So my ex and I broke up recently. It was his decision, and I thought it was amicable enough - I had hopes he didn't feel he could meet, and he felt overwhelmed by how much I can be sometimes (I do not dispute this, I'm A Lot.), and so while it hurt because I really thought we were getting through the rough patch, it was the right move to just be friends.

The thing is, he's not really acting like a friend now, and the way it's going I'm not entirely sure that's even truthfully what he wants.

He's always been kind of rude - he's socially awkward by his very nature and not at all an emotional guy - I'm very used to him being somewhat ignorant of the feelings of others, that's normal. He's not diagnosed autistic but most people he comes into contact with have their suspicions on him being on the spectrum. (This is not a bad thing or a sweeping armchair diagnosis, our whole friendgroup is autistic so it would not be a surprise and would of course be an explanation for his overall demeanor, but not an excuse for the behaviour that follows.)

Now though, it's not just 'socially awkward guy can be misconstrued as ruder than he intends to be', it's targeted. and usually targeted at me.

I tried to brush it off as me just being oversensitive in the aftermath of the breakup, because I know I can be hysterical and overdramatic, but it's become obvious in the week or so that it goes on that I'm not imagining it - he's being downright mean. And I never thought he was mean.

So I tried reaching out to him about it - I thought maybe he was being so odd because it was hurting him too and he wanted to talk about it, or he wanted to avoid giving me false hope by being deliberately meaner than usual for a bit, or maybe he was just enjoying the freedom from a relationship that he seems to think was controlling. All of the above would have been fine and I would have, to an extent, understood if any of those were his reasoning, but he denied acting out of character at all - told me that he'd be saying everything he's said for the past week with or without the circumstances.

I don't think that's true, because a lot of it seemed to come out of nowhere with no prompting from any outside source (so not a badly landed punchline to something else) and he's famously stoic and private to the point of paranoia, but I accepted it - it isn't my place to push him on that, if he says he's fine and he thinks it's normal then whatever, I suppose it must be for him.

Reaching out seemed to make it worse - today he decided to go vaguepost in a shared server about how people who talk about having a certain opinion are annoying - down to my exact wording of said opinion. This would not be so damning, if there were others in his group/life that had the same opinion. As it stands, it's only me, and everybody in our group knows that. So really, he's just publicly calling me annoying for no real reason, somewhere he knows I will see it.

I know I said he can be ignorant of the feelings of others, but I refuse to believe that as an incredibly smart grown man, it hasn't registered to him that if you insult someone, it's going to hurt their feelings. There is a huge difference between "being unable to read the room and making people uncomfortable by mistake" and "being unaware that knowingly insulting a friend is bad".

I've tried to be civil about it all.

I didn't blow up at him for breaking up with me knowing I was at work at the time, because I asked first and said I wouldn't break down, so that's on me.

I haven't gone and blamed him for the part where I got so upset and stressed about it all that I got physically sick, because it's not like he wanted that to happen to me either.

I wanted to comfort my friend if he was struggling, and I didn't want to make it a big deal that we broke up, and I didn't want to really bring it up at all, because I know he's bad with emotional stuff and I figured he'd like to just move right along, which was fine by me if it helped him.

It just feels like I've sacrificed and sacrificed and sacrificed to try and not blow up our lives over this, and I've denied myself the chance to actually grieve because it would inconvenience him, and all he can think to do is just...rub salt in the wound wherever possible and assume the worst of me at every turn.

And nobody else seems to notice beyond 'feeling like they missed something' how mean he's been lately, except for my one friend who has never really liked him all that much in the first place.

And that makes me wonder if this is actually new, or if this is just the rose glasses breaking - was he just always this awful, and I never saw it because I loved him?? Has anyone else had this sort of jekyll-hyde turn happen?

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