He’s Confused and I’m Broken – Please help

TL;DR version (but please do read the details as I do believe it gives perspective as to how confusing this whole situation is – sorry for the verbosity!)
-guy pursues me heavily
-our dynamic is great and we have a very healthy relationship even though we’re LDR and he doesn’t do well in LDRs
-he’s serious enough to meet my mom and he has me meet his
-he makes jokes about wedding dates and marriage
-but he feels like he wants to be independent and starts questioning our compatibility purely because I don’t have all of his same interests/am not his brand of geek/am not from his profession
-he starts detaching and is neglectful, I eventually can’t take it anymore and threaten to break things off if nothing changes
-he reacts, schedules a therapist appointment as well as a trip to visit me and spend a couple days together
-visit starts off great with him asking me to be transparent and vulnerable, we have a great time, but eventually he starts talking about his confusion and asks to break up with me (this is a few days before my birthday, on a trip that was meant to reconcile our situation and try to overcome this)
-within the breakup he shares his previous intentions for the timeline he had set (that I had no say in and wasn’t privy to AT ALL) to propose and marry me
-I didn’t see any of this coming so I bargain and try to rationalize taking a break instead; grave mistake for me to have acted out of desperation.
-texts me the next day to hang out because he misses me already, feels guilty, and wants to spend time with me, I do and am able to give the performance of a lifetime in looking good, smelling good, and creating a light, fun atmosphere synonymous to how we were when we first met, he was dumbfounded
-last day of his trip he texts me saying that he’s been crying and is now talking about a break as I had mentioned the previous night instead of a breakup and that he’ll respect any distance I want from him. I decide that in order to gain him back, I need to agree to his initial idea of breaking up. I couldn’t agree to him treating me this way and only being available to him when and how he wants me, and not how we should be as a healthy couple.
-He went back home without a call or wanting to meet one last time. He only texted me to wish me a happy birthday a few days later and hasn’t contacted me since
-Since then I have been on NC, and am on Day 15 and do not feel better about this situation or myself at all.

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My ex and I started off as friends. When he asked me out, I initially said “not right now” as my engagement was ending with my fiance. He kept on pursuing me aggressively (and even agreed to being my ‘side hoe’ while I was sorting things out with my fiance), and within two weeks I agreed to be with him.

Our relationship lasted 9 months, and it’s been very different from any other relationship I’ve had. He’s a geek; the type of guy nice guys relate to when talking about never getting the girl. I am a nerd, but in our circle, I was “the popular girl” – I say this not to toot my own horn, but to highlight our dynamic.

I’m rather conservative when I say that I date only with the intention of marriage, he said that he felt the same way about dating, and we were on our way to a healthy relationship. We took and shared our Love Languages test, spoke about the future and how we see it, the differences between our cultures. We spent the bulk of our relationship long distance, we even had a conversation about how often we’d speak and what we’d do to be able to be successful at LDRs and budgeting so that we would see each other once a month – as he’s always said that he’s not very good at LDRs.

From there, we spent at least one whole weekend together every month. We sent each other gifts, and spoke on the phone every night for conversations that often lasted upwards of an hour or two. We had pretty good conversation and could debate in a healthy way without our egos getting involved.

I ended up in his city at around month 4 of our relationship, he insisted earnestly that I meet his mother (and sister, but circumstances didn’t allow that to happen) and was very happy when she told him she liked me. During this trip he made a few jokes about our wedding day/marriage.

Around month 5.5 my mother was in town, and he expressed interest in meeting her, and went the whole 9 yards in doing so.

Around month 5, he said he was having doubts because ‘something didn’t feel right’ but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Our values were the same, I gave him space to do his thing and he gave me space for me to do mine, we could fight but still apologize by the end of it, and he said himself that he doesn’t know if he’d ever find a girl that would care for him the way that I did, and he knows that he’ll be ‘happy enough’ if he ended up with me.

These doubts weren’t as big then because he would always be able to rationalize his situation because he saw that we were a good fit and logically it made sense (he’s an engineer, so the logic > feelings thing was frequent) and all those around us could notice our compatibility and dynamic. With time, we spoke less. He would text less, and while we would still talk on the phone, it became obvious that he wasn’t engaged. When I questioned him on it telling him that it was hurting me that he was disengaging, he said he didn’t know what was wrong with him, that he imagined his future wife to be more like his sister (also a geek, someone whose affection he has to frequently run after.) That he feels like he won’t be able to maintain his independence and he had doubts. He wouldn’t be able to coherently explain what these doubts were.

Eventually I couldn’t take this disengagement anymore and said that if he wouldn’t seek help to find answers to his questions either through therapy (cuz it’s kind of messed up that he wants to marry his sister?) or to talk it out with his married friends or friends in long-term relationships, that I would end things. He doesn’t have many of the either, and was wary to reach out to them as he knew that they would encourage him to work through the differences because we were compatible in all the main ways and that our ‘problems’ weren’t really as big as they were in his mind.

When I said that if things didn’t change between us in the way that he was treating me, that I would break things off, he freaked out. Within two days, he booked a ticket to see me in a week’s time, and made an appointment to see a therapist. This trip was supposed to help us reconcile and remind each other how much we like each other and being with each other.

The time of his visit comes and I’m very happy as this is the first day of his visit hoping that we can catch up and enjoy each other’s presence. He asks me to be open and vulnerable with him, so I share incredibly sensitive things with him. the time we’re spending together is just like how things always were, and then he says that he doesn’t want to wait until the end of his trip to talk about what’s going on between us. In this, I heard of a lot of how his therapist wanted him to make a decision on the spot (at the first session.) That he feels like all of a sudden we’re different and that he thinks he would connect better with a fellow engineer. He admitted that I gave a lot into the relationship and accomodated his hobbies and interests without him returning the same to me. But he realized that he had to stop being selfish and motivate himself to be interested in learning more about what I like. He said he’s confused and doesn’t know whether or not he wants to get married at all soon, and whether or not he wants to marry me.

The interesting thing in all of this is that I’ve never asked him or put ANY pressure on him to propose or marry me. Indeed, my intention was to get to know him for the purposes of marriage, but I never put a timeline or held him to some sort of benchmark expectations. I’m currently going through a lot of instability myself, and know that it’s not a good logical decision for my own self to get married any time soon, much less to expect a significant other to make such a large decision. But as he’s sharing the above stream of consciousness about his confusion, he tells me that HE had a timeline of proposing to me earlier this year, and planning a summer wedding. Mind you, we had NEVER spoken about any of this, these are all of his thoughts.

After sharing his earlier intentions of proposing and marrying me, he switches the conversation to how he needs to make the difficult step to figure out whether or not he’s willing to be less selfish and put in effort to make things work when a couple of things don’t ‘feel’ right even though he can’t point at them (other than all of a sudden thinking that he’d be a better fit for an engineer) This led to him asking me to break up with him, and offering to be the bad guy in the situation.

This hit me out of left field and so my reaction was confusion and rambling, and bargaining. I told him that I had intended on asking him for a break so that he can figure himself out while I focused on myself and started trying to rationalize why a break would be a better option.

The next day he texts me saying how he’s been thinking and likes spending time with me so much, but if that’s the situation he doesn’t know why he can’t commit. He wanted to hang out, to which I asked his intentions for (I wasn’t going to grovel or give in to my desperation just to be in his presence and have him close to me) meeting me were, and he said he felt very guilty and that perhaps having a good time with me would allow for him to stifle that guilt at least in the short term.

Luckily, within this time period I’d chatted with a good friend who is a psychiatrist and has worked with relationships, where she told me that if/when he initiates to hang out, that I should look my best, act like how I was when we were just friends and NOT talk about the relationship. I did exactly this as he asked to hang out with me later that evening, and I could tell he was dumbfounded. I was intentionally late, and I could tell he had been waiting for me at our meeting spot for a while. Throughout the evening, I was witty and joked around with him, while I could tell that he was a bit confused as his actions showed it. I ended the meeting, he walked me to my car wanting to discuss our break (YES, somehow he went from breaking up with me the previous night to now being on a break) I did as I was told and said I just wanted to enjoy the evening with him and not discuss the relationship.

The next day (the day of his departure), he texts me saying that he’s been crying all day and he can’t even imagine how I must be feeling. He said he would respect whatever distance I wanted from him in this break. I told him that I was okay with the breakup as he’d initially suggested, as he needs to figure himself out and that this journey is one that only he can take, in the meanwhile where I needed to work on myself and sort my life out.

He texted back being okay with these terms, leaving me with well wishes, as he leaves to go back without asking to meet again or even chat on the phone. Fun fact, this all happened within 4 days of my birthday. He had the galls to text me a happy birthday and send other birthday wishes to me. This was the day that I decided to initiate NC and started it by deciding to not reply to his birthday wishes at all. I’m on day 15 of NC and I still feel 90% as shitty as I did when this all happened. We never exchanged “I love you’s” but I’ve been reacting to this break up different from all other breakups I’ve had (including when the engagement ended between me and my fiance) in that I don’t want this to end, and want things to be as they were because he was able to give me a great glimpse as to how great we can be together.

Do you think there’s room for him missing me? He hasn’t once contacted me in these 15 days. He’s in a different city surrounded by great smart people, where I’m sure if he has a case of Grass is Greener Syndrome, that he’ll easily find a female engineer.

What do I do to stop hurting? Is this worth salvaging? What do you think might be going on in his mind if he’s sending such mixed messages about crying and liking to spend time with me but then going back and forth between it being a break up or just a break?

I have 15 days left of NC which I think I’ll have to extend because I haven’t been able to make many changes externally to justify becoming an ungettable girl when I initiate contact. I know he’s different from the rest, and I think he knows it as well, our differences are just small things that we need to try to overcome (I have had my doubts about him too, but have been working on them), and I feel like when the honeymoon period wore off – he let his small doubts take over his mind while deincentivizng himself to even put in effort to fix things. What do I do? Do you think he’s missing me, much less thinking about me enough to want to save this?