Some context.

We have been dating for around a decade. We're both around 30 years old. His mother died a year and a half ago, after a long hospital battle where he was forced to care for her.

We talked almost daily for years, we were mostly in a long distance relationship but we have spent time in each others houses or in each others company, dates to the movie theatre etc. I used to live in his state but had to move due to unforeseen circumstances regarding a roomate going off the deep end.

He started ignoring me around Nov 2023. I wanted to talk to him, but he would leave me unread for days where previously he talked to me daily. All he would talk about was either how awful his mother was doing, or a popular childrens TV show that he really liked. I tried to be supportive, and we would watch the TV show together on WTG.

In spring of '24 his mother died and he grew even more distant- Leaving me unread for weeks, but still making an effort to talk to me, although instead of holding conversations with me he just talked about the things he was doing with some new online roleplay friends he'd made, and he largely ignored the majority of what I said in favor of showing me screencaps of the things his new discord friends and him were talking about.

We had previously roleplayed together often and wrote stories together, for years. He started to get excited around that winter because his character was getting married to someone elses character, and invited me to the chatroom to "Watch" the wedding. I attended and hoped we would be closer but I was bitter about it, I don't know how I didn't flip my lid over it because I had been planning to propose and we had been planning wedding stuff for two of our own characters, and it was heavy on my mind that he was spending time with people who weren't me, doing things we did together, while ignoring me. Like I was thirdwheeled in my own relationship.

At this point he was very much into a TV show that I wasn't really into, but I wanted to be close to him, so I set my jaw and got into it, and you know, I liked it, and I even made characters from that universe for us throw into adventures together. Not like, canon characters, but you know.

He started to fully ignore me around then- That whole spring and summer he only sent me a couple clusters of messages, probably under a hundred.

In July of 24 I told him that if he was trying to break up with me quietly, he was succeeding, and I begged him to talk to me. He blew up at me, saying things like "this is why I don't talk" and "I just need to veg more". I was empathetic to it because I had just lost my own mother in July (No-Contact, not dead) and I bought him a bunch of video games from his steam wishlist to give him something to distract himself with.

I was distracted that summer and fall with my own issues; He wasn't talking to me, but my family is estranged from me and I was struggling with losing my own mother, and my cat, who I had lost to liver disease in March of 24, and I had just moved into a new space. I made attempts to talk to him only for him to give me half assed responses that weren't really anything, or he would send me a meme every now and again but nothing else. I gave him some space because I knew he was grieving, but these were things that left me feeling sad and angry, and jealous, that I let slide because I knew he was depressed. He had been talking to me about it and how he just "needed to veg" for a while, felt useless and helpless and stuff. He asked for space, so I stopped talking to him so much and gave him space.

All this time, his Steam account would light up when he was online, or in-game, and it showed me that he was "okay", like, "alive", because long distance relationships are hard when one half goes quiet, but every few weeks I would send him a message to check in. Sometimes he would reply, but mostly not, but he usually replied to me within a few weeks.

And then this year, 2025, he started hitting the month mark, as in, a month would pass between his replies to my messages, and he was constantly not even reading my messages, leaving them unread for weeks. (Our chat messenger shows you if your messages are getting opened or not.).

I started talking to my friends about him and what was I going to do, and they all told me to drop the relationship because it was clearly over. But I held trouble with it because we had been dating for so long, and he had helped me through my stepfathers abuse of me and my traumatic forced-to-come-out-of-the-closet time. I felt, and feel, like I owed it to him to try harder to fix our relationship because he was clearly grieving.

A month or so ago, he changed his status to "The person that doesn't matter", and I texted him and asked him what was going on, was he okay, would he please talk to me, and he didn't read it.

Then, two weeks ago, I got together with friends, drank some alcohol, and started blowing up his chat with an hour long ramble of how much I missed him and how much he was hurting me and how bad I felt that he was choosing to ignore me when I could plainly see him playing videogames on Steam, he's been into a lot of Hearts of Iron lately. I told him he was just like one of his characters, a character he'd created who had hurt his wife badly on purpose in the name of trying to "Fix" one of her fears. I told him I was tired of being in Schrodinger's Relationship.

He didn't read that either. I gave him a week to see if he would read it and then, nothing.

So this last week I wrote up a breakup letter, sent it to him, and blocked him on every platform. He read the whole backlog of unread messages from that month in only a few short hours, and then unfriended me on Steam, presumably so I wouldn't see him in-game anymore.

I didn't unfriend him in any platform we had been talking on- Just blocked him. I told him in my letter that I hoped eventually he would rekindle the fire that we had, but I was angry and sad now, so that he would have to watch for me to unblock him (Our chat messenger tells you if you're blocked too.)

I don't think that is going to happen, but my heart wants what it wants.
I feel broken, and I feel like I failed him, and I feel stupid for believing that I had found something stable, someone who loved me without fail, or if that I HAD found that, I was ruining it, and that maybe if I just kept giving him space eventually he would have come around, and I definitely feel like a huge asshole who should have been more sensitive to his grief.

I feel like I should have given him a chance to rebuttal, to talk it over with me, but I also feel like I'd given him plenty enough warning.

Part of me felt embarrassed for sending him the drunk ramble texts and didn't want to deal with the fallout.

Part of me felt like I had tried enough, and put enough time into trying to fix this.

All of my friends tell me that it's the right decision and that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped, especially when they live 1300 miles from you, and that I was wasting my time and my younger, healthier years, waiting for a guy who clearly didn't care about reading my messages. They told me that if I had an emergency or was texting him from my deathbed, would he read them? Would he care?

But I don't know. I'm heartbroken and wracked with guilt over breaking up with him, because his life has sucked the last few years. His mom died, his dogs died, his little brothers chose to go live with their aunt because home life was awful because his parents were in the middle of a divorce, it's a mess that I desperately wanted to fix, to help him, to move him out of there and move him in with me. I thought our life would "begin" at that stage, you know? Part of me feels... Better, now that I don't have to worry about if he's just ignoring me or if something happened to him, because it's literally impossible for him to ignore me if I've blocked him.

But... I also feel like I'm a huge asshole for doing this to him, and I desperately want to talk to him and know what he's thinking, if he even cares, or if it's like, business as usual. He used to tell me that I was the only good thing in his life and that he loved me, but if he loved me, why... all this. I feel like a major asshole, and that I should have just waited.

Anyway, that's the whole story for the most part, what do you guys think? AITAH? Or is there NAH or are we both AH, I don't know. I'm looking for public opinion on this one, I'm so conflicted and heartbroken.