Warning - this is going to be a lengthy rant.

So I've been writing all week about dreading last weekend - it was when my ex would be moving out the last of his things, and we'd have one last conversation before going No Contact. I'd been heartbroken and scared all week, and the weekend was such a stressful few days. First, on Friday, my therapist managed to make things worse. He has this tendency to think out loud, and insinuated that perhaps my ex had been interested in someone else, or that there were things he wasn't telling me. This breakup has been devastating, but I've at least understood everything and all of our conversations on how we'd gotten to this point have made sense. But those suggestions from the therapist, made when I was particularly vulnerable, festered until I spent the entire evening crying and panicked that maybe there was more going on than I knew. I felt like anything was possible, and that I didn't even know this person I'd been seeing for years, and I was an absolute mess. Eventually I calmed down and was able to move away from those careless comments, but it was tough.

Sunday was the "moving day." I woke up sick to my stomach, and spent most of the day sitting in bed watching Netflix. The ex came in the afternoon, and I stayed in my room in order to be out of the way. Eventually he finished moving his things, so we sat down to talk before he left.

A part of me has always known that he lacked some emotional maturity. That's been a lot of the problem. He has serious growing up to do. But that conversation.... I basically wanted to convey to him that the way things had been handled this past year had been very hurtful to me. I wanted him to know that despite his suggestion that I guide whatever contact we have in the future, he would need to be the one to do so, because I didn't want to "chase" him anymore, or have to worry about whether or not we wanted the same thing, even in the context of friendship. And I wanted a chance to reiterate that I would miss him, and will always love him in a way, and we could leave things on a positive note.

But that's not really how it went down. He had very little to say. He got defensive. "Well, it was hard for me too, you know, working through all of this...." Working through it by himself! All in his head! He chose not to discuss any of this with me, to leave me wondering for 8 months why my partner seemed to want little to do with me. His response was that it was too difficult to talk about. Difficult like ending a 5 year relationship, difficult? I told him that I really wish he had discussed his thoughts with me at any point in time, so that this breakup could have been a mutual decision. He suggested that just because he's the one who made the decision, that didn't mean it wasn't painful for him or that he didn't have feelings about it. He muttered some half-assed suggestion that it wasn't his intention to hurt me with the way he handled things, and that "if it's worth anything," he's sorry. That self-pity party really threw me. He couldn't just say "I'm sorry that I hurt you and that things happened this way." He had to add some ridiculous "if you even care" sentiment before it, and I have no interest in making him feel better about his solo decision to leave me.

When I mentioned that I miss him, he responded that he's felt a bit lonely in the basement apartment he now lives in. Poor baby. He just misses having another person around who cares about his day. Part of the perk of having a devoted partner, one might say.

The bottom line was that it was a very awkward and unsatisfying conversation. When he left, I cried for about 60 seconds... and then the anger hit. I knew it was coming, because all of the things that happened during our relationship that hurt me (but I'd brushed aside to keep the peace) had begun rising to the surface. But once he was truly gone, and I'd just gone through that final reminder of how mismatched we are emotionally, I just lost it. Luckily I had great friends who were there, and other friends who called me, and I was able to get a lot of the anger off my chest.

I know that anger isn't always the most healthy of emotions, but right now this feels so much better than the crushing sadness. I'm the most functional that I've been in weeks. There's so much for me to be angry about, and I want to process it and move past it eventually, but right now I want to run with it. I want to sit and seethe over the things that made our relationship so unbalanced, because it's important for me to remember that a lot of what kept us together was my unconditional love, not necessarily our true compatibility.

While I'm sure the sadness will come rolling back soon, and I'll of course begin missing him again at some point, for the first time I'm happy for No Contact, and feel empowered that we won't speak again until I decide I'm ready to. And for the first time, I really, truly believe that I deserve better than what he gave me. I deserve to love someone and know that they love me just as much. We all do.