I’ll try to be objective, everything here is either the objective truth or something both of us came to a consensus on.

It was a large and complex issue, last straw was I attempted to communicate that we would need to talk out our issues before we started co-living again, she took it as she wouldn’t be allowed to come back to the house without that talk right now. I ran that message past a few people before I sent it because we’ve had some nasty communication issues in the past, they did not think it was a reasonable reading of said message. It certainly not my intention.

We’ve also had a lot of issues on and off. I’m the kind of person that doesn’t mind that and is happy to work on this stuff, she’s got some anxiety issues and tends to avoid grappling with things. It was going okay for the first couple of years, and I was a much more forgiving, go with the flow kind of person back then. I started to feel like my priorities and needs weren’t important to her, chiefly because when I tried to communicate them to her she would sort of treat it as unimportant as a first reaction, then if I pressed the issue she would concede the importance, but then never make actual progress.

The most recent batch of issues came last year when there was a construction crew basically rebuilding the entirety of next door. They did a significant amount of damage to our property, and the noise was extremely loud from 7-2:30. She got home at 3ish. I needed some time to relax after the figurative siege of noise, she has dyspraxia and won’t turn off the anxiety and will use the anxious energy for housework. I also have moderate to severe PTSD regarding noises like that from childhood. It wasn’t a good combination. She also wouldn’t even acknowledge the problem for the first maybe 5 months, and basically didn’t do any of the legal work regarding the issues.

I started to have a breakdown in maybe August last year, where I stopped being able to do housework so easily, her answer to that was to force herself to do the things I wasn’t capable of at the time. I still kick myself for allowing that to happen, because it built up more antipathy that she never communicated, and even at the time I knew things going this way was a possibility.

Even up to the end we cared for each other, but how we were interacting was bad for both of us. My main frustration isn’t that we had these issues, but that I didn’t think they were insurmountable at all. People and relationships need work, and we both agreed on that in general, but the work discussed never materialised.

For my part my faults in this were I was too forgiving at the start, and too frustrated at the end. I don’t blame myself for that, the issues next door basically made me regress into the abused child on some level, but it did definitely lead to a lack of communication skills, and patience. I did okay, but not great.