Hi Anita,

Thank you for your thoughtful response!

I think overall that is a fair assessment. I tend to not like being angry and am a more laid back person by nature, I don’t often get angry and when I do get angry, I try to be careful how I express it as to not hurt anyone else or have regrets about it later.

I didn’t necessarily keep my anger out of the relationship but I was selective about what angry feelings I shared and how I shared them, especially towards the end when the relationship was the most fragile. If I could deal with my feelings on my own, I often chose to do that instead of trying to have a conversation about it because I didn’t want to create issues or a conflict if there didn’t need to be one. My ex was difficult to talk to about uncomfortable topics. When things started to go poorly, we would have talks about it that weren’t really talks. My ex would never say what the issue was for them and usually just said they didn’t know what to do about it. They looked to me to say what was wrong and to ultimately fix it. Which I tried to do, I tried really hard to make the relationship work where both of us could be happy. I realized too late that no matter what I did, I couldn’t fix a relationship my ex didn’t want and had already moved on from.

When I did share when I was upset about something or something had made me angry, my ex didn’t want to talk about it, often ignoring me and dismissing my feelings. When I did confront their behaviour, they would just say that I know that they don’t do well with talking about things that aren’t going well and made no attempt to discuss why I was upset. The indifference hurt more than the thing that had upset me in the first place.

When reflecting back on it, I recognize the role I played in the downfall of the relationship. I didn’t communicate fully when I was unhappy out of fear of being treated with indifference. I know my communication in relationships is an area I need to improve in order to have fulfilling relationships in the future.