My OCD (BDD) inflicted finace of five years dumped me last week. She gave me a list of reasons straight off of the standard OCD relationship failure list (dissatisfaction with me, virtually zero sex life, doubts about my reliability and commitment, inability to become aroused or feel attraction) and kicked me out of the flat. I lost my job, having nowhere nearby to live.

Now I look through some of the posts in OCD support forums here, I see how little she did to help herself. The NHS mental health service is pretty rubbish. She could get 10 weeks of counseling after waiting 15 months on the waiting list. Not exactly regular enough for any CBT techniques to really take root. She was taught relaxation techniques but she stopped doing them. She was recommended a book with lots of exercises to help her when her OCD kicked in. It got tossed under the shoe rack and forgotten. She constantly tried to stop taking her meds. She dragged me into her BDD rituals. She shrank further and further away from our sex life, which had been pretty active and experimental, finding it progressively harder to get aroused and rarely ever achieving orgasm, even manually towards the end.

I suppose the part that really kills me is that when I did eventually land myself a new job, I offered to pay for private counselling for her. After all, it says everywhere that meds alone don't help much and that CBT is key to helping OCD sufferers get their lives back. She turned me down. The debts her ex-husband dumped her with were more important to her and she put all the money into paying those off instead.

After everything she did to sabotage our relationship, even though I know she didn't do it on purpose, I actually feel a little relieved now it's over. No more coming up with new ways of telling her how good her hair looks while she's stuck in an OCD loop. No more being told I'm not trying hard enough when I can't find an IT job in the middle of the biggest recession since the Great Depression (not that she stopped moaning when I did get one). No more heart-stopping questions like "are you going to leave me?" every time we have a tiny disagreement over something.

I realise now, thanks to communities like this, that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I did my absolute best to accomodate her problems even though she didn't make much of an effort to do anything about them. I put up with her running my emotions through the grinder over and over and over again. Unless she finds herself some help, she's going to have exactly the same problems in all her future relationships. She's also something of an arsehole magnet and I worry that she'll realise what she's thrown away by kicking me out. All things considered, I think I was a saint to stick it out as long as I did. I can never take her back though. She complains about feeling insecure? After the mess she's made of my life, I don't think I could ever feel secure around her ever again.

But the worst thing… she was on holiday for two weeks in Turkey and her previous record when she's decided to break up with someone is far from good. I guess I'll never find out whether she cheated on me or not.

It's over.