I’m new to this but reading all of these stories made me feel like I’m not alone. my boyfriend of 2 years recently told me that he needs to be alone and find himself (start loving himself) he feels that he can’t love someone unless he loves himself.. which I understand… but it’s hard to be ok knowing that we’re not together anymore. I asked him if there was anybody else and he told me no… our relationship has been a roller coaster when we first met we super attracted to each other, but during that time of just beginning he had an ex that I did not know about until 3 months later and he would always check up on her social medias (he wouldn’t tell me, I just always caught him) i never really thought anything about it because I wanted to understand him and I didn’t want to come off pushy or I don’t know.. so this past summer I found out that the whole year we actually got to know each other and became close he was still speaking to his ex until April, my friend and I messaged her and asked her questions and told us everything. the crazy thing about this is when I told him I knew everything, he didn’t answer me until the next day and told me he was sorry and that he didn’t mean for this to happen and that whatever happened in the beginning, shouldn’t affect what happened throughout our whole relationship. I remember that same day I went to his house and I spoke to him in person and he was so cold to me, he told me that it was over between us and that he didn’t want to be with me and that I’m a mean person… and once I asked him for his social media to see if he was speaking to his ex, he gave a big sigh and said that he left his phone in the house and I told him to sign onto mine haha. As I started to look into in his messages I saw her name and he thanked her for telling me and she asked him “why string her along if you weren’t happy” and he said “that’s something I was struggling with for a bit.” and my heart dropped of course, I kept reading everything and they were both talking about the past and one of them brought up about going to a baseball game together and she invited him up to where she lived at and he seemed like he was willing to go and he even had her on snapchat, so my theory is- if i didn’t come to his house or even saw those messages, he would be with her right now. it just seemed like he was still in love with her. So I logged out and I understood and told him that I was done and that it’s ok that he doesn’t love me at least I know. A DAY LATER, he’s on my front doorstep crying to my mother and telling her that he wants to talk to me and that he wants to come to a consensus about everything, I was getting ready for a party so I was already having the mindset on going out and doing me… but me having the heart that I have, I stayed and wanted to hear what he had to say and he cried so much and got on his knees begging me to stay. I gave him a month of keeping him away from me cause I couldn’t deal with it, but we tried it out and we were good- fast forward to now and he’s talking about being away from each other and him trying to find himself and loving himself. He’s really into psychological readings, and he did this research on some sort of depression that loses interest and loses motivation and we’ve been fighting so much that it gets exhausting. I miss him so much, but writing this all out just breaks my heart. I really need advice how to deal with this cause I’m listening to podcasts, reading articles and trying to maintain my sanity but this all just hurts.