I am single again. There were a lot of reasons for the breakup.

I don’t know if he is capable of giving me what I want from a relationship, no matter how much he wanted to. We have different ideas of how we should be in a relationship. Maybe I expected too much from him. Maybe he found me to be too needy, too clingy, too affectionate; just too much. But I don’t know how, and don’t want to know how, to be any other way.

He didn’t realize the tone he would take with me sometimes, and the way that he would speak to me. I know he never meant to be cruel and he never meant to hurt my feelings, but I am sensitive, and that is something that I cannot change. And because he didn’t understand my sensitivity and expression of emotion, he would get angry with me when I got upset, which in turn made me more upset. But it never changed because he didn’t even realize how what he would say came across.

He told me that he didn’t care about whether or not my family liked him because he couldn’t waste energy worrying about what other people thought of him (my mother paid his lawyer fees while he was in jail and it was taking him like 4 months to pay her back when she was supposed to be paid back immediately). But the truth of the matter is, it does matter to me whether or not my boyfriend gets along and is a part of my family. They are everything to me, and I wish that he would have made more of an effort to invite them over for dinner or call my mother to apologize that it was taking so long to pay her back. Just let her know that he cared, that he didn’t forget about paying her. His daughter was important to him and because of that, she automatically became important to me.

I was unhappy right before he got arrested, and then that whole fiasco happened and there was no way in hell I was going to turn my back on him. He made a lot of promises to me while he was in jail about how much things were going to change, how he was going to treat me better, how he was going to appreciate me more. But things never changed. We dated for 7 or 8 months and I never got flowers. Not even a single flower. Ever. And I had mentioned several times how much I like flowers or cards or little things for no reason.

As much as I love him, nothing changed and I continued to be unhappy. He isn’t going to change; he is 35 and too set in his ways. And if he is not going to be able to give me what I want from a relationship (through no fault of his own), then I need to find someone who will. Because there is someone out there who can and who will. And as much as I wanted that person to be him, it just couldn’t be.

I wrote him a 10 page letter detailing all of the things that I was unhappy about and he never addressed anything. Refused to talk to me about it, pretended like he never read it, and chalked it up to me having a bad day and throwing a tantrum.

But that letter was my last ditch effort. Nothing can be resolved by pretending it doesn’t exist. Ignoring things doesn’t make them go away, it just sweeps them under the rug where they marinate and grow until it becomes impossible to ignore.

And on top of all that, he was fixated on the fact that I was “smarter” than him. While I may have more formal education than he does, I never considered myself any smarter than him. He knew more about some things than I did and I knew more about others than he did. But whenever we fought, or if I (unconsciously) corrected him, he would tell me how he knew that I thought I was so much smarter than him. That was obviously just his insecurities shining through.

I’m sad. I gave a lot of myself to him, and I did everything for him. I wanted so badly for this to work. I don’t know if I wanted things to work with him, or I just wanted someone. I think it was probably the latter. I know that I just want to love someone with all my heart and have that person love me in return. I’ll find it eventually, but I hope its sooner rather than later.