I also have the urge to say again that I very much hold her in high regard, and think she's a really great person. I usually don't like to use great person without qualifying in what sense, but it feels right here. Obviously we had our issues and she wasn't perfect.

And I have previously said that most of the issues were my fault, which is probably true, but I also think I oversold it a bit. As in my personality and preferences lend themselves much less to the traditional expectations for a partner in a relationship, much less a "boyfriend"

I don't want to excuse my behavior too much though. Clearly I grew a lot during the period we were together, and a lot of that growth was probably more painful to her than to me. Then again, I was fairly forgiving and lenient with her problematic behavior for the most part,

which is not necessarily a good thing but I definitely didn't demand much out of her for the most part. Not that demanding is bad, its very very normalized in romantic relationships in our society and relationship anarchism is far away from that norm.

Not that I necessarily am on board with all of the implications of RA, but I definitely had a lot of similar behavior in my relationships. Still though, even with RA communication is vitally important, and I dropped the ball on that with my concerns, probably partly because

I felt as if my concerns were pretty petty, and I didn't even really need her to change much. But clearly that can cause of a lot of problems, especially if people are on different pages. And I think a lot of my lack of communication caused the large issues in our relationship