u/Embarrassed-Slice492

I used to think healing meant eventually becoming angry enough to stop loving someone. But lately, I’ve realized something harder and sadder:

I don’t think I can fully hate him.

Not because what happened didn’t hurt me. It did. Deeply. There were lies, avoidance, confusion, emotional damage, and so many moments where I questioned my worth because of how everything unfolded. I carried the ricochet of wounds that were never mine to begin with.

But deep down… I understand him now in a way I couldn’t before.

His first relationship broke him. The way he described her, she was avoidant, cold, emotionally distant, and hurt him badly. And somewhere along the way, I think he slowly became what hurt him most. Not intentionally. Not maliciously. Just… unhealed.

I was the first person who genuinely loved him after all of that, and instead of knowing how to receive love safely, he protected himself from it. Avoided it. Ran from it. Sabotaged it before it could hurt him first.

And the painful part is realizing:
sometimes wounded people recreate the same pain they once begged someone else not to give them.

I don’t excuse what he did. Understanding someone’s pain doesn’t erase the damage they caused. I still have scars from loving him. I still remember crying over things that could have been solved with honesty, communication, reassurance, and emotional maturity.

But I also can’t ignore the humanity in it anymore.

I think he was fighting battles inside himself that he didn’t fully understand. I think he loved me in the only way he knew how at the time — through fear, avoidance, shutdowns, and emotional survival mechanisms. And sadly, those survival mechanisms hurt me in the process.

Maybe that’s the hardest part of love sometimes.

Realizing someone can love you and still not know how to love you correctly.

So no… I don’t fully hate him.

I think I grieved long enough to finally see the wounded little boy underneath the man who hurt me. And honestly, that realization hurts in an entirely different way.

Do you still think about me when the world gets quiet?

When you’re driving alone at night.
When certain songs come on.
When something funny happens and your brain instinctively reaches for the person you used to tell everything to.

Do you ever miss me the way I miss you?

It’s been almost 9 months and somehow I still carry you everywhere.

In memories.
In prayers.
In random moments that hit me out of nowhere so hard I have to stop and breathe through them.

I still think about our conversations the most.

The nights we would stay up talking for hours about life, the universe, God, existence, our fears, our dreams, what happens after death, why people hurt each other, what love really means.

You were the person I opened my mind to the most.

And maybe that’s why losing you feels so haunting sometimes. Because it wasn’t just romantic. You became intertwined with my thoughts, my routines, my inner world.

I think part of me truly believed I had found my person.

So I stayed.

I stayed through wandering eyes disguised as jokes.
Through emotional inconsistency.
Through anxiety that slowly turned me into someone I no longer recognized.
Through moments where I was silently begging to feel emotionally safe again.

And the craziest part is…
I still love you.

Not in the “please come back” kind of way anymore.

More like:
I hope life is gentle with you.
I hope you heal.
I hope you become softer.
I hope one day you understand how deeply I loved you.

Sometimes I wonder if you know what losing you did to me.

How I spent months in therapy trying to rebuild myself.
How I had to learn boundaries.
How I had to relearn self-worth.
How I had to learn that love was never supposed to cost me myself.

And still…
some nights I miss you so terribly that it feels physical.

I miss being in love.
I miss having a person.
I miss the comfort of belonging somewhere emotionally.
I miss loving someone so deeply that even ordinary moments felt meaningful.

But I think what hurts most is knowing that I can never return.

Because I finally understand now:
love should feel safe too.

So now all I can do is carry you quietly.

In songs.
In memories.
In prayers whispered to God late at night when the grief feels heavier than usual.

And sometimes I still wonder…

Do you think about me too?

I’ve spent the last 9 months trying to figure out whether my relationship was unhealthy…or whether two people can genuinely love each other and still slowly destroy each other without meaning to.

My ex and I were together for 4 years.

And before anyone says “if it was bad, why stay?” — because it wasn’t bad all the time. That’s what makes this so hard to process.

When things were good, they felt really good.

We connected deeply mentally. We could spend hours talking about random things — music, psychology, TV shows, life, dreams, dumb hypothetical scenarios. We’d watch shows like The Bear together and pause every few minutes just to analyze characters or go on random tangents. He once told me he loved my brain and the way I thought. That meant everything to me because I genuinely felt seen intellectually.

We were also extremely attracted to each other. Even years later, the chemistry was still intense. We had that “can’t keep our hands off each other” type of relationship.

But what made it feel even deeper was that it stopped feeling like just “me and him.”

He grew incredibly attached to my son, and my son grew attached to him too. Somewhere along the way, it started feeling like we had created a little family together. Simple things — eating dinner together, hanging out together, random outings, hearing them laugh together — started to feel normal. Safe. Permanent.

And I loved him for loving my son.
My son loved him too.

That’s part of why losing this relationship didn’t just feel like heartbreak. It felt like grieving an entire future and a version of home that no longer exists.

But emotionally, I think we were wired differently from the start.

I’m very routine-based. I like stability. I wanted a future that felt grounded — eventually buying a house, building a peaceful life, traveling together with intention, creating something lasting.

He was more free-spirited. He wanted excitement, spontaneity, downtown high-rise life, bars, clubs, experiences, movement, freedom. Not occasionally — constantly. And I don’t even think that’s wrong. I really don’t.

I just think we valued different things more than we realized.

And the thing is… I tried really hard to make him happy.

I started compromising parts of myself and my values because I loved him and didn’t want to lose him. For example, I’m personally not someone who feels comfortable with my partner going to strip clubs. But I slowly convinced myself I had to become “cool” with things like that for him. I kept overriding my own discomfort because I thought love meant adapting.

Looking back now, I think I slowly started living outside of my values.

And when you live outside your values long enough, your internal foundation starts shaking.

You stop recognizing yourself.
You stop trusting yourself.
You start abandoning your own boundaries trying to preserve connection.

Ironically, he used to tell me it scared him how much I reminded him of his mom. Not physically — personality-wise. Career-oriented, routine-driven, grounded, structured. Me and his mom were actually very alike in those ways.

Part of me wonders if that comfort eventually became boredom to him.
Or maybe responsibility.
Or maybe pressure.
Honestly…I don’t know.

And I don’t think I’ll ever fully know.

Things got worse after he started his business and after he experienced multiple family losses. He became more stressed, emotionally distant, overwhelmed. I tried to support him through all of it. I listened to him vent constantly. I was there whenever he needed someone.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling emotionally safe with him.

The jokes were always part of our relationship. At first I brushed them off because that was his personality — teasing, sarcasm, pushing buttons a little. But over the years, those “jokes” slowly started turning into negging. Comparisons. Comments about other women. Little remarks that chipped away at me over time.

And eventually they stopped feeling funny.

There were jokes about other girls. Comparisons. Social media stuff that hurt me. At one point, during a rough patch, he became emotionally fixated on a stripper because she “made him happy” during a stressful period in his life. I remember him literally telling me he wished he could pursue her and then come back to me afterward.

That shattered me in ways I still can’t fully explain.

After that, my anxiety in the relationship got worse.

The more emotionally unsafe I felt, the more reassurance I needed.
The more reassurance I needed, the more overwhelmed he became.

And then we got trapped in this horrible cycle:
I’d ask questions trying to feel secure.
He’d dismiss me, shut down, walk away, or call me insecure.
I’d panic more because I felt abandoned.
He’d get angrier and more avoidant.
Then eventually I’d get called “crazy” or a “crazy bitch,” and everything would explode.

And the thing is…I actually tried ending the relationship multiple times in a calm, mutual way because deep down I knew something wasn’t healthy anymore.

But every time, he would stop me.

He’d apologize, cry sometimes, tell me he loved me, say he didn’t want to lose me, promise he would work on things too, and for a little while things would feel okay again. Softer. Hopeful. Like maybe we finally understood each other.

But eventually we would fall back into the same cycle again.

Toward the end, nothing ever felt fully resolved anymore.

I begged him at one point:
“If you need space, just tell me kindly. Reassure me we’ll talk later. Give me a timeframe. Don’t just shut me out.”

But by then I think we were both exhausted.

And then came the thing that broke me the most:
I found out he was talking to someone else.

Or at least…I think I did.

At the time, one of our worst blow ups happened.

I never told his family anything or ever had them involved. But, his dad suggested we take a no contact break, 10 days. And my ex admitted to him there was another girl involved — supposedly someone who didn’t even live in our state.

I remember feeling like my worst fear had finally become real.

And the hardest part?
He said I pushed him toward her.

But then months later, the story changed.

Suddenly I was told there never was another girl.
That I made it up because I was jealous and insecure.
That any female client, message, or interaction would make me spiral.

Then months after THAT, I received a message through a third party account claiming there was never another person at all — that he had only been talking to bots intentionally so I would see it and leave him. He said he had recently had a near-death experience and needed to “finally tell me the truth” because he couldn’t live with himself otherwise.

I blocked the account afterward because by that point I genuinely didn’t know what reality even was anymore.

And honestly? That’s what I still struggle with most.

Not just losing him.
But losing trust in my own perception.

After all of this, I’ve been in therapy for almost 9 months trying to understand myself, our relationship, my attachment style, my reactions, my boundaries, and why this breakup still affects me so deeply. Some days I feel like I’m growing and healing. Other days I feel stuck grieving a person, a family, and a future that no longer exists.

I still don’t think he was a monster.
And I don’t think I was either.

I think we loved each other deeply.
I think we connected mentally, emotionally, physically, everything.
I think we genuinely tried.

But I also think we slowly triggered each other’s deepest fears:
I feared abandonment and not being enough.
He feared emotional overwhelm, pressure, and losing freedom.

And eventually love stopped being enough to hold all of that together.

And the hardest truth I’ve had to accept is that I still love him.

After everything, after all the confusion, hurt, resentment, therapy, crying, and months of trying to understand what happened…I still love him deeply. But I also know I cannot be near him anymore. I can’t keep reopening wounds trying to search for answers that may never come. I can’t keep losing myself trying to hold onto someone I loved this much.

Sometimes I still want to text him.
Sometimes I still wonder if he misses me too.
Sometimes I still think about the family we almost became.

But love stopped being enough to save us.

So now all I can really do from a distance is hope he’s okay. Hope he’s healing. Hope life is kinder to him than life was toward the end of us. And no matter how much time passes, I think a part of me will always carry love for him somewhere inside my heart.

Has anyone else experienced a relationship where the love was real, the connection was real, but the dynamic slowly became emotionally unhealthy over time?

And if so…how did you finally stop blaming yourself for everything?