Woman says she spent years waiting for her boyfriend to propose — and after one more round of disappointment, she finally walked away and built a life that looked better without him in it

A woman on Reddit said she had spent years trying to be patient with a boyfriend who kept acting like marriage was in their future, even while giving her less and less reason to believe it.

She wrote that they had been together for years and that from the outside, the relationship probably looked stable. But inside it, she said, she was carrying constant disappointment. She wanted marriage. He always seemed to leave just enough room for hope without actually moving anything forward. In her post, she said she had started to realize she was putting huge parts of her life on hold for a man who kept showing her, in small and large ways, that he was not serious about giving her what she wanted.

One of the details that stayed with her was something that had happened two years earlier. She wrote that after a blackout-drunk argument, she left the house to stay at her mother’s for the night. While she was gone, he downloaded Tinder. She only found out four days later after seeing a verification code text on his phone. In her words, cheating was always supposed to be a total dealbreaker for both of them, yet somehow she still stayed and kept trying to make the relationship work. Looking back, she said that should have told her everything she needed to know.

By the time she made the post, she said she had just finally broken. She wrote that she wanted to start 2025 fresh, but there was one practical complication: they were living together and the lease did not expire until March. Even so, she said that even if he somehow turned around and gave her a ring now, she no longer believed it would fix anything. She wrote that she had given too much of herself away too early and was only just starting to understand how much the anger, resentment, and repeated disappointment had pulled her away from herself.

She sounded devastated, but also strangely clear. In the line that seemed to sum up the whole post, she wrote, “When someone tells you who they are with their words and actions, BELIEVE. THEM.” She said she was excited for the rest of her life, wanted to surround herself with people who believed in her, and was done treating a man like the thing that determined her worth. The breakup hurt, but she also made it clear that staying had been hurting her too.

About eight and a half months later, she came back with a very different update.

She wrote that the year after leaving had turned out to be the best year of her adult life. She had saved enough for the deposit on her first home and was getting ready to start house-hunting on her own. She planned to buy solo and eventually have her sister come live with her. She also said she had been headhunted for a new job, one that came with a 25% pay increase and far more room to grow.

The list of changes kept going. She bought a new car entirely by herself and maintained it herself. She built a new circle of friends she adored. Her relationships with family got stronger because she finally had the time and emotional energy to show up for them. She went to a play alone, went to a concert alone, and even traveled abroad alone, where she met people she still kept in touch with. She also wrote that she had lost 25 pounds, fallen in love with the gym and swimming, and swam 30 kilometers in June alone.

By the end of the update, she said something that completely changed the emotional tone of the whole story: leaving him had not just helped her recover. It had opened up the happiest year of her adult life. She said she now had more to look forward to because she was finally living for herself. She ended by telling other women who were ending 2025 disappointed in the man in their life to think about where they could be in a year if they chose themselves instead.

Original Reddit post.