I’m so confused and upset and trying to piece together what happened and what went wrong and whether this is for the best. I’m sorry in advance for the long post. So as not to drip feed I will lay it all out.
I was in a long term relationship from 2010. My partner really was very kind and loving. He really was my best friend, incredibly supportive and similar interests, good sense of humour. However a very big age gap, not that it showed. My friends and family who were sceptical at first all loved him. He really is a good guy. However, he had very elderly parents who he used to travel to visit every weekend and they didn’t approve of him being with me and after 4-5 years I got fed up of our relationship not moving forwards. I wanted to buy a place, marry and have kids and although he wanted all that too he dragged his heels and I got fed up and tired of it all, caused me many tears. During this time he was always supportive of my work, family problems that came up etc etc. I suppose we kind of called it quits from about 2016 onwards but although it was a strictly platonic relationship we may as well have still been together, emotionally we were still very involved with each other. If I’m being honest it was like being in a relationship still just without the sex.
Then last year I met a man through work, my age and we really hit it off. We started seeing each other. He’s very different from my ex boyfriend - more passionate, more firm in what he wants, quite different characters. I explained at the beginning I was coming out of a long relationship and needed to take it slow. He said he understood but he said he also wanted to crack on and marry and have kids. Anyway, I spent the whole of the last year feeling conflicted. I still saw my ex boyfriend as friends which my new boyfriend was ok with. But I always compared the two in my head.
The last year has been very volatile partly because he thinks I’ve been very slow to commit - he wanted me to move in after 6 months and I didn’t want to yet - and partly because he can be very selfish with his time and what he wants to do. In many ways we may have just been incompatible but 10 days ago he ended with me and I’ve been distraught. I wonder now if it was me that sabotaged it all and maybe if I had thrown myself into it, seen him for his own worth and not compared that maybe it would have been different. It’s that not knowing that makes me so upset. I know that the new relationship was so different - my boyfriend was nice but not as kind as my ex boyfriend and was a much more difficult character but then again my ex boyfriend is very unusually nice I think.
I suppose you only know what you want or what you have until you’ve lost it. Most of my friends don’t like the recent boyfriend and think it’s good it ended. They say we had too different interests - but I think a lot of their dislike may have also been because I was quite negative about the relationship to them. I felt like recently I had dropped all my barriers and was letting him in and then he left and this was what I had feared he might be like when we first started going out.
I am not contacting him as he’s made it very clear it’s over. He’s very headstrong and once he’s made up his mind he doesn’t tend to change it.
But I am so sad about it. I know now that I needed to fully move on from my ex. He’s still my best friend but maybe it’s just not compatible if I want a relationship with anyone else.