Why I'm Struggling with My Breakup

My ex and I broke up roughly a month ago and prior to that, we had been on-and-off since April of last year. So, in all honesty, I should've seen the big breakup coming. Of course, I was oblivious to the signs and I ignored my good ole' female intuition. For the sake of this article, I'll call my ex by his middle name, Micheal.

Back in March of last year, I was very much not looking for a relationship. I had just broken up with my boyfriend of one-and-a-half years in December and was just having a good time, which definitely means I was sleeping around. I have no shame in my game now and I most certainly didn't back then—especially back then. So naturally, when Micheal and I first met each other, I was in the mindset of "Oh, this guy is super cute and has a badass shoe collection, let's do it." And we did it—at least five times that night and it was amazing. But what was even more amazing was the time we spent together without us having sex, and that's how we fell for each other.

I'm not one for saying it was "love at first sight," but I will say there was definitely something there beyond just a sexual attraction to one another. He quickly became one of my favorite people to be around and I can only hope that the feeling was mutual at some point in our relationship. But like all good relationships, we struggled and fought, and things tore us apart. Some things were from our pasts, some occurred in the present, but we always tried to work through our issues. Or at least claimed we were trying to work on our issues.

This reason why this breakup is so hard, I think, is because we were in a good place in our relationship. Granted, not the best we've ever been but most certainly not the worst. He told me that it wasn't my fault and I shouldn't blame myself, but as a girl, how can I not blame myself? I still blame myself even though he's told me time-and-time-again that it's not. Maybe one day, I'll actually believe him. When we broke up, we agreed that we would still talk to each other and be in each other's lives because it wasn't a particularly bad breakup, like if one of us cheated. But that just ended up to be too much for him and me, even though I was in denial about it.

I miss Micheal and when we broke up back in January, I would've done anything to get him back: to make him want me again, to want to be with me again. But now, I'm just done. I think we both just need to put ourselves first, because there's so much that we've found we were unhappy with within ourselves and you can't bring that kind of baggage into a relationship. For so much of our relationship, I put his feelings before mine and put things on the back-burner that mattered to me because of how I thought he might react. I would be willing to bet in a certain way he may have felt the same. Not to say that we didn't love and care for one another but there was always a weird dynamic to our relationship. We started off as equals and somewhere along the way, that shifted, and we could never get back to normal.

Something I've learned through this relationship—and just in life—your significant other has to be your friend. Micheal and I skipped over that part, and I do believe that our relationship suffered from it to a certain degree. That's just not how relationships should be. I wish we would've spent more time building that foundation and maybe we wouldn't be where we are now: not talking to each other anymore because it's "too much."