Thoughts about breaking up with my long distance girlfriend

I am currently facing a tough decision that has been brewing in me for almost a full year now: to break up with my girlfriend. I just had a breakdown, so I am writing this post to reflect on my feelings.

I met my girlfriend. I will call her Beth for the sake of keeping her anonymous in September 2020 during my semester abroad in Canada. She changed my world and the view I had of myself. Before her, I had never had a positive encounter with a girl, and I was convinced that I would never have one.

I thought that I was not worth it, that there was no reason for any girl or anyone to love me, and that the reason I never had a positive encounter with a girl was solely my fault due to being a loser. I was 21 at that time and have never been with a woman creating all sorts of self-hate and negative feelings about myself. Being romantically loved by a girl was something that only existed in my fantasies. This topic had brought me to the edge of hopelessness.

When I met her, I was in a pretty good mental state due to a year of therapy. Being away from my somewhat toxic environment in university and not being bound to my friend’s and fellow students’ beliefs had allowed me to step over my social anxieties and form the self that I wanted. People there saw me as special because I was German and different in a good way, making me the center of attention, which had never happened before. I was bullied and non-existent in school. She was one of them. She thought I was cool. She thought I was interesting. She thought I was attractive. She gave me attention.

She changed my self-view of being a loser into being interesting, worthy of attention. She made me step over so many hurdles. She made me learn what it meant to date and live romantically. She showed me a completely different world. Sadly, I had to leave Canada after four months causing us to start a long-distance-relationship. We were nine months apart before she could fly to Germany to be with me for three months. Now she’s back in Canada, and we don’t know when we will see each other again, but that’s the lesser issue.

With all that background, I will now start to talk about why I am thinking about breaking up with her.

I don’t feel complete. Not that she cannot fulfill me, but I am not ready to be fulfilled by someone else yet. I know that if I stay with her and everything turns out to be fine, I would marry her and start a family. I would live a happy life, but I would always feel incomplete. I am not at the end of my journey, rather right in the middle of it. I still have the sense of being a loser. What I am saying is that I have not yet removed my self-view of the loser belief.

Being together with my first love forever does not prove to me that I am not a loser. Evidence for that is that I haven’t had enough romantic partners showing me the opposite. I still fear the idea of talking to a girl indicating to me that my loser self is still a prominent part of me. Whenever I see a girl that I find attractive, this exact feeling is being triggered in me. I want to change my loser self-perception, and I don’t believe that being with her will allow me to do that. This is why I don’t feel ready to commit to her yet.

Despite all these hurtful words, I genuinely love my girlfriend. She fits my idea of being an ideal partner. Simply the idea of breaking up with her puts unbearable pain on me. I can’t kill her like that. I would utterly destroy her. I would hold a gun to her head and pull the trigger. I would take her heart out and step on it. Yet, I know that if I keep quiet forever that I will be living an incomplete life and that it would be an indestructible obstacle to true happiness in our relationship.

If you have read this far, I can only say thank you for listening. All my friends are currently not available as I just moved to a new city. I don’t feel like calling them.

I hope you have a wonderful day and that someone important will show you love today.

P.S. I don’t see cheating as an option as it would hurt her even more than telling the truth. I got close to it once. I talked to another girl. I don’t regret the experience, as it showed me that I am not done with my journey, but I am thankful that I ended it before anything could happen.