I broke up with my boyfriend of 2.5 years a couple days ago and am going through several stages of grief, the most acute being that knowing that whatever he’s feeling is worse than what I’m experiencing. It’s comforting to see I’m not the only one on the internet feeling this way because he is extremely sweet, supportive, thoughtful, and reliable (and naive) and I feel so monstrous knowing that I took him for granted and abandoned him when he’s partially in my country because of me. Breaking up with him was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I’d been feeling for 1.5 years that things weren’t right and fell out of love the last few months. Because we’re both extremely conflict averse and up until a couple months ago I’ve been in school and unable to manage any external stress or seriously analyze our relationship, we never talked about our problems even though they were obvious from my behavior (I stopped initiating affection, saying ‘I love you’, making him a priority or even even looking forward to seeing him).

I’m not sure why it stopped working for me though I’ve tried to rationalize it. He is foreign, and arrived in this country almost 3 years ago. While he used to do a lot of social and artistic things in his home country, he hasn’t made that life here- his whole life consisted of his work, computer games, and me (not in an excessively codependent way – he has never expressed jealousy or tried to guilt me into spending time with him). He said that lifestyle satisfied him when I raised the concern near the beginning of the relationship. But later he would tell me that he was occasionally lonely and sometimes thought of what his life would have been like at home. While I’ve tried to hint over the years at him finding hobbies outside his apartment, going to events, or trying to make friends, ultimately nothing has stuck and I have felt for a while that I’m keeping him in my country away from his family and friends; causing him to waste his mid-20’s. And I’ve lost interest in our conversations and his personality because I’m not that interested in computer games.

As I come to terms with the fact that he might actually move back home and I might never see him again, I’m starting to wonder if I jumped to conclusions and didn’t give him enough of a chance to change. Granted that expectation bothers me because that makes me feel even more responsible for his happiness here than I already do (realizing this made me determined to break up with him in the first place). But I wonder how much of our failure was due to my resentment for his inaction snowballing when it could have been fixed with a conversation. I wonder how people cope with mysteriously falling out of love with people who at the beginning seem like soul mates. And I wonder if our relationship was ruined by the bad timing of me being in school for most of it.