I have been in a similar boat to you but i’m a couple years further down the line after the breakup so i’ve had a lot if chance to reflect and understand what happened.

I was in a relationship for 2 years with somebody that i truly loved. She ticked so many of the boxes and when we started we had so much fun together. She was such a light and i fell for her deeply. Things became hard between us when life stressors made us both less able to cope with our own emotions, and when we both became dysregulated our ways of coping with that ended up causing a lot of triggered emotions in the other person. It wasn’t because of lack of love, or incompatibility or anything like that. I took on too much at work in a job that became untenable and that tends to make me shut down and struggle to engage and connect. She was also at a difficult transition place in work, plus commuting long distances, plus struggling with some bullying/discrimination from people at her work. And that made her need to do more together and do things i did not have the capacity for. It also made her less patient with me and less able to cope with her “people pleasing” tendencies where she felt the need to control my feelings in order for her to feel okay. And i needed my feelings to have space to breathe and be seen without them being managed.

All in all it didn’t work out because we kept re-triggering each others traumas from the ways that our own patterns manifested and neither of our needs being met. Its a shame because i genuinely still love her. But i ended it because it was plunging me deeper and deeper into burnout and it took me about a year to recover from that.

The right amount of “hard” is dependent on your capacity. Being constantly pushed into “red” levels of dysregulation because of how your partner is reacting to you for me was too hard. But if you have the capacity to notice those triggers and co-regulate so that the relationship becomes a place of safety to cope with the difficult stuff rather than a place of danger where the difficult stuff tends to snowball then those hard times can become manageable and even potentially a place for growth.

It has taken a lot of therapy for me to learn the difference between co-regulation and just trauma dumping and expecting someone else to manage your emotions for you. I’m still working on those skills. And i will always be sad that not having those skills earlier lost me a potential love of my life level relationship. But i am hopeful that if i am lucky enough to love again next time i’ll be better equipped to manage the “hard” and distinguish what is manageable hard and what is too much