Rebecca and I broke up just over two years ago after having been together for 9+ years. “9+” = “there were a couple little separations in there that make true calculations not worth the brain power.”

I’m 35 and most of my relationship history is wrapped up in this one partnership. Rebecca and I met at a publishing company in Colorado: she was in marketing, I was in editing. I referred to her as “my girlfriend” immediately upon meeting her, though it took many months to make that proclamation true. We had the most important thing in common that two people can share: a love of reading. Some of my best memories are of Rebecca reading to me on long road trips or reading me to sleep at night. We also shared a love of animals, a love of dry humor (her jokes were rarely caught by others, which made them even funnier to us), and a love of constant learning and personal growth. We pinged and ponged off of each other over the years, sometimes the supporter, sometimes the supported. We could spend days together and not get sick of each other, always finding something interesting to talk about. We could make the house spotless for parties without even a word exchanged—we both knew what needed to be done and who liked to do which chores, and we always pulled it off, no matter how short our timeline. We were a great team.

Sounds great, right? What happened? Life happened. Growth happened. Doubt happened. Resentments and hurts built up. “Shoulds” happened. Here’s the math:

“Shoulds” = killers of fun

Relationship – fun = doomed

Once the writing was clearly on the wall that we needed to do something drastic one way or the other, we chose “end it” (after having tried “ignore it,” “force it,” “surrender to it,” “meditate on it,” and “talk it to death”).

So that’s a little background. In my next post I’ll get into the meat of how we split up and loved each other through it step by step.