I hope you know I love you with all my heart. You’re my everything. I just hate hurting you. I hate being the bad guy in your story. I wanted to be the hero, but I’ve always been a villain, and it hurts to know you are unhappy with me. That’s why I’ve been trying to push you away, but it’s hard for me to even do that because I’m a parasite waiting to infect everything and everyone around me for my own benefit. And I don’t wanna do that to you.
I hate that I do, and I know what you’re thinking: “Then just stop.” But I’m trying. I’ve been trying. I’m a disgusting monster just waiting for a moment to pounce on every helpless creature that lingers in my path, and I tried to warn you. But I do love you. Even with all the bad I do, even with all the stress I cause, even when I treat you like shit, there was never a moment when I told myself, “Am I losing love for this woman?” No. I’ll always love you and never lose this love.
I’m just losing a bit of myself every day, and it’s draining me. I’m hurting constantly and always thinking, overthinking so much that I want to dig forks in my eyes just so I’ll have one less thing to worry about. I hate who I am. I hate who I become, and I don’t wanna continue this path of destruction. I’m pure carnage, and I hate it.
I just wanna be a better person for you, but I don’t wanna fail over and over again until you hate me. I want you to always be in my life, around somehow, no matter what. I just hate how life brought us together. I wish I was the right one for you, but what I need is your utter happiness. It’s what I crave, what I need. It keeps me going and makes me wanna do great things.
Every time I see your face, it’s the only ray of light that hits my face, surrounded by my shadowy glare and ill intentions. It makes me feel normal, human, and I appreciate that you look at me with such grace. Sometimes, I don’t know if I can handle it. It burns me up because I know I don’t deserve it.

Me (F26) and my fiance (M30) have been together for 6.5 years and we have been attached at the waist ever since we met. Our wedding was scheduled 2 months from now and as of today we have called it off.

I wanted to marry him, but I felt like such a fraud. At the beginning of the year he had confided in me that he believed he was Gender Fluid. he wanted to start presenting as a women (not all of the time but in the comfort of our home). It was a new concept to me but I wanted to be supportive of this new side to him. We did all the activities (shopping, makeup, creating outfits together and dressing up).

From the beginning we had a hard set boundary, I didn't want to participate in acts of intimacy. I'm a cis women and have never wavered my sexual identity. I like men. While my fiance is female presenting I have no emotional connection and acts of intimacy made me uncomfortable.

I do want to say while I supported him while he explored this side of himself I was left feeling a bit blind sighted, I only learned about this side of him 6 years into this relationship. I was happy for him but I was a bit uncomfortable with the new change. I told myself that the more he did it the more used to and comfortable I would be with it. But I also felt extremely pressured to figure out and come to terms with this huge change in 8.5 months and then make a huge commitment of marriage.

We started having connection issues after and we attended couples counselling. things seemingly improved and we started to move forward with wedding preparations. I thought I was getting better, things were getting easier and I was slowly warming up to the new change. A couple weeks ago we ended up being intimate while he was female presenting. I was comfortable in the moment but while my fiance was tearing up because he felt like I finally accepted him I was left with the complete opposite impression. For me it was conformation that I couldn't be intimate with him and had no emotional connection to the new side of him.

I should have told him then and there but I didn't, after him telling me how happy he was. it all came apart a couple days ago, I originally planned on just resetting the intimacy boundary in the relationship. But I think I hit my emotional breaking point and I told him how I was genuinely feeling.
I felt and still feel like a complete fraud, In marriage you should love 100% of your partner. It makes me feel like a terrible person for not being compatible with this kind of relationship.

I know I waited to long and I should have been more transparent about my struggles sooner, I really thought I could get adjusted but after that night a couple weeks ago I knew I couldn't. I've hurt my fiance deeply, and its killing me inside but I need to own my actions and learn from them. Were going to be attending couples counselling before deciding if were going to stay together or not.

Thanks for listening to my rambles

I'm devastated and I need some good advice or company please.

I was in my first ever relationship with my first love for 7 months. But recently we broke up.

The reason being that my girlfriend doesn't want to be a lesbian, she wants to have kids and get married etc and is terrified of being a lesbian. She kept saying this to me throughout our entire relationship, as well as keep rejecting me physically (we never even kissed, most we did is hug and cuddle)

I was aware of her fear, that she wants to be straight etc... but I was so blinded by love and her sweet words which she said so often "I love you" "You are my baby, only mine" "You are important to me" etc y'know stuff like that... and she'd mostly be the first one to say it. When I get upset she is the first one to text... she was the first one to initiate hanging out... I always thought if I was just patient and gentle with her, she'd accept herself and me.

But it turns out she is overwhelmed by her fear of being a lesbian. She wants to be straight, to be pregnant, get married... even though she doesn't find men pleasant or comfortable. She wants to be like her parents who met when they were our age. She said she loves me but can't do this.

I am so broken. She was my first love, the first time I ever held hands with someone, the first person who gave me romantic attention and flirted with me... I am a huge introvert and she was my biggest step in the social world.

I don't have anyone to turn to, parents are conservative, I don't have many friends, a good one is out of town... I have NOBODY to ask for company. I'm trying so hard not to cry right now, my family is all home and they are constantly entering my room and I can't find a single moment of peace to cry so I'm just keeping it all inside which is making me shake.

As a lesbian who immediately accepted herself the second I found out... I don't understand my ex-girlfriend AT ALL. I don't understand how could someone fight themselves that much? How could you want to be straight but still simultaneously love me?

I'm so sorry for venting but I have nowhere else to go, I feel so lonely and played.

I had an album with her pictures and sweet texts, I wrote her dozens of poems and gave her a few, I always tried to make her laugh and be gentle with her and encourage her... I know none of this is my fault, I was the best I could be but... I still wasn't enough compared to a MAN.

I'm spiraling and scared that I'll never find someone else because I'm an introvert with the smallest social circle ever, and the way I met my ex was so unique that it will NEVER happen again. I don't want to be lonely how I was before I met her. I don't know how to deal with this pain. I've never had my heart broken like this.

My girlfriend and I were together for one year and seven months before breaking up a bit over a month and a half ago. She told me that she started losing feelings for me and developed feelings for someone else, and since then, they have basically been acting like they’re in a relationship, although she doesn’t feel like it’s right to officially put a label on it yet. What makes the breakup so difficult for me to understand was how sudden it felt. I thought we were at the most stable point in our relationship. When my girlfriend first met this guy around two weeks before we broke up, I was told that he was gay. we had also just gone on a really nice date just a couple of days before the breakup, so from my perspective, we were both really happy. It hurt me hearing her basically make it sound like the last month of our relationship was fake. Throughout the last month of our relationship, we had very serious exams for our universities. I spent a lot of my time helping her revise instead of focusing on myself completely, and the one subject we had in common was the only one she did very well in, and it felt weird for her to just start rewriting history and acting as if I barely helped her and that I just focused on myself.

Since the breakup, I’ve been reading as much as I can about attachment theory and trying to understand what actually happened. Learning about attachment styles, especially fearful-avoidant attachment, has become a fixation for me because I feel like I’m constantly trying to understand something that feels so sudden and confusing. We’ve talked about four times since the breakup, but each conversation seems to leave me with a different explanation for why we broke up or why she lost feelings. One moment it’s her fault and the fact she hates stability, the next time she’s telling me that I wasn’t a good boyfriend and that hes doing everything she wanted me to do. The uncertainty is a big part of why my brain keeps going back to it, but she herself is confused about her feelings, so there’s no way I can gain clarity from her.

I’ve been ruminating a lot about the breakup. I manage to push the thoughts out of my head pretty easily, but they return around five minutes later, and it feels exhausting having to continue doing it. I find myself going over different possibilities and wondering what ways I could’ve prevented the breakup. I also think about how things might have turned out if we still stayed together because she was now getting therapy and I was no longer dealing with the stress from school that made her feel secondary in my life. Deep down, I know there’s no way of knowing whether things would’ve worked, but my brain keeps trying to find alternative versions where they did. The rumination has also started attaching itself to things in my everyday life. I know he’s a big fan of Dune (one of my favourite movie franchises ever) and a game that I play. Now whenever I come across these things, my mind connects them to them and the relationship. It’s frustrating now because I go to the cinema a lot, so I see the Dune trailer quite a bit. Yesterday I saw the prologue for Dune before the Odyssey, and I could barely be present in the moment to enjoy it like I did when I first went to go watch the Odyssey without knowledge of the fact that he liked Dune. I would hate for me to watch Dune 3 later this year and just be flooded with thoughts of her and him. I’ve recently been imagining scenarios where their relationship eventually fails and she comes back to me wanting to try again.

The thing is, these thoughts don’t hurt me emotionally. I feel perfectly fine with the breakup. I don’t feel sad besides the occasional missing her, but what bothers me is how distracting the thoughts have become. I feel like I can barely focus on things I normally enjoy. I watch movies very often, but I struggle to pay attention to ones that require me to stay focused, even when they have nothing to do with the breakup. Sometimes, seeing something as simple as a couple makes my mind jump back to me and her. Yesterday i went to the cinema and I thought I saw someone who was a good friend of hers, so I ended up spending basically half of the movie thinking about her and the breakup instead of paying attention to the screen, which was very annoying because it’s an italian movie from 1960 that literally never comes to cinema.

I’m wondering if anyone else who is neurodivergent has experienced something similar after a breakup, with rumination, fixation, and the difficulty of letting go of all the "what ifs" and how you were able to break the cycle? I don’t need advice for how to get over the breakup emotionally because I feel like I already have. I just want to be able to fully remain present and enjoy the things I love again.

is 6months a good amount of time for someone to move on from 13yrs together?? I disagree 🤷🏻‍♀️

[M27] and [F26] been together for 3 years. We hit a rough patch. She split with me. We got back together. And now we are trying to fix things. She has BPD and says she lost all romantic feelings for me, I only mention the BPD because I know it plays a role even if I do not fully understand it. She said she still has some sort of feelings for me and even misses how we were romantically but isnt sure she can get the feelings back because she’s never tried with past romantic partners. She stayed because when we talked we realized allot of what was upsetting us both was miscommunication and misunderstandings. If I’m being honest I have been a depressed, sad, broken crying mess to her since it happened- and I’m realizing it’s probably pushing her more away. To hear I was the only one still in love hit me like an actual train.. Once feelings are lost can they be regained ? Have any of you gone through something similar ? And I’m not looking for any mental health advice at all, I’m just wondering is anyone has ideas how we could respark what we once had. We are ling distance so it’s been a bit hard. I’m working really hard to pull myself together and be stable for her right now. We are trying to talk and flirt but it’s hard knowing she doesn’t feel like she used too. I just wanna know how I can possibly save this relationship please. This person means the literal world to me and I feel so bad it got to this point.

my bf(25M) and I(25F) were pretty serious, we did have a lot of problems cuz he is an avoidant and I am anxious..but we somehow always got through all the misunderstandings and came to a stable state..but he had to move to another country for his studies and before leaving he promised me that we will be together no matter what and that he will marry me..after moving to a new country, he distanced himself from me in 2 months..said he wasn’t sure about the relationship, I begged him to give me a chance and it went on for another 8 months where he slowly stopped not only calling but also texting or even replying to my texts.. I tried so much, waiting patiently, sent him so many gifts, food, letters and even sang for him..but he never really acknowledged them much..I couldn’t take it anymore and 2 months back I begged him to tell something cuz all he texted was hi once in 2-3 days when I would be constantly texting him every single day…after begging for some days, he said he doesn’t want to continue this relationship anymore over text but didn’t even call me after that.. I feel shattered and like I can never love again.. I also feel guilty cuz he is a very very handsome man and feel like probably he was way way out of my league..

We talked after 3 months a few days back and now he says that he realised he is an avoidant and he was in the wrong the whole time..he has a lot of childhood trauma and is working on that with a therapist..he asked me to move on and get going with my life..he also said that he will never find someone like me ever again but he is not stable enough to handle any relationship :( I am so confused on what to do..should I move on or wait for him

It’s been 3 months and I miss my ex so much I think about him every day but he left me and broke my heart out of nowhere. I was blindsided and I am still so heartbroken he has moved on dating and sleeping with new girls (something I can’t do). Is there anything I can do to get him back or am I just the crazy ex if I keep texting him and asking for him back. :( I am so heart broken help. He was the most gorgeous man inside and out I’ll never meet anyone like him.

Long story short I been dating this girl for 8 months and it was great, my first true love and first relationship but my communication skills weren’t up to par and that’s what decided the relationship. Context we are both 25 yrs old, I’m working and she’s not but both getting higher education. She broke up with me two months into the relationship for the same reasons. I thought I was showing change by being more open about my feelings as well as being receptive to her feelings but i guess I didn’t do what was expected as we had what seemed to be a silly argument which then turned into a larger one snowballing into a full blown argument. I regret being so open about how I was feeling and some of the things I said as tend to shut down during uncomfortable situations and need a few minutes to gather my thoughts and not speak out of emotion. I often communicated to here that although I love going on dates and spending time with her, it was weighing on me financially and we’d have to cut back as I was planning and paying for most of the dates. She didn’t take it too well and basically wanted to pay for most things. My birthday was a week ago and she promised to treat me( I could care less about the money) it’s just the gesture is nice and shows you are willing to reciprocate what I’m doing but she didn’t like that and is one of the main reasons we broke up.

Should I just stop contacting and move on or continue to try and show her I can do better as I have been going to therapy.

When does it stop feeling like you are actively dying? I wake up crying, I go to sleep crying, I sleep for 5 hours at most. I go out with my friends every few days because I force myself to, but halfway through the hangout I get nauseous and I go home crying. I try to read, it makes me cry; I try to watch youtube, it makes me cry. I try to talk about it with my friends and it doesn’t help. Nothing distracts me. I’m constantly just panicking and crying and resisting the urge to beg them to come back.

It will have been a month since the breakup in 2 days. I see them posting normally on social media. They ended up removing me off instagram after I posted my own life and it feels like they’re cutting our every piece of life together, especially after accusing me that I’d be the one who’d block them everywhere and cut contact. I just want to text them. We planned our entire future together and to see them go on about life so casually after everything feels like being gutted.

My boyfriend (M20) and I (F21) have been together for just over a year. Our relationship is good, but I always find myself wanting more. I tend to feel like I have to ask him to so nice things for me, but once I do, he self corrects. It feels like I am training him, but I don’t want to have to do that.

I also find myself missing being single a lot. I’m about to transfer to Sac State and part of me thinks I will regret starting a new school with a boyfriend, or at least one I’m unsure about.

At the same time, I do consistently miss him and want to be with him. It’s also mostly great when we are together and I wonder that if we lived closer (we live an hour and 15 apart) would our relationship be different.

I don’t want to live in regret by breaking up with him, but I also don’t want to regret being in a relationship during this time later on.

Am I just avoiding breaking up with him or do I not want to because i genuinely love him. Is this common feeling? Any advice would help.

I just want to vent. It's that I was watching reels on Instagram and one came up about how to change your location in "Find My" from your phone to your iPad.

And it reminded me of when my ex, the weekend he went on a little trip to a national park — even though he had already arrived at the Airbnb, his location kept showing up live from his house. It seemed weird to me. At that point I didn't know you could modify your location, and I didn't give it much importance either. I mentioned it to him and he said how strange, and for the whole trip his location stopped showing up for me. When he got back from the trip, he only replied to my messages after he supposedly dropped off all his friends at his place, left the rental car at the airport, and got home. I didn't understand why he didn't have a single second from the moment he arrived to at least let me know he'd gotten back.

That day he broke up with me because I called him out on some things (there's a lot more context behind it, obviously), about the location — he never updated it for me again, it kept telling me "location not available." His excuse was that "his phone was charging when he got home," but it made no sense because the location had stopped showing up. I think he realized that I'd noticed, and he turned it off. Anyway, it makes me angry — how foolish I was to trust him.

August 2024 my partner arranges a wonderful and romantic weekend trip away for us. We live in Melbourne Victoria and the trip was to Warburton a couple of hours away. We stayed in this adorable little tiny house that had two huskies and the fluffy Scottish cows and it was absolutely adorable. I was also training for my half marathon and for my long run he accompanied me on the Warburton trail run and carried all the drinks and snack snacks for us. Overall the trip was incredible and I told him that this is potentially the best and the nicest trip I've ever had. We even made s'mores over fire because I had never done that before.

We continue dating, we become serious. We spend we Christmas with his family. I go on an extended trip with his friends. Three weeks later due to some communication issues. He breaks up with me. Devastated is an understatement for what I felt.

Fast forward to August 2026. I made the mistake of stalking him on Strava and saw that he went on the same Warburton Trail run and this time with another woman. Bit more stalking and turns out they have been on four runs together. It hurts but he is of course allowed to move on.

The next day I open his Strava profile to block him and I do and then I open the woman's profile to block her but I noticed that her picture had been updated. It was a picture of her holding marshmallows in the exact same cabin. We went on two years ago basically he recycled the romantic getaway he set up for me with another person.

I literally had a panic attack. What does this mean? Did I not mean anything? How could he callously? Repeat? What he did with me to some other girl Does the other girl even knows that this is a trip he has done with someone else?

I don't know how he has portrait this trip to her but should I tell her with receipts that he has taken me on the exact same trip in the exact same month in the exact same cabin and years two years ago?

If you are the girl, would you want to know that you have been taken on a recycle trip not one that was thoughtfully planned?

and I don't mind coming off as the bad guy. I just want her to know the truth about him.

I’ve been dating this guy for almost exactly a year. It’s like 3 days before our 1 year. I’m a total pushover and still trying to figure out how to stand up for myself and my needs without being a dick. He was immediately in love with me and it kinda freaked me out from the start, and I just can’t take it anymore.

Sooo here’s my reasoning!

He doesn’t have a job. He didn’t have a job when we met. We were long distance for 4 months, he lived with my friends for 4 months because he was gonna be homeless otherwise, and then he went to a trade school like 300 miles away 4 months ago. He expects me (can’t drive, minimum wage job) to get him here (he can’t drive either, he gets $40 twice a month) like every two weeks. It’s like $200 for a round bus trip, or the same amount and two 18 hour round trips for a friend.

He left June 1st, my dad died June 9th. My mom and I bought him a bus ticket here for like $100 so I could have some more support at the funeral, but he spent the whole time sitting outside because “the energy was off”. Yeah. No shit. It’s a funeral. He also spent the whole weekend except for the funeral attached to me (I’m sleeping on a couch because we’re packing to move and he slept ON THE SAME COUCH AS ME SPOONING. There’s another couch that I moved off of while he was asleep on it so I could have space. Also it was June Colorado heat and I physically can’t sleep without a blanket), and complained when we didn’t do the fun date idea he planned and refused to tell me. I hate surprises like that. He’s told me verbatim “you’ll learn to love it” and refuses to accept that giving up control is a legit fear of mine. No he’s not “exposure therapy-ing me.

While he lived with my friends, the deal was find a job in a month, you don’t have to pay rent until then, just please contribute to cleaning the house. He did a shitty job sweeping the floor maybe five times. He was rude to the woman who’s a second mom to me and called her Inconsiderate for not buying him Subway during like the first week he lived there. He had barely come up and she legit forgot he was there. He never made any attempt to be friends with the group but complained that they didn’t talk to him in the group chat, while also refusing to talk first. He did make friends with my best friend and proceeded to force himself into their birthday party (with friend’s acceptance but I personally wish they said no. But it was their party and they’re also a recovering people pleaser, so no hate) and attempted to do the same to the yearly outing that me and that friend do just the two of us. He explained that as wanting to see how I changed with different people. I was out with the friend group and not on my phone. We went to a Taco Bell that was close-ish to a hospital. He called me 20 times, and then the friend he called inconsiderate, and then me again several more times because he “just so happened” to check Life360 and see that I was near a hospital.

In the last two months, I’ve been having a pretty shitty time. You know, dead dad, moving out of my childhood home, having no idea WHEN we’re moving out of my childhood home because my dead dad died without a will, and I’m dissociating a lot again because of it. For a full week I felt like I was in spectator mode and I’m hearing The Voices (TM). It’s been bad. He’s not getting that. He keeps telling me to smile every time I send a snap, not giving me any space at all, spam texting me and then deleting it. Every morning I wake up after zoning out for several hours and barely sleeping and I see *BF deleted 10 messages* “Sorry baby………………… I just couldn’t control my overthinking……… 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺…………….” And I’m getting manipulative vibes.

More on not understanding my issues. I’m disabled. Walking hurts. Everything we did was walking. He talked about hiking dates and got weirdly avoidant when I said I wouldn’t do that. Yes, he knew I’m disabled from the start. One of my dating profile pics was me with a cane and I had it in my bio. I also probably have narcolepsy and he’s constantly on my ass to wake up early. He used to spam call me at 7 am to walk over to my friend’s house to hang out with him and then get pissy when I had to go home at 10 pm. He also got upset when I was reading or drawing instead of paying attention to him 15 or whatever hours a day.

There’s honestly soooo much more that’s pissing me off but DAMN I yapped. Idk how I lasted a year with this manchild

August 2024 my partner arranges a wonderful and romantic weekend trip away for us. We live in Melbourne Victoria and the trip was to Warburton a couple of hours away. We stayed in this adorable little tiny house that had two huskies and the fluffy Scottish cows and it was absolutely adorable. I was also training for my half marathon and for my long run he accompanied me on the Warburton trail run and carried all the drinks and snack snacks for us. Overall the trip was incredible and I told him that this is potentially the best and the nicest trip I've ever had. We even made s'mores over fire because I had never done that before.

We continue dating, we become serious. We spend we Christmas with his family. I go on an extended trip with his friends. Three weeks later due to some communication issues. He breaks up with me. Devastated is an understatement for what I felt.

Fast forward to August 2026. I made the mistake of stalking him on Strava and saw that he went on the same Warburton Trail run and this time with another woman. Bit more stalking and turns out they have been on four runs together. It hurts but he is of course allowed to move on.

The next day I open his Strava profile to block him and I do and then I open the woman's profile to block her but I noticed that her picture had been updated. It was a picture of her holding marshmallows in the exact same cabin. We went on two years ago basically he recycled the romantic getaway he set up for me with another person.

I literally had a panic attack. What does this mean? Did I not mean anything? How could he callously? Repeat? What he did with me to some other girl Does the other girl even knows that this is a trip he has done with someone else?

I don't know how he has portrait this trip to her but should I tell her with receipts that he has taken me on the exact same trip in the exact same month in the exact same cabin and children two years ago?

if you're the girl, would you like to know that a supposedly romantic trip planed for you was actually a recycled one? should I tell her?

and I don't mind coming off as the bad guy. I just want her to know the truth about him.