I’m single now, after 6 years as a partner, a word slightly stronger than girlfriend and slightly less than wife. The end wasn’t angry, more a whimper than a bang, an engine stalling or failing to turnover instead of a crash. Sad, dragging closure, months when I thought if I could just be better, do more, change my attitude, change something, then things would work out. We’ve shared so much, my boyfriend and I, over six years, it seemed impossible that this could be more than a rough patch.

Our breakup was as amicable, as kind and as respectful as the end of six years together could be. Friends tell me that’s a blessing, but anyone who says that didn’t see him, with his internal monologue turned external, as always, wandering around the wreckage of our life, asking aloud what it is that makes the apartment so bare? Is it the pictures gone from the walls? Was it really, he wonders aloud, that my possessions made his bachelor pad our home?

I was prepared for the tragedy of wanting different things, and for the loneliness of being newly single, but I wasn’t prepared for the endless logistics of separating our lives. Eating on his plates, that last night, because my plates were in the dishwasher, getting ready to be packed and stored at my parents. (And what I have done wrong in my life, to be thirty years old, and have my kitchen in boxes in my parents’ garage?) Canceling accounts, switching bills from my name to his, the undoing of everything we’d done so excitedly when we first moved in together.  Calling the car insurance company, to explain over and over to the confused, unhelpful clerk that we both wanted to keep our insurance with them, just no longer as a household.

I wish, at times, that it could be an angry, bitter breakup. I daydream, when I’m lying in my new bed, unable to sleep, about a split where I could have taken my stuff while he was out, leaving a Dear John on the kitchen table that is mine no longer. I wish I had that anger to separate my thoughts of him, instead, it’s a phantom pain of what he would say if he were here. Finding his shirt as I unpack my possessions in a new state, or seeing his favorite pad Thai on a menu, or finally watching a film we’d been meaning to see.

Beginning my new life, I recall the endless logistics of sharing a life with two last names. The constant hassle when one of us wanted to pay a bill or buy an airline ticket in the other person’s name, forced to recite social security numbers, birthdays, and his numerical passwords, burned just as firmly into my brain as my own. But it was constantly hilarious to find that I could get his credit card balance just by claiming to be his wife.

The morning I left, he came out to check the oil in my car and make sure my boxes were securely wrapped for a nine-hour drive. The tradeoffs of a shared life never seemed as sweet or as distant as that morning.

And this separation process, these mature, civilized discussions of who takes the printer, is the last thing we’ll share.

Meg Stivison blogs at SimpsonsParadox.com