The next morning Cheyenne very timidly told me that she was having “doubts about our relationship.” I realized later how much planning had gone into this attempt to break up with me: she had waited until after the house party because she didn’t want the break up to interfere with her fun. But she had made me take Chaser during the party so that I would be bright and alert and ready for her break-up speech. She had also planned on the fact that I usually go the gym on Sunday morning. This was basically a hit-and-run tactic: she wanted to break up with me in a way so that I would not have time to discuss it with her. She had even arranged to stay at a friend’s house that night so she wouldn’t have to see me.

Eventually, I realized that this was the tension I had sensed at the party. Cheyenne had spent months telling everyone we knew how unhappy she was in our relationship. Everyone, that is, except me. I had been a party with perhaps twenty people who knew I was about to be dumped. This is an incredibly humiliating experience.

As I sat alone in the apartment that night I thought about all of the changes in Cheyenne: the strip club, the tattoo, and now this. She was 25 and this seemed to be her quarter-life crisis. Still, I had given her two opportunities to end the relationship honorably yet she chose this.

I knew that the relationship could probably not be saved but I went out and bought $80 worth of flowers. One of the things Cheyenne had said was that she needed to feel that I was “madly in love with her.” I wasn’t stupid: I knew that flowers would not magically save the relationship but I wanted to show that I was serious. I also wanted to be able to say that I had done everything I could to make the relationship work. After buying the flowers, I wrote her a letter and found a therapist who did couples counseling.

All of this was to no avail: Cheyenne told me I had two weeks to find another apartment. She had already had a new roommate in mind before she broke up with me. I didn’t have to leave of course, I was on the lease. But Cheyenne didn’t have a car (she could drive but utterly refused to preferring whoever she lived with to chauffer her everywhere). She also stated that she could never live alone.

Those two weeks before I moved out were hard. We were still sleeping in same bed and we had sex at least twice. Cheyenne initiated both of these encounters—one was “break-up sex” (a concept I had never heard of before) and the second was for Valentine’s Day. I felt a lot of anger at Cheyenne for how she had treated me but I actually got over it and I told her I forgave her.

During this time, I was doing some research and I asked Cheyenne to use her library password to access some online materials for me. Rather than doing it herself, she simply told me her password adding, “By the way, I use that login and password for my e-mail address, and everything else.” Why you would give such a password to an ex-boyfriend is completely beyond me. Considering how devious and deceitful Cheyenne and been, she was being awfully naïve now.

End of Part 4. To be continued. Soon. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3