiating from you as you slowly figured out that the efforts we’d made to fix things would never be enough. I broke up with you because you’re one of the most special people I’ve ever met, and even though you’re not right for me, you’re going to make someone else unbelievably happy one day. You deserve to be free, to find someone you loves you the same way I do and then some.
