[M19] I left my long-distance girlfriend [F19]. I suddenly stopped loving her, told her not to visit me, and now I feel like a monster. I need honest opinions.
(Disclaimer: English is not my first language, so I used a translator to write this. I apologize if it sounds not so good or real).
Hi everyone. I’m writing this because I feel tremendously empty, I feel like I just did the worst thing of my life and I need external, sincere opinions because I'm losing my mind. I want to make it clear right away: I am not looking for pity or compassion. I just want brutally honest feedback.
We are both 19, and we come from a relationship that started in my hometown last summer after a crazy on-and-off phase. Basically, after a lot of difficulties, we only managed to truly be together for a few months, because then I had to leave for university, over 1000 km away.
I’ve been gone for about 7 months now. We loved each other so much, but she was always very skeptical about starting a long-distance relationship. I told her we should try and I probably convinced her.
The first few months were brutal, constant arguments. She practically seemed to want to break up every time, but in the end, she always stayed, which made me feel awful. But those few times I went back down to my hometown, in person, we were great.
Over time things stabilized a bit, we even took a trip abroad, she came to visit me and I was happy, even though we always cried when saying goodbye. But despite everything, she had constant relapses.
She always had something negative to say about the distance. She'd say that years like this were too heavy, that she was suffering, that she wanted to build a real life down there and find someone to love her locally, and that I wasn't enough from afar. She even went as far as saying that ours wasn't practically a real relationship.
These comments destroyed me and made me feel so guilty, but in the end, her head said one thing and her heart did another, and she stayed. I, naively, tried to mediate.
During her breakdowns, while she was crying, I would tell her to do whatever she wanted, that if it made her suffer so much she could leave me. But she wouldn't do it. Instead, she accused me of not caring enough about her, because otherwise I would have fought harder to make her stay. So I just kept doing everything possible for her, taking on all the responsibility.
It happened to me countless times that I ruined entire days, feeling guilty while trying to build my life here where I study, because she might be feeling down or alone. She would ruin evenings where I just tried to relax, making me feel the weight of not being able to help her. She would say she needed me, but since I was far away I was useless.
Even when I was out on a hike or with friends, I tried to text her every single hour, but she would just give me cold replies, making me feel terribly anxious. But I got used to it, I knew what kind of difficult period she was going through. She is absolutely not the type of person to ever accept a long-distance relationship, but she did it with me, suffering, and I appreciated that enormously.
Recently, I went back to her for 10 days, everything was beautiful. Then I came back up here, usual routine. One holiday I was out with friends, and she had another crisis: alone, saying I was ignoring her, cold responses. Same script happened when I went to a dinner with friends, to see a movie, or to a concert.
Except this time, I suffered more, because after 6 months of feeling lost, I was finally finding pleasure in living my life here. I was allowing myself things that I previously denied myself out of fear or guilt. Thanks to this new "stability" of mine, I started tolerating her mechanisms less. Before, we would argue and then it would pass; now, it weighed heavily on me. I couldn't understand why I had to live in constant anxiety. Her own words about how "maybe love isn't enough" started getting into my head.
In the last two weeks, I think I naturally "pulled away". I was super busy with exams, studying, labs. We talked less, and I was less anxious about her. She complained about it, saying I was leaving my previous life with her behind, and she was right. I hadn't noticed it until she said it.
From there, an internal nightmare began. I felt that our lives weren't fitting together anymore, but above all, I felt that the desire to hear from her or see her just wasn't there anymore. I even had the chance to go down and visit her recently, but I didn't. The excuse was an exam, but thinking back, the truth is the drive was gone.
I hoped it was temporary, but I saw the relationship becoming more and more marginal. I unconsciously stopped calling her "love" and saying "I love you." I felt ashamed even thinking about it, but I wasn't loving her anymore. It seemed absurd, I truly loved her until barely a month ago, I was sure of it. How was it possible that after all the sacrifices, everything vanished like this, without me even wanting it to?
I want to clarify that lately she was actually doing better: I personally found her a therapist and she was happy about it, and she finally found a true friend at university. Exactly for this reason, I felt it was the right time to talk to her.
I told her I was feeling something weird. She panicked: "What do you want to do now? Do you want to break up?". We argued the whole day, until I told her the truth, which is that I didn't feel the need to hear from her like before.
It was a tragedy. She said I was ruining her life, she cried and threw up for hours. I knew exactly how that felt (I went through it because of her in the past) and I never wanted to make her feel that way. She tried to mediate, saying that problems can be fixed, that you don't throw everything away.
I hesitated there, saying I wanted to try, but the next morning she realized it wasn't holding up. She got angry and called me selfish. In the end, I stopped denying the evidence and admitted that I just didn't love her anymore.
What I regret the most is my inconsistency. I was the first one to say that if there's a problem we can try to fix it, but as soon as I had a problem, I threw everything away without trying anything, without giving her the chance to change her behavior. I trapped her in an irreversible decision.
I think I finally understood that she probably just desperately needed to feel loved, because she never felt like she was anyone's first choice in her life. And now, I left her alone, I abandoned her. She explicitly told me this: that now she isn't even my first choice anymore, that I was the only person she trusted and who truly cared about her. Hearing this completely devastates and destroys me.
Today we closed it completely and she blocked me. The point is that tomorrow she had a flight booked for months to come to me, and she still wanted to come. I told her no.
If she had come, I would have hugged her and kissed her, but I wouldn't have been able to say "I love you" without lying. She said she wasn't coming to talk about us, but then what was she coming for? To spend 3 days kissing and pretending nothing happened, only to give her false hope and drop the world on her shoulders again when she left? I couldn't bring myself to make her travel just to make her suffer.
She took it terribly, said it's completely over (we also had two holidays booked) and blocked me. Now I am here asking myself: was I a piece of shit to tell her not to come? Am I selfish for pulling away as soon as I stopped feeling good? Did I ruin a person's life out of cruelty? Please be honest, because I really don't know anymore and I disgust myself.