1. I didn’t know who I was without him.

“Are you and ____ coming to the party?”

“You and ____ look really nice tonight.”

“How are you and ____ doing?”

My name was always tied in with his name. Often, people just assumed we would be doing anything and everything together. It got to the point when even I didn’t think I could do anything without him. I got used to being me with ____ all the time. He was everything I knew, and I was everything I knew with him. But, who was I without him? I needed to know.

2. We grew apart.

We can’t stay forever young.

We started dating as teenagers. The way teenagers feel about a relationship is completely different than we feel about relationships as adults. As we became adults, we tried to keep the same feeling of our high school relationship alive. However, slowly but surely, our minds and feelings matured. Our goals changed. The things we liked changed. We didn’t see eye-to-eye anymore. Ultimately, our lives began taking turns in different directions that did not support our relationship.

3. He wasn’t my soul mate.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love him. It was just that, in the end, I wasn’t “in love” with him anymore. At first, I was in denial about this fact. I tried telling myself: “This isn’t true; he’s the one for me.” I even tried talking to close friends and my mom about it. They would just say I was going through some life adjustments and it was a confusing time. It wasn’t a real feeling.

But it was a real feeling.

At 20, the harsh truth was that he wasn’t the one for me that the 17-year-old me thought he was.

4. I needed to redefine myself.

The reality was that this boy and this relationship were the main concerns in my life. He was my priority over everything.

I gave up things that I liked doing to be with him.

Sadly, I lost friendships over him.

My grades slipped.

My future with him was more important to me than the future for myself.

I realized that I needed to figure out my life without him. I needed to figure out what I liked by trying new things. I needed to discover what I wanted to do in life and who I was as an individual. Forming an authentic relationship with myself became my new goal.

Breaking up isn’t fun. Trust me. It was extremely hard for me to break up with him. However, you must learn to love yourself and become your own self without the help of another.