Dude, you didn't screw anything up from the sound of your story. There's a strain of thought in the manosphere and pickup blogs that says if you get dumped, then you must have done something wrong, you didn't "maintain frame," you were too beta, etc. I think if the babe is sleeping with you and you get into a LTR then you can't be too beta.
Her email is not about trying to puff herself up, it's just verbal diarrhea and lame rationalizations that doesn't mean anything. She was overcome by powerful emotions telling her to get out, so she can find a lame excuse/reasons on the fly to justify those feelings. She pulled a Kate Bolick on you, nothing more, nothing less. There isn't anything you could have really done differently. Years from now she will regret it, but you can't convince her of that in real time:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/308654/
IN 2001, WHEN I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.
The period that followed was awful. I barely ate for sobbing all the time. (A friend who suffered my company a lot that summer sent me a birthday text this past July: “A decade ago you and I were reuniting, and you were crying a lot.”) I missed Allan desperately—his calm, sure voice; the sweetly fastidious way he folded his shirts. On good days, I felt secure that I’d done the right thing. Learning to be alone would make me a better person, and eventually a better partner. On bad days, I feared I would be alone forever. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life?
Ten years later, I occasionally ask myself the same question. Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.
Well, there was a lot I didn’t know 10 years ago. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons (“something was missing”), I see now, is in keeping with a post-Boomer ideology that values emotional fulfillment above all else. And the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother, who had embraced it, in part, I suspect, to correct for her own choices.
Kate Bolick is a f*cking idiot. Look at all that verbal diarrhea. What it boils down to is that Kate and your ex-girlfriend had a BMW, but they think that somewhere out there there's a Rolls Royce with their name on it. I suspect that either there's another guy in the wings that she wants to do the honeymoon with, since she can't do another honeymoon with you, or there is no guy in the wings but she's got some sort of idiot notion in her head that there may be something better out there for her and she should not be so quick and willing to settle down. Any sort of romantic entanglement she wants right now involves a lot less commitment and intimacy. My guess is your girlfriend probably does want to be single and free of the day to day responsibilities of a LTR, and thinks that getting a boyfriend and falling in love is as easy as ordering up a pizza, and she can get one anytime she wants.
You don't throw away something that isn't broken, something Kate Bolick had to find out the hard way and I suspect your ex will someday too. But there's nothing you can say or do today to convince her of that.
