My Girlfriend Admitted She Wasn’t in Love Anymore Yet Wanted to Continue Living Together, So… (Full Update)

Update Two: Desperation and the Lease

The situation has escalated significantly since my last update. Belinda is starting to understand that this isn’t a phase I’m going through, and her attempts to fix things have become more desperate.

Three weeks ago, she tried a different approach. She came home from having drinks with her friends and was wearing one of my old college t-shirts that she used to sleep in when we were dating.

She sat on the edge of the bed while I was reading and started crying. She said she missed me and missed what we used to have together.

She said “she made a mistake and wanted to go back to how things were before.”

I put my book down and asked her what specifically she missed. She said “she missed feeling close to someone and having someone who cared about her.”

I told her it sounded like she was going through a difficult time and suggested she might benefit from talking to a counselor. I said there are sliding scale therapy options if cost was a concern, or she could try some of the mental health apps that offer affordable counseling.

She stared at me like I had slapped her. She asked if I was seriously recommending therapy instead of talking about our relationship.

I said I wasn’t qualified to help her work through her feelings about missing intimacy and emotional connection. A professional would be much better equipped to help her figure out what she really wanted.

She got up and left the room without saying anything else. The next morning she acted like the conversation never happened, but I could tell she was studying my behavior more carefully, like she was trying to find cracks in my roommate approach.

The lease situation finally came to a head last week. Our landlord sent the renewal notice and I left it on the kitchen counter for Belinda to see.

She found it when she got home from a freelance meeting. She asked me if we were going to renew the lease.

I told her I had decided not to renew and that I had already signed a lease on a different place starting next month. She asked where that left her.

I said she would need to decide whether she wanted to take over this lease by herself or find somewhere else to live. I offered to ask our landlord if he would be willing to remove my name from the lease if she wanted to stay.

That’s when she completely lost it. She started yelling that I was abandoning her and leaving her with no way to afford the rent on her own.

She said “I was being cruel and punishing her for being honest about her feelings.”

I stayed calm and reminded her that roommates don’t typically sign long-term leases together unless they’ve specifically discussed it and agreed on terms. I said I had assumed she would want the freedom to make her own housing decisions as an independent adult.

She said “I knew she couldn’t afford this place on her own and that I was deliberately putting her in an impossible situation.”

I pointed out that she had never asked me about my plans for the lease renewal even though she had six weeks to bring it up. I said if she had asked, we could have had this conversation much earlier and she would have had more time to explore her options.

She demanded to know why I was doing this to her. She said “I was being vindictive and trying to hurt her because she didn’t love me the way I wanted her to.”

I told her I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I said she had made it clear that she wanted to be friends instead of romantic partners, and I was trying to respect that by not making assumptions about our future living arrangements.

She asked what she was supposed to do now. I suggested she could look for roommates or maybe move back in with her parents temporarily while she figured things out.

I said her friend Patty had mentioned that she was looking for someone to split rent on a two-bedroom apartment. She said moving back in with her parents would be humiliating and that Patty’s apartment was in a bad neighborhood she didn’t want to live in.

I said those were definitely challenging options, but that I was confident she would figure something out. I reminded her that she had been living independently before we moved in together, so she had experience managing her own housing.

She said “that was different because she had a steady job then and that I knew her financial situation was more complicated now.”

I agreed that her financial situation was more challenging but said that was exactly why it made sense for her to have more control over her living expenses instead of depending on someone else to make those decisions for her. The conversation ended with her storming out of the apartment.

She came back several hours later and didn’t speak to me for three days. During those three days, I could hear her on the phone constantly, presumably trying to figure out her living situation.

She had several long conversations with her parents, which sounded tense based on the tone of her voice coming from her bedroom. She also had what sounded like a difficult conversation with Patty about the roommate situation.

I gathered from the parts I overheard that Patty’s timeline didn’t match up with Belinda’s needs. On Thursday, she asked if we could talk.

She had clearly been crying and she looked exhausted. She said she had been thinking about everything and she realized she might have been taking me for granted.

She said “she wanted to work on rebuilding our relationship and earning back my trust.”

I asked her what she meant by rebuilding our relationship. She said “she wanted us to be a couple again.”

She said “she had been confused before but now she understood what she really wanted.”

I asked her what had changed since our conversation six weeks ago when she told me she wasn’t in love with me. She said “she had been scared of commitment and had convinced herself she didn’t have strong feelings for me.”

She said “living as friends had made her realize how much she actually cared about me.”

I said that was interesting and asked when exactly she had realized she was in love with me again. She said “it had been building over the past few weeks but it became clear when she thought about me moving out.”

I said the timing seemed convenient given that she had just discovered she couldn’t afford to live in our current apartment without me. She got defensive and said money had nothing to do with it.

She said “she genuinely missed being close to me and wanted to give our relationship another try.”

I told her I appreciated her honesty, but I wasn’t interested in dating her again. She asked why not and I explained that she had already told me she wasn’t in love with me.

I said I believed her when she said that, and I didn’t think people’s feelings changed that dramatically in just six weeks. She insisted her feelings were real and asked what she could do to prove it to me.

I said there was nothing she could do because I was no longer in love with her either. That wasn’t entirely true when I said it, but it became true while I was saying it.

Something shifted in that moment and I realized I really was done. She started crying again and said I was giving up on us too easily.

She said “relationships require work and compromise and that I wasn’t even willing to try.”

I said she was right that relationships require work, but they also require both people to actually want to be in the relationship. I said I no longer wanted to be in a romantic relationship with her.

She’s been staying at her friend Amanda’s place for the past few days, presumably to give me space to change my mind, but I’m not going to change my mind. I move out next Friday.

I’ve already started packing and I hired movers to handle the furniture. Belinda can keep anything she wants that we bought together; I just want to take my personal belongings and start fresh.

Update Three: The Final Closure

I moved out two weeks ago and wanted to give everyone a final update on how things ended. Belinda came back to the apartment the day before I was scheduled to move.

She had been staying with Amanda for almost a week and I think she expected to come home to find me still there surrounded by unpacked boxes, maybe having second thoughts about leaving. Instead, she found most of my stuff already in boxes and the movers scheduled to arrive the next morning.

She asked if I was really going through with it. I said yes, I was moving out as planned.