I broke up with my partner of 10 years and I feel absolutely awful.

I really don’t know if I am making the right choice, and it is crushing me. My partner is the most loving person I have ever met. He’s patient, loves me to death, caring, patient, in the same interests as me, we have the same life goals.

He was there for me when I was going through a very bad depression a few years ago, he still loved me while I put on extra weight, and supported me when I wanted to lose all that weight again. .

On paper, he is the perfect partner. But our S life was basically non-existent for the last 5 years. Before that, the S never has been that mind-blowing and frequently hurt for me, and it just kind of faded away until we had like S maybe once every two months. The S we do have does not feel loving, but just mechanical, like something you need to do once in a while to get off your chest.

We spoke about the lack of S in our relationship once or twice, and we both we’re okay with it because we click so well on a personal level.

I thought I was okay with the situation as well, but in recent months something was nagging inside me, like something was missing from the relationship. Then 3 months ago, I realised I am seriously missing the physical side of our relationship and told him I wanted to break up.

I moved out of our apartment, but we decided to do a couple of therapy to see if things could still be fixed. We got a ‘touching’ exercise from our therapist to rekindle the initial spark we had, but subconsciously I pull myself away from his touches a lot of the time.

I sometimes felt the urge though to kiss him, but never acted on it. It felt a bit like we were stuck in limbo. We saw each other pretty frequently, but nothing ever happened further except for those touches between us (hugging, touching each other arm, holding hands).

Now for the last three weeks, I felt myself developing feelings for someone from work (no close colleagues). I told the other person this, and the feelings are mutual, but we decided to not act on them for now because my mind is currently not in the right state.

I told my partner about these feelings yesterday, and we both decided that this probably concludes the end of us.

I haven’t stopped crying since. I feel so genuinely bad. My partner is such a great person, I love him very deeply, he is my best friend and nobody knows me as well as he does. But I think due to the lack of S, that love is not a partnership love and more of sibling love, and I’m feeling that I won’t be able to turn it around through therapy.

There is also a lot of guilt in my mind, as we planned our whole future together (we would soon start by trying for children and bought a house together) and I am robbing us both of that.

I don’t really know what to do. Sometimes I felt relief in the past few months, but now all I am feeling is like I am making the greatest mistake of my life. He has all the things I am looking for in a partner, except the physical part is missing. I am putting myself and him through such great hurt just because of that.