(This is really long sorry)

I recently just got out of a relationship. I've been trying to cope with it and I have through many break up advice and self help websites and videos, along with good friends supporting me. This is going to be very long.

We were best friends. When we first started talking online, he was 11 and I was 15. I hadn't known his age until a girl he went to school told me. At this point, we were already friends and I already had a crush on him. I had seen pictures of him and he looked older (When we first began talking I thought he was a girl. Around a year later he came out as FtM, so due to his biological sex he had already hit puberty and looked older.) we were both at the same level of social experience so there was no form of imbalance or difference, when we talked I never even questioned that we might not have been the same age. After a year of being friends and around 8 months of a very stubborn crush, we began dating. It was never very weird to us that it was long distance or that there was an age difference. When we began talking, we were both severely depressed and anxious. I had just had a friend (and crush) leave me due to being too dependent on her. His friends had left him due to a fight between him and one other friend (because he didn't give her enough attention apparently, despite being a good friend at the time). We connected on a lot of levels and had a lot of the same interests. I'm only really sharing all this as a backstory or something that could maybe help someone decipher or explain what happened or why it did.

When I first told him I liked him, he said he wasn't sure if he liked me back, then he said he didn't but at one point in time he did. It was devastating, but I wanted to be friends still. 2-3 months later he asked me out. We had seen each other in person and were very happy together. At school, he didn't have many friends. Whenever he was sad or upset I tried to give him suggestions, advice, or just listen and be there for him and no matter how I responded, he would be incredibly angry. He was like this to a mutual friend as well. I decided to deal with it if that's what made him feel better because it didn't upset me for long. The next time I went to his house, he seemed very distant. It was weird. Our relationship was never very physical, which I was very fine with considering we are both young, but he wouldn't kiss me, which made me really upset and confused because he did the time I visited before. I thought he didn't like me anymore. Eventually I just passed it off as nervousness and/or anxiety, as he was more depressed than the last time I saw him. He actually seemed more affectionate when we were with his friends. He wasn't very close to his friends at school. He didn't open up to them. This was at the end of 2013, and to this day he is still friends with him and they don't know him on an emotional level. We saw each other last summer, and he was still unaffectionate to an extent.

Towards August, he started talking to his friends more. I was happy for him because he was always upset about not hanging out with people and felt alone. During a few Skype calls, he hung up on me to talk to his other friends (via Skype). It made me upset because he sees them in person, and I don't need all his time or attention by any means, but hanging up like that is very rude. After that we didn't Skype. He Skyped with his "irl" friends, mostly. When school started, he was very stressed out and spent all of his free time hanging out with other people. Which, again, I was fine with but he never made any time to talk to me. My issue was our lack of communication, not necessarily jealousy. He was never affectionate (meaning compliments or anything like that - the most affection you can do through a computer screen or phone call, and he was barely affectionate when our relationship was "good"), and when I was affectionate towards him I was ignored. It got to the point where he wasn't even liking my selfies anymore (which seems very benign and silly, but when it's the last reassurance you have that this person likes you, it matters). It was at a point where I was grateful for having attention, even if it was once within 2 weeks. I only confronted him a few times, and he would ignore me for days and just not respond due to feeling guilty about it or just not wanting to deal with my feelings. It was like he expected me not to have feelings at all. He would brush it off and call it stupid, and usually we would have to talk to a mutual friend just because his communication skills are so poor that he couldn't talk directly to me. My friend was scared for me. She felt he was treating me very poorly and that my expectations ended up completely warped due to his lack of communication. He started getting angry and said I was self centered and not respecting his feelings, of which he never told me, or his "thought process", of which he never explained to me. He said I was being critical and that there are things I do that he doesn't constantly whine at me about, which actually bothered me because if we have an issue we need to talk about it. It's very hard to assume everything is fine until it's not. Especially when it already feels like it's not. I would bend over backwards to help him or make him happy and he couldn't even give me attention in return. It hurt because I thought he should want to give me attention. I don't expect endless bouts of gratitude because I find joy and comfort in making others happy, but once it feels entirely one-sided it makes me feel very stupid. I try to be very open and honest with my feelings. He told our friend that our relationship was more important than anyone else and that he found talking to me more gratifying than talking to most people. I don't expect to hear that. I don't want people to drop their friends and life for me, or make me their highest priority. I just want to matter to them, and not be completely ignored. It made me feel like he only wanted to talk to me that much when no one else was around. Whenever I got mad, he wouldn't talk to me. He said he didn't understand why he should talk to me, calm me down, or comfort me if I was mad at him. He has a very weird way of viewing people. He feels if someone is mad and he believes he's right, he won't try to fix things. That relationship is over. He can't acknowledge being wrong. He severely lacks empathy for other people, and he's said so himself. One time, my mother had a suicide attempt and I was very upset. After awhile, he responded "I don't know what you want me to tell you", which was a terrible thing to hear. It felt like he did not care at all. I have a very big fear of wanting too much attention due to being entirely dependent at one point (which I am over now, minus gaslighting pushing me back into it at times) and he made me feel like I was asking for too much when I knew I wasn't. Around a month of me confronting him, he broke up with me and said he didn't like me anymore. I thought it was a very weird coincidence. I felt very used and disposable. Since our friendship was of such poor quality and I was having anxiety attacks daily due to him, I decided not to talk to him anymore. He scared me. Looking back at how I was perceiving myself in relation to his behavior scared me. I felt like I was demanding too much, stressing him out, I was manipulating and using him for attention, etc. even though none of these were true. I felt really manipulated and used myself. I told myself I would only talk to him if we had a chance of dating again because being able to have some form of those good memories we had in our past again was the only thing worth salvaging. I thought his negative behavior could be turned around, but if we were completely over, that was the last straw. After around 10 days, he texted me apologizing and said we could just take a break for awhile and that he thought he just stopped liking me because of fighting (that's what I had thought as well, but something in the back of my head still told me it was because he didn't want to deal with my feelings), and he was completely sure he would like me again. He would do this a lot. Saying he didn't know how he felt then making one statement then switching to a contradiction quickly. To clarify the timeline here, he did stop liking me after I began confronting him. He said he stopped liking me 2 weeks prior and at that point we had been fighting for 2 months (or, more accurately I would occasionally bring up my feelings and he'd get angry, then I'd suppress my feelings for weeks at a time). Once, I was telling him about a couple that broke up and I said it was sad that one girl was dating another person 3 weeks after, and he got very defensive and said "you're not mourning it's just a break up there's no appropriate amount of time for that", but I feel the majority of healthy people believe the loss of a relationship is very sad and for a period of time it feels irreplaceable.

We spent 2 months of me avoiding any talk of feelings towards him. It was difficult. Eventually, I brought it up, because I couldn't take not knowing anymore. He has left me confused and alienated countless times. It felt like he gave me 2 pieces of a puzzle and expected me to see the whole picture, and the puzzle pieces didn't even go with the picture he was seeing. He said he was totally sure he didn't want to date me again, but he'd prefer us to be friends, and he didn't want me to hate him. I felt lied to. It always came back around to him. When I was upset or hurt, he would be defensive and mad that I didn't appreciate him being honest. I felt like he didn't want me to hate him just because that would mean someone has a negative opinion of him. He couldn't give a decent apology and he said stuff like "I don't want you to hate me but if you do I'll get over it whatever it happens I guess I'd prefer if we could be friends or talk again eventually", and he just seemed incredibly callous and apathetic towards losing me. I felt like he didn't care at all about losing me but rather losing someone who was a good friend towards him. We were best friends. He said I was incredible and one of the best friends of his life, but he said it when he thought I was going to leave. He never said it when I needed comfort or reassurance. Being around him so long makes me feel crazy for even mentioning my feelings or analyzing his behavior, even though all of my friends (whom I trust to tell me if I'm wrong, especially as most of them talk to him,and they have told me when I was wrong in the past) agreed with me. He stopped talking to our mutual friend, even though at one point they were best friends. We were basically the 2 people he was closest to. It seems he doesn't want anyone to be close to him or know that side of him anymore. His parents and sister have said he doesn't care when he upsets them and he doesn't try to make things right but rather waits for them to get over it and gives a poor apology.

I feel like I was emotionally abused, but I also feel like I can't take my own feelings seriously and that I'm over dramatic. My friends are all into reading about psychology and several of them are/are going to major in psychology and to them it definitely seemed like abuse and that he has some form of disorder. I suppose I'm looking for someone else's reassurance that this could be true so I can stop taking it so personally or blaming myself. It's very hard to re-wire your thought process after someone has blamed everything on you, even after your self esteem is moderately improved/high. Or maybe I'm just looking for advice. I'm not really sure. I think I feel better but it's still lingering there. I still feel very alienated and confused and it's brought back suicidal feelings to a degree, just because I'm not really sure how to dig myself out of the pattern of feeling like I'm wrong even when I know I'm right and my self esteem isn't completely low.

I'm sorry this is so long. I really needed a venting space and I don't have a lot of places to retell this story as my friends have all already heard it, and most of them can't relate (which I'm incredibly happy for, if you can relate I'm very sorry.) Thank you for reading this (or responding if you actually got through all this, haha). I'm very sorry if you have had anything similar happen to you.