Did I mess up? (Long post)

Eventually, he came back and forgave me, insisting that he also had a part to play in it. Again, I never fully believed that. A few months later, I was broken up with, and he stayed with me through my five stages of grief with that. This brought us closer and, after him basically confessing his own feelings in every way aside from actually outright saying "I have feelings for you", we started dating. I know, I know, don't date your best friend, but I had confidence and wanted to explore those feelings. Not to mention that, again, he confessed first. So I was in a bit of a bind where, had I said no, I would have hurt him and suppressed my own feelings. I thought it would work. I took the risk.

To be fair, most of our relationship was great. We already had shared interests and a deep knowledge of each other, so we often spent hours on the phone just having fun and talking about whatever made us smile. We were there for each other on good days and bad, and we turned to each other first and foremost. (2/?)

The problem was that communication of confusion and disagreement became something of a nightmare. One particularly severe incident involved him having a breakdown one night and telling me (sexual assault victims may wanna skip the rest of this paragraph) that he wanted me to drug him to incoherence, tie him to a bed, and fuck him. For anyone unfamiliar, this would constitute rape. When I told him that I wasn't going to rape him and that it was fucked up of him to ask that of me, he turned it into a pity party rather than actually genuinely standing back and saying that he fucked up. I wound up taking a week's break from the relationship over this just because it fucked me up so hard that he just wouldn't hop off of the "I'm so disgusting" train for ten seconds to admit that I was the victim in that scenario and I deserved a proper apology. Another incident that made me go on hiatus from the relationship involved him breaking down and telling me that I needed to fuck him to make him feel happy again. Again, he tried to make it a pity thing and told me that "he didn't mean it" and "it's a form of self-harm". It took the rest of the day and a decent amount of fighting to actually get a proper apology for that one.

Incidents like these compounded with the fact that my main defense mechanism is to shut myself off from the world made him wary of any disagreements, as I could easily drop off the map or turn cold if I felt that those patterns were showing up again. Today, it came to a head. He changed his identity (again) and mentioned that he wanted to use she/her pronouns between close friends/loved ones because they made him feel "cute and soft". As he's now a trans man with heavy dysphoria regarding everything else, I was confused. From my interpretation, I thought he was using those pronouns because he saw them as inseparable from that cutesy femininity, and was assigning them traits of stereotypical "cute girls" rather than just seeing them as indicators of someone being female/of a feminine gender.

I was confused, I asked questions. I didn't intend to be mean, I just wanted to see what he was seeing. He saw it as me accusing him of being sexist and got upset when I just asked questions regarding the assignment of gender-neutral traits to gendered pronouns. I wasn't voicing any sort of disagreement or malice, I just wanted to know what was going on. (Part 4/?)

His explanations felt like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole ("I only see them like that when I use them for me" ???), but I knew that any further questioning would just make things worse, and I was already at my wit's end trying to figure out his thought process while he kept turning the conversation against him ("oh I'm just wrong and stupid", "it doesn't matter anyways"). I decided to just say that I didn't understand, but I would still accept him, because it seemed to make him happy.

Instead, he just decided to tell me that he wouldn't do it since I wasn't 100% on board with the idea and that "I was clearly upset" even though I was honest to got just trying my best to understand, again, with no malice or anger or pain whatsoever up until that point. He also brought up that he hadn't gotten over the past incident where I broke up with a week because I felt manipulated, and that he was now convinced that I would just bottle everything up and lie to him because I clearly didn't feel confident enough to ask questions anymore. At this point, I broke down, lost my nerve and, completely convinced that I was being toxic somehow and holding him back, I broke up, telling him to find someone better and kinder. (Part 5/6)

So that's where the story of five years ends. I don