[XDDD]

First of all, thanks for answering =).

I didn't exactly maintain the status quo... I tried to fix things. I tried to stop apologizing and explaining myself for things I didn't have to apologize/explain myself for, I tried to start thinking a little bit more about myself and I've tried explaining it to him.

But whenever I've tried to explain it to him, he just hasn't understood. He gets fixated on the small things, on the examples. Some, he's tried to change. Others, he's tried to justify. But he doesn't seem able get the whole picture, so these things and others keep coming up and nothing is fixed.

For instance, if in the middle of a fight I try to tell him that, while I'm in his life, he's not really in mine and I mention, as an example, that he hasn't know what my favorite book is, that it bothers me that he isn't the very least interested in knowing what I see in it, he just answers that he isn't into french philosophy and that he can't even borrow it because my copy is in french. But the truth is that is the book is a barely 100 hundred page novel that costs 10 bucks at the most. And I know most of the songs he listens to by heart, although I don't really enjoy myself listening to music and I don't normally like the music he listens to. But for him the discussion is settled and he doesn't seem to think much more of it.

So, it's not like I haven't tried explaining it. He just doesn't get why these things bother me. He doen's get that I feel like I'm losing myself in this relationship. He doesn't see that I don't have much of a life outside of the relationship and that this relatioship revolves mostly about him. And I guess that at some point I did stop trying so hard to get him to understand. I just resigned myself to things as they were, because they really weren't that bad.

Right now I realize that was a mistake. And I realize that this relationship isn't working and I need to start living my life instead of molding it to his. So I need to break up with him. But I don't know how to do it, because if I try to explain all this to him, he isn't going to understand it. Instead, he's just going to feel that all this examples come out of the blue and that I'm blaming him for them, which I'm not, because I understand that getting to this point is mostly my fault since I'm the one that's allowed herself to give up on all these pieces of herself without putting much of a fight.

So, my question is, how do I do it? How do you break up with some one you truly care about? I can't just come up to him today and tell him "Hey, this isn't working for me, I want to break up" when yesterday he thought everything was fine (maybe not great, but fine).

I know that there isn't a good moment to break up with someone. I know that it isn't going to be easy, nor painless. But I do want to do it as painless as possible for him.

How do I do that?