[37M][34F] How to recover from losing your person when they have to choose to further their career?

Not using a burner account for this because at this point it doesn’t matter and I’m sorry if this doesn’t fit in this category, but since we are still talking and kind of on the fence about this actually ending I figured here is a better place than the breakup subreddit.

I recently lost someone incredibly important to me and the hardest part about this is I didn’t do anything wrong. As a matter of fact, neither of us did.

We were together for almost a year and she taught me so much about what love is supposed to feel like and how comfortable we were with one another. She taught me a totally new way of communication between partners and something I’ve been yearning for my entire life. She taught me so much and I started to see so many glimpses of a very happy future with her.

I’m divorced, been through the wringer in terms of relationships and life in general in recent years, and meeting her was one of the best things to ever happen to me.

Suddenly, though, I had to sit through the tough convo with her that ultimately meant we aren’t together anymore. Her career has ground to a halt and in order for her to get back on track and pursue her goals she can’t really do that without charging forward and putting everything she has into that.

Of course, that meant cutting out the one thing that said it never wants to be a stressor or to get in the way of things, that he wants to be the stress reliever instead… me.

I’ve gone through maybe half a dozen REAL breakups over my life, from a wide range of scenarios, but this one hits so much different. This is one of those breakups that makes you think “there’s literally nothing I could have done to prevent this…”

I was the romantic type. The nurturer. The listener. The one to put your needs above my own because you’ve had a hard day and need a break. I basically applied as many principles and characteristics as I possibly could in this relationship and I still come up short.

I feel like everybody has one of these relationship breakups in their lifetime and I don’t know how to handle this so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

TLDR: My girlfriend suddenly called off our relationship to work on her career and I’m really struggling to handle this.