I'm sorry about the situation you are in. I've been through a lot with my now wife (a lot of the hard stuff we went through before we even got married) and I do understand the whole practically married part before getting married. After a year of being together we shared a bank acct, cc, and even moved in together. We got lucky enough to work at the same office, we have the same mutual friends, and now after my stroke in May she has to drive me around because I cannot drive. So yeah, I understand the whole being together all the time because she is my best friend... cliche right?

However, when I was still in the dating scene, which was 13 years ago, once whoever I was dating and I decided to break it off (regardless if it was my idea or the guys/girls idea) I wrote it off completely. If we couldn't make it work and it came to actually breaking up then I was done. I didn't want to stay friends, I didn't want anymore contact period. If we couldn't make it work and we were just at that point of throwing it all away I was done with it. It may not be the best way to look at a relationship but maybe that's how your ex is too. If she saw that you weren't will to fight to keep the relationship and it was so easy for you to throw in the towel, why would she want to give you a second change to hurt her again?

At this point you have done everything you are able to do and the ball is now in her court, regardless if you like/accept that or not. Purposing to someone in a last ditch effort to "keep" them just looks creepy and desperate in my opinion, granted it's juswt my opinion. The way I would see it is you would have rather broken it off with me then work/fight to keep our relationship going. Your first response was to break it off and now that you suddenly realize that it was more important to have her in your life, for whatever reason, you suddenly want to be like "I want to marry this women!". In my opinion, that's really the wrong reason to get married in the first place.

Just my two cents and I wish you the best of luck in however you continue from here.