For a number of reasons, dropping that first ‘I love you” in a relationship can be a little risky. This is one of them:
I (23F) told my boyfriend I loved him (24M) and he broke up with me
I (23F) told my boyfriend (24M) that I loved him this past weekend for the first time, and he broke up with me. For full context, we’ve been dating since April, and “official” since May, so about three months. We’ve spent every weekend together since that time. I really didn’t think it was too early, and I truly felt it, but I also had prepared myself for him to say he wasn’t ready yet. Everything he’s shown me says that he has strong feelings for me, if not love, so I thought that there was a good chance it would be reciprocated. We’re talking grand gestures, small everyday things, meaningful sex, emotional support, etc. Instead, he kind of freaked out. He got quiet, and what he tried to say didn’t really make sense. He told me “i don’t think you mean that.” I left and said we should take some time to think. Two days later, we met up again and he broke up with me after we spent an hour talking about how we can improve the relationship (things like opening up more). I was so thrown off because I thought we had agreed on things to work on, but then it just spiraled downwards. He said some really horrible things that he’d never brought up before, despite being a really open communicator. I think he just wanted the conversation to end. We ended on a really bad note, but I want to reach out. He never even said we’re broken up or over- he couldn’t bring himself to do it
Why did he do that? There could conceivably be a lot of reasons, but my first guess would be that he was much more unhappy in the relationship than he let on and had already been thinking about checking out. That’s because it seems awfully strange that she went from talking about all these signs he was in love to having an hour-long conversation about how they could improve the relationship. Early on, when love is creating the good chemicals in your brain, you don’t feel like you need to work on anything because how wonderful the girl seems big, bright, and hard to miss while the flaws seem minor and in the background.