We broke up
My (late twenties nb lesbian) now ex partner (late twenties mtf) broke up with me a couple of weeks ago and is in the process of moving out.
She is really angry with me. She says that I could have tried harder to make room for the exploration she needed to embark on, that I could and should have compromised more of what I wanted in a relationship, and that she was forced to do all of the compromising for me.
The truth for me feels like we just became incompatible. I’m in a different place in my life - I’ve lived in the same city my entire life. I have a robust support system and a very solid sense of self and what I want from my future. She moved here a couple of years ago, met me within weeks and we began to fall in love. I know that the life we were building together came right at a time when she was only barely establishing roots in a new city, hadn’t come out yet, and didn’t really have existing, profoundly fulfilling friendships. There was an imbalance there and I saw it from the start. She was just so beautiful and special to me. I had never professed my love to someone or asked them to be in a relationship with me before - those things kind of just happened upon me. I dreamt about her and agonized over my avoidant tendencies, and I gathered the courage to just take the plunge and tell her how deeply I was falling for her and how I wanted to be with her - for real.
She came out to me as trans then started HRT a little under a year ago. I wasn’t as supportive as I should have been and will always regret that. My very best friend in the world started HRT at the height of the pandemic, when we were stuck quarantining together in my 1BR apartment because they had lost their job. What was supposed to be crashing on my couch for a few weeks turned into being on top of one another for over a year. I loved them but they got on my fucking nerves sometimes, the mood swings, the messy relationships that were byproducts of low self esteem and the all the (beautiful) mess transition did a real number on our friendship. I felt like they parentified me a lot - that they put me in this position where I was supposed to just accept and understand all their behavior, even when it hurt me directly and sometimes just pained me to see as their very empathetic loved one, as a stage of development that they would be finding their way through. Being parentified like that, or feeling that way is a big trigger of my eldest daughter with delinquent parents and lots of siblings traumatic upbringing.
We are still friends to this day, but I came out of it very weary about the ways that starting HRT can impact my living situation and relationship with someone I love. When my partner came out, I became pre occupied with how it was going to impact my housing situation and relationship - I told her “well, this is going to be kind of hard and annoying” and I admit that it was amongst the worst possible way I could have responded. I tried to correct course and be as supportive as possible once she told me how much it hurt her. I think it was the beginning of some really deep resentment she developed towards me.
I really am happy for her and her transition, that she feels more like herself than ever before and that she’s developing a truer relationship with her body and what she wants. But I don’t feel like my desires out of a relationship ever changed all that much.
We did non-monogamy. I’ve been non monogamous for my entire adult like (10+ years), but I have always felt that it takes a tremendous amount of responsibility and communication to make that practice successful within a committed relationship. It takes work. It feels like she wanted to enjoy the ease of being single in her new, more confident body. It felt like she resented that I had limits to who I felt comfortable with her hooking up with/seeing (my close friends, people who have displayed concerning patterns of behaviors, or people who have been particularly nasty to me in front of her). She said I wanted to control her- but I just wanted what I signed up for and consistently communicated to her for the entire course of our relationship.
I think she didn’t feel confident enough to put herself out there before HRT, so it was easier for her to repress some of the breadth of her own sexual desires + expressions of them, but it continued to simmer in the background.
I guess I just feel as though I’ve been treated really unfairly in her transition’s crossover into a committed relationship . I get that it’s about her and not me - but we were in a relationship and I just wished that some of it could have been about what we were building together. We built a home together. I wanted to marry her someday. I couldn’t trust her judgement after repeated instances of her hurting me and dismissing my feelings as just expressions of my own insecurities or being “controlling”. I recognized that I could have been projecting whatever insecurities I had laying in the recesses of my mind and I asked for advice - from friends, from elders, from therapists, from people online - “am I asking for too much by asking her to talk to me before she initiates a sexual relationship with one of my best friends or someone I have been dating? Is it really unfair for me to ask her to not escalate a relationship past casual sex + play with someone who multiple people have told me was a bad meta to them?” - etc etc. I interrogated my own desires constantly, I never tried to just limit her behavior without explaining why it hurt me. I really did my best.
I tried really hard and I’m heartbroken. But I’m happy that she gets to be who she wants to be without the limitations that our relationship posed to her.
I just wish that she could see this as simple incompatibility/growing apart. She didn’t stop at dumping me- she has berated me and demanded that I take total ownership over the relationship failing, going so far as harassing me to the point of needing to block her on multiple platform, saying horrible things to me that exploited the most vulnerable moments I’ve had with her, and then some.
I just don’t understand why she is so angry with me for being the same person I have always been. She changed/got closer to her truest self - but I’ve always been me.