My boyfriend and I are approaching our three-year anniversary in about a week. Things haven’t been working well for us for the past few months. This is mostly due to problems he caused early on in the relationship then refused to try work out with me until very recently. Around a year and a half ago, I moved across the country and put all of my effort into making our relationship work. This included things like staying up late or waking up early, sending emails when I was at school and couldn’t text, FaceTiming him before bed every night, etc.

Around six months ago he realized that he needs to put more work into the relationship and that I’m really the one that he wants to be with. This really pissed me off to hear, as we have been talking about marriage and being soulmates since very early in our relationship as we were great friends before we started dating.

At the same time, we decided to work on the relationship. I was not very sold on the idea of working things out, but I decided to give it a chance. I figured I would keep doing the same things I was doing and he could put more effort in. He did not. I started to text him less and less and it’s gotten to the point where if I don’t communicate with him for a while I don’t even realize it. The only thing he really stopped was ditching me to go watch a movie he seen 1 million times, but he doesn’t have time to do that now anyway.

We both started college recently and he has no direction. I am learning who I am and what I want to do, but he is not even making an effort to plan out his future. He is going to school with a scholarship. He cannot afford college otherwise. However, he still misses as much school as he can, doesn’t turn in work, and overall does not put any effort into school. When he skip school or misses assignments, I remind him how useful a college degree would be for a future career. I have to do this stuff a lot. I feel like his mother a lot of of the time.

Another thing is, he refuses to cut his hair or groom his hair, he’s gained weight, and he has worse acne than he ever did before. He doesn’t put any effort into himself or his appearance, and that really bothers me. I have told him about this and he doesn’t seem to care.

I do not want to hurt him at all, but I do not want to stay in this relationship at all. I tried to break up with him last week but it was messy. I had a hard time with the idea of not ever speaking to him again, and he had a hard time with the idea of not being together. We decided to go “on a break“ but nothing really changed. He has only told me how much she wants to make things work, but I can’t really tell if any effort is being put in.

Oh yeah, and he’s coerced me into sexual relations before. I was raised in a very conservative household where sex is only seen as a bad thing. Unfortunately, this has penetrated my mind and is reflected in how I like to behave and how I carry relationships. To make things worse, when I was in middle school I was super depressed and some older men took advantage of me online.  The pretty much gave me attention in return for me giving them sexual pictures. This warped how I navigated this relationship. Early on, he initiated sexual contact, which I was fine with a little bit. Then he was pushing me for more than I was willing to give, but I did not want to lose his attention so I gave him to some of it. Other things, I refused until I eventually gave in because it was nonstop pressure. When I saw him in the summertime, he was pressuring me for more than we had done before and way more than he knew I was comfortable with. The bottom line is that I am not mature enough to be having sex, as I am way too paranoid about getting pregnant. He knew this. However, he still would pressure me for more than I was willing to give and every time, no matter how likely it was, this led to a very real pregnancy scare for me.

When I saw him in December, I told him I would give the relationship one last chance and the night I did he pressured me to make out with him. So I did, because we hadn’t really kissed the entire time he was here and I thought it would be nice. Then he starts asking me for more than I know that I’m comfortable with giving. More than he knows I’m comfortable with giving. I stopped and went to bed. This really cross the line for me, as I had made it very explicitly clear just how much I didn’t want to do any of that shit.

He was also emotionally abusive in the beginning of our relationship. He would always tell me he was going to break up with me. Then he would tell me how he liked another girl. To compensate for this, of course I got sexual. It was really toxic and unhealthy and I’ve only recently realized that.

 how do I break up with him?

I keep telling myself that I don’t want to lose contact with him forever, but writing out how he’s treated me really makes me think about that. I cannot believe that I’m going to break up with him and ask that he still keeps me as a friend, when I’m really the one that needs to figure out if I want him in my life with all the stuff he’s done to me.

Another thing that really hurt me is that a few months into our relationship we started calling each other soulmate. Then, eventually he stopped and started holding that word over my head. If I did something he liked he would call me his soulmate under his breath. I would ask him what he said, desperate to hear that he thought I was his soulmate, and he would say “oh nothing “. Writing this out it sounds stupid, but it really, really, really hurt me. Use the word that we tenderly called each other to manipulate me. It sucked!

When I look back on all of our relationship, I can’t help but think that if this is what love is then I don’t know why people talk about it. If this is what love is then I don’t know why people write songs about it, write books about it. If this is what love is then I do not want love. I think that’s enough of a reason to end the relationship.

He’s also from a broken home, so I would like to be as delicate as possible. I really do not want to cause him any emotional grief. I would hate to do that to him.

Anyways,

TLDR: I want to end a toxic relationship but I have no idea how to do it. This is my first relationship.