She left me before she actually moved out.

The distance between us kept growing, but I was working so hard I didn’t notice at first. Then one day I was eating breakfast, looking around the apartment, and I realized half of our crap was missing. I’m not the most observant guy in the world, but even I eventually notice when the cat’s gone.

That’s when the break up and the confession came. She’d been slowly moving everything she considered hers out of the apartment since Christmas. As it was currently April, I had to applaud her sense of stealth or risk having to acknowledge my own obliviousness.

Getting over an ex is never easy, but it’s especially hard when she’s still living with you. Getting over her was going to be impossible no matter where she was.

Apparently all her stuff was at her mother’s because she was still saving for a place of her own. I thought about being the bad guy and telling her to get the hell out right now, but that would have made getting her back a lot harder, and at the time I was determined to get her back.

Obviously I’d been doing something wrong. Working too much, paying too little attention to her, something that had made the idea of staying with me a real chore. I started dressing better, wearing that cologne she gave me that smelled like rotten apples, even helping out around the apartment. (There was a lot less stuff to clean – apparently everything that was good besides the TV was firmly in the “hers” pile.)

Once it was out in the open, then it really began to feel like the relationship was ending, as she moved into the guest bedroom. There was nothing but the rock hard futon her sister gave her in there. It was kind of humiliating to realize she preferred sleeping on it to sharing a bed with me.

Even more humiliating when I realized she didn’t always sleep alone in there. She didn’t rub it in my face, but it got the message across.

Getting over her happened slowly. My ex girlfriend lived with me for two months after we officially broke up and it was the most wonderful, awful time. I entertained fantasies of us working it out, her realization that I was the only one for her. It never happened.

I got the cat back, though. At least she lets me watch the Playboy channel.

Mark Street, 24, retail manager

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