I got dumped via a PowerPoint presentation

Imogen* was fuming when she opened up the mysterious PowerPoint presentation...

When I was 24, I landed my dream job in London at a major marketing agency. I’d been working for an advertising firm back home in Plymouth since finishing University and was itching to change lanes, try something new and further my career.

By this point, I’d been with my boyfriend for almost three years, and we were in a really good place relationship-wise. He was from the same area as me but was three years older, and we met soon after I moved back home from Portsmouth, where I went to University. After dating for about a year in our home town of Plymouth, we decided to move in together and rent a flat.

Our life was mostly great – we shared the same friends and kept our romance alive by regularly going out on date nights, booking long weekends away, or grabbing a takeaway on a Saturday night. But there was always that niggling feeling in me that wanted to see what else was out there before settling down for good.

New life in London

Luckily, he was also incredibly supportive of my professional ambitions and always encouraged me to apply for positions in the capital, as he knew it was on my career goal bucket list. So when I told him I’d been offered the perfect job, he was genuinely ecstatic for me and couldn’t be prouder.

Despite having to uproot my whole life and move to London, we were still on good terms. Besides, nothing was going to get in the way of my excitement and the fact that I was finally starting this new career chapter.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t move with me because of his job, but being a self-confessed home bird, he also expressed no desire to consider moving to London with me in the future. In fact, being on a pretty good wage, he said he would cover the costs of our one-bedroom apartment in Plymouth so we still had the same 'home' to meet up in.

We decided we’d do long-distance and promised to see each other every two weeks – whether it be he came to me, I went back to Plymouth, or we met up somewhere in the middle.

This all worked perfectly for the first year and a half, and I honestly couldn’t have been happier. My relationship was still going strong, my job was everything I’d hoped for, I was loving being in London and I’d made loads of new friends. I’d never felt so fulfilled in all aspects of my life.

Warning signs

However, with him being three years older than me, it started to feel like we were at different life stages. He made it clear that he was ready for marriage and children, and wasn’t prepared to wait much longer for the things he regarded as life 'milestones'.

I, on the other hand, was caught up in the London whirl and wasn’t prepared to move back to Plymouth full-time and give up the life I’d worked so hard for.

We started to have small disagreements over the phone, and when we did see each other – which became less and less often – our time together would be filled with bickering and him complaining that he was the one keeping the relationship alive. He said he felt I wasn’t as 'invested' in us anymore.

The brutal truth

Then after a particularly difficult weekend together last year, I got an email from him with a PowerPoint presentation attached. Confused and thinking he’d accidentally sent me a work email at first, I opened up the seven-slide document to find it contained a list of reasons why he didn’t want to be with me anymore.

From me being 'selfish' and putting my career before our relationship, to him suddenly deciding I was 'too young' for him, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I knew we weren’t on the best of terms, but it was something – at the time – I thought we could work on. Obviously, he thought differently.

Naturally, I was fuming that one) he’d decided to break up with me in the first place, but two) the callous way he'd gone about it. When I called to confront him, his response was unusually cold.

"I didn’t dare say it to your face and I thought this would be the best way to say goodbye. It made it easier for me to visualise a fresh start in writing," he told me, before having a final dig. "I thought you’d respond better this way as you’re always on your phone replying to work emails or texting colleagues when we’re together anyway."

Three years on, I still can’t believe he thought that was the best way to end a five-year relationship.

*Names have been changed to protect identities.

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