the other day a conversation spiraled into my boyfriend saying that he’s felt disconnected for months, and if i’m being honest i’ve felt it too. he just seemed like he wasn’t interested in me. he would seem like he didn’t care if i were around or not, and then he would have these spurts of being super affectionate so i wouldn’t bring it up, but now that i think back it almost seemed like he could’ve been overcompensating, but maybe his emotions were just all over the place like mine are now.

i’ve asked him if he felt the same way about me for a long time, throughout our relationship i just ask for reassurance we’re good and he’s always said yes, i think it was a mixture of so i would stop asking and because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. he says he still loves me and is still in love with me but he can feel that somethings different, and he broke down in tears when he was telling me this and it was the first time i’ve ever seen him cry in the three years we’ve been together . but because he wasn’t upfront about it we couldn’t fix it when it was starting to happen, but he also said it was a feeling that was coming and going.

we didn’t decide to break up but we decided to not spend as much time together that way we can give the other time to miss the other and just think about how we feel and what we want to do. i came up with a list of ways to try and reconnect and feel close and in love again. but instead of focusing on that we just decided to give each other a little space so that we could try and focus on the other things in our life that we weren’t giving the attention we should have. he is very depressed and unhappy especially with his job and family life and he wanted to deal with those issues on his own, i wanted to focus on school and being more independent whether or not i’m in a relationship.

we’ve been together for three years and for most of our relationship i’ve had a hard time saying when something was bothering me because i just hate confrontation and can’t bring myself to spit it out so i haven’t, i also have a habit of telling myself i’m overreacting so i don’t want to make a mountain out of a mole hill. i’ve been writing in a journal when i want to talk to him to try and make things easier, that way i can get things off my chest and work through my feelings as i have them because they’ve been all over the place. even when i do push myself to say what i’m thinking later on i always feel like there’s so much left unsaid that i wasn’t thinking at the time and because it was already talked about i don’t want to bring it back up.

neither of us ever cheated on each other, we always treated each other good, and we’ve shared so much together and been together for so long, we talk and act alike, and we don’t like all the same things but our personalities are just very similar and go well together, i consider him my best friend. i don’t want to have that intimacy with somebody else, at least not where i’m at in life right now.

the only bad thing i can say about our relationship is we didn’t communicate like we should’ve, which i know is a big thing, and it’s probably mostly my fault, but he said he’s felt a disconnect between us for months so now it shows we were both bottling things in.

my mind is just all over the place. at first i was really cool and ok and i was like it’s ok, we’ve been together for a really long time, we’re past the honeymoon stage so we just fall back in love and rediscover our relationship so we’ll take space to miss and then reconnect. then i get these moments when i get mad and i get bitter because i’ve been so good to him for three years for him to lose interest in me, especially when i always tried to check in so we could see where we’re at and fix distance issues as they come up.

i want to call and yell at him and say i’m gonna be the one that got away, then i want to call and ask if i can come see him because i miss him. i think we’re not going to break up if i miss him this much i know he’s going crazy without me, then i think he isn’t thinking about me at all he’s over the relationship already and we’re definitely over it’s just not official yet. then i think no we’re definitely going to stay together and be closer than ever. then i think we’re going to break up and its fine i’m unfazed and i can accept the fact that our relationships over we can be friends still, but then i feel like i can’t handle that and i wouldn’t be able to move on for a long time and i’ll never trust another man because i’m already wary of men and it took a very long time before i was comfortable with him and i couldn’t start over with someone else and i’d be heartbroken.

then i think if i gave him what i always thought to be the best version of myself and he still loses feelings, then so will any other guy after him and i can’t handle people leaving over and over for no reason (i already had abandonment issues when we started dating) and i’ll never want to date again.

my mind can’t pick one emotion, i have been all over the place and so unsure i wake up all hours of the night. i only really cried one time and i don’t really know if i’ve been in slight denial even though i keep telling myself it’s happening.

it just feels wrong to throw away a three year relationship when nothing happened and no one did anything to the other and we both still are in love. i feel like we’ve just entered a stage where our relationship has come mundane, and that it makes sense that it would happen after three years. i always believed in making love work and not just giving the relationship up when things get boring. i’ve been stuck between if it’s meant to be it will and if you want something to get it. i’m also stuck between you can love someone and not be with them and people who are in love should be together.

i need advice on how to deal with this for the time being and how to start feeling connected again.