My boyfriend dumped me and was on Tinder within the hour

Sarah* now 25, recalls the pain of her first love slipping away, then him immediately appearing on Tinder.

I’d been with this guy, Johnny*, for just over a year. Like many men in their 20s, he’d never been able to decide what he wanted. I, on the other hand, knew from day one that I wanted to be with him. He was scrawny and chaotic, but his energy was infectious and our connection was undeniable. It was a slow burner, but after a couple months of umming and ahing, we were finally official.

I remember being excited, falling in love and being infatuated... But I also remember not being the least bit satisfied. Sex was infrequent and we quickly fell into a monotonous routine: sleepovers three times a week, takeaways on a Sunday, vicious drunken arguments on a Friday night.

It didn’t take long for the romance to dwindle and the more I felt him begin to drift, the more I clung to him even tighter. Begging to see him every night. Baking focaccia and making spaghetti vongole (he was Italian) on Valentine’s Day. Getting hour-long taxis late in the night to socialise with his friends I didn’t even like.

Ignoring the red flags

In hindsight, I should’ve known something was up when he asked me to pay for his train ticket to Scotland to stay with a bunch of his girl-mates I’d never heard of. I obliged. Paid for his ticket and embraced the role of the effortlessly cool, supportive girlfriend he fell for. Behind this façade, doubts niggled away at me. I spent nights crying, feeling like he was slipping away.

When he got back, things seemed normal and I convinced myself that we were fine. But in the back of my mind, I knew something was up. He’d stopped treating me in the loving way I was used to. He cared less about how my day had been and conversations about our future had become vague and murky. But I believed his excuses, for why he was pulling back.

That weekend, he had a house party and I tagged along with friends. We danced, we drank and had loads of fun together. In the morning we were in bed for what felt like forever, wrapped up in each other. We ordered pizza and midway through a slice I felt a big distance between us. "Is everything okay?" I asked, sensing the shift. He hesitantly replied, "Of course, babe, everything’s fine." I persisted, urging him to open up.

Breaking my heart

Looking back, perhaps I should’ve left it at his initial response; that might have granted us one more day of blissful ignorance. Then, he uttered the words: "I want to break up." I was devastated and thrown into chaos. The finality killed me and I remember whimpering, "But will you still come over?" He laughed sadly. "That’s not how breakups work."

I walked home, submerged in a state of anxiety. Was it my new haircut? Had he met someone new? Was I too needy? Or did he need more? When I got home there was a box of Krispy Kremes sent from friends waiting at my door. I couldn’t bring myself to touch them. Heartbreak is an unwitting diet plan.

Lying in bed with my friends, holding back the tears, one of them turned her phone towards me and showed me his Tinder profile. There he was: Johnny, 23, Bath. A photo of him smug and smiling. I tapped through his profile only to see a photo I had taken of him one night while we were having fun and messing about. It had taken him approximately an hour to execute the ultimate betrayal.

Torn apart with anger

Suddenly, it wasn’t just me crying. My friends were fighting back tears of their own, overcome with sympathy for me. In that moment, sorrow morphed into seething rage. With adrenaline rushing through my veins, I dialled his number, my voice trembling with a mix of fury and disbelief. "You’re deluded if you think there is any chance you will find someone on that app."

You can’t truly grasp heartbreak until it happens to you. I went to my parents’ for a week, spending each night in their bed, struggling to sleep as I battled with feeling alone. When you get dumped, reality is too harsh to face. So, I clung to the fantasy that it 'came out of nowhere', that he made a senseless decision. This was less painful than accepting something was fundamentally broken. We’d only been together for 18 months and I’d been in relationships before but he was my first love and my best friend.

Now, three years on and thriving in a new relationship, whenever anyone tells me they’re going through a breakup, my stomach churns. It pulls me back to that time, to just how much he hurt me.

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

Read more: All of Yahoo UK's How I was dumped stories.