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I need help - I feel like I ruined my relationship

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Hi Everyone I am hoping to get some sound advice since I have spent the entire weekend bawling my eyes out. I have been dating a guy for 4 months that is a coworker. He expressed interest in me for a year before but I was devastated over a previous relationship so I was always very scared. Four months ago we finally started dating and it started out great. He planned a trip for us and was very affectionate. Over time I noticed that he was a bit young (3 years younger than me) in terms of relationships. He is a workaholic so little things started to bother me. It would be hard to get time with him, when we would hang out he would check email and almost exclusively talk about work, not ask about my family necessarily or friends. In March my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and I really was just wanted a supportive partner. Not supportive in the sense of being a therapist, but more if I was having a bad day to plan a nice date to take my mind off it, buy me flowers, or even just in passing as how I was doing with it all or how my mom was doing. He stopped planning dates and would never ask me about my mom. I just felt very unsupported and still do. I addressed a lot of this with him in several talks and he always agreed to change. Recently I got a bit too tipsy and cried about all this and was pretty sassy with him. I profusely apologized and since then have told him he means so much to me, that i want this to work, that i just wanted him to meet me halfway and be a solid guy. He agreed to do this and now just broke up with me last night because I called him out on not asking to see me before a work trip. We would have gone 10 days without seeing one another and he has not brought up seeing me before he goes even though he was free Sunday-our breakup. I am not really sure what to think of all this. I feel I tried my hardest to be a mature adult and communicate things and why I felt the way I did. From the start over a year ago and even when my mom was diagnosed, I told him I knew it was a stressful thing to have to deal with, and not something in my life that was going to go away any time soon. He reiterated he wasn't going anywhere and that he was here for me. I am instead feeling really rejected and really unloved. Am I expecting too much from this person? Does he just not want to be with me? I am really really hurt and compounding this is that I have to see him at work. I know dating is not a promise things will work out, and heck, 4-5 months is very new. But we were friends before and so I thought we could be there to open up and talk about various stresses. He would talk to me about stress in his life or work and I was always supportive. When he broke up with me he told me things shouldn't be so hard early on and it upset me. I got dealt a pretty bad life hand and feel I am managing it the best I can. I don't want to feel like I can't date or can't live my life and that I need to wear an L on my forehead simply because my mom is sick and it's such a painful thing to deal with. I have not drank in a month even though I know full well I dont even have an alcohol problem. And I started seeing my therapist more regularly. I told him I am doing things to actively set good practices in my place for myself but he told me the night I cried and called him out on all this was too hard for him and he cant "bounce back" from it. I keep trying to think what I did that was so catastrophically wrong. He even said he knew he closed off and was absent and that he does this to everyone in his life - family, friends, partners. I have never been one to not change things I know I can be better at, but he does not even seem to care about this at all. Am I asking for too much? Why do people choose to not change if they are aware of their shortcomings? It has been my experience even with a break through or self awareness that men typically don't come back or try to make it work But maybe that has just been me dating the wrong men. Or maybe this is all my fault? I feel awful. The break up is hard enough as it is but I feel so hurt and blind sided. I just wanted something easy and fun and I feel like my life is not going to ever deal me a good hand.

I need help - I feel like I ruined my relationship

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For all his faults, unfortunately you can't get him to morph into someone he isn't. If he is a workaholic, then that's who he is. He could mature in the future and take notice of his lifestyle but there's plenty of people who live to work and make their career their main focus, sometimes for a lifetime. His statement that he cuts everyone off including his family tells you where you stand with him and his actions just reinforce his attitude. Rather than blame yourself, you need to learn from this and then choose a partner who shares your values. You need someone who balances their life and someone who needs a supportive partner and therefore, someone can reciprocate support because they understand it. Respectfully, any relationship that you have will not be easy if you feel that life hasn't dealt you a good hand. Rather, we all need to accept and learn to play the cards that we have been dealt and if we play them properly the first time, we'll only ever need to do it once.

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