This post caught my interest. My relationship crashed and burned because of our belief differences. Through my family I was raised a Christian. Can't say that I am a religious person but I do respect certain things. If I ever have kids I would also want to teach them everything that I was taught regarding Christianity. My ex-"love of my life" is an atheist. He was raised in a communist country and therefore had no religious guidance by his parens. He claims that he is proud that his parents raised him like this. The wierd thing is this: I totally respected his choice of atheism, yet he never respected my Christianity. He would see a couple of icons on the wall in my room and he would feel uncomfortable. Honestly, he reacted very bad towards anything "churchy". He didn't agree with a wedding. Didn't agree with baptism for the kids. Didn't agree with having Christmas nor Easter. I told him that raising that type of family is unfamiliar to me. I don't know how to be that type of person and don't agree with it either. This way of living would disconnect me from my own family as well, as he also didn't agree with family gatherings. He didn't used to be this way. He developed this extreme way of being through our 4 years together. Anyway, with great ease he decided to "let me go" cause he could not agree with my idea of raising a family with weddings, baptisms, Christmas and Easter. I am still crushed by all of this. I did love him, even though he had so many quirks. The question is...did he actually did me a favor by breaking us up? Was he able to have a clearer view of how our lives together would be like? Was he able to see misery in the future? I loved him so much that I am still not able to see the possible problems. What bothers me though, is how incapable he was to respect the part of me that was associated to religion. I guess his "love" for me wasn't as strong as mine was. Maybe this is something that derives from religion: being able to be selfless enough to love somebody this much. I don't know. As I said, maybe he did indeed do me a big favor by leaving.