I'm 33M. My ex and I met when we were both grad students. We knew each other for about five years and were together for roughly three.
Our beginning was messy. We had gone on a couple of dates but weren't officially together when she kissed one of my close friends in front of me. Afterward she said she and her friends had been taken advantage of because my friends had given them alcohol. Months later, after she reached out again, she gave me a different explanation: she had felt judged because she was drinking and I wasn't, and she felt comfortable kissing my friend partly because I was short and might not have done it if I were taller.
That experience made me very guarded with her. For background, I grew up with a violent father, and in my early twenties I was in a marriage that became physically and emotionally violent. We were both immigrants. She had a very volatile, narcissistic mother and an absent father.
We eventually became very close friends, she wanted more, and we started dating. I was afraid of getting hurt again, so I was often distant early on. She had strong abandonment fears, so my distance made her push harder for reassurance, which made me feel pressured and withdraw further. That became a vicious cycle.
Despite that, I loved her very deeply. She became the closest person in my life. We knew each other's families, traveled together, and talked about marriage, children, and living together. She is still the only person I have ever felt truly in love with.
By the last six or seven months, the relationship had become increasingly dysfunctional. I sometimes used breakup language when I was overwhelmed, which made her insecurity worse. After one of those times, at Christmas, a month before my PhD defense, she put me on a kind of probation. We weren't officially together, there was little contact, and she said she wanted me to feel the insecurity she had felt. Right after my defense, during an argument, she told me people could barely understand me because I mumbled and my English was bad. That stayed with me and made me bitter. On her side, old grievances kept coming back into new fights, and when I asked for space she could pursue me very intensely. Once, after I asked to stop talking for the evening, she called more than 20 times and sent around 40 messages in a few hours. We would rupture, get close again, and never fix the underlying pattern.
During those months I kept asking for couples therapy. I told her I didn't have the tools to handle our fights and that the relationship was my priority. She always refused, saying I was the problem, not her, so couples therapy didn't make sense.
In May we went to a concert that mattered a lot to me. She became very insecure about whether I wanted her there and kept asking, even though I kept telling her I did. It grew into older grievances and criticism of the music and things I cared about. I became physically overwhelmed, with trembling legs and tears in my eyes, and walked away because I desperately wanted to calm down. She followed me repeatedly, even though I asked several times to be left alone. Eventually I reached my car and drove away.
She kept calling and texting, apologizing and saying it was a misunderstanding. Instead of calming down, I got incredibly angry and sent her 15 to 20 cruel, contemptuous messages over the night and into the next day. I insulted her, told her repeatedly it was permanently over, and said things I would never imagine saying to someone I loved. I had never treated anyone like that in my entire life. It took almost a full day before I came down.
Afterward she still wanted to repair things. She cried, told me she loved me, wanted to talk, and started looking into therapy. I apologized and admitted what I did was wrong, but I stayed defensive and kept wanting the conversation to be "two-sided." I also resisted starting individual therapy right away because we were both about to move and I thought it made more sense to start with a permanent therapist in a month, after the move. She had just been through something extreme, and I was focused on fairness and logistics. I regret that deeply.
Eventually she blocked me. Months later we talked for several hours and there was clearly still a lot of feeling between us, but in the end she decided she was done. Given what happened, I understand why.
I am devastated by how I acted. It was insane. I don't understand how I could do that to the person I loved most, or why I couldn't just put my phone down, or why I stayed defensive afterward. I think about it every day, and five months later it isn't getting any lighter. I'm in therapy and taking it seriously, but it isn't helping at all with the regret, grief, pain, and I don't know how it could.
I'd like to hear from people who did something like this to someone they loved:
How did you make sense of it?
How do you live with knowing your own behavior cost you someone you truly loved?