If you figured out that it’s not meant to be at a point where ending the relationship is easy/cheap, that’s successful. A failure would be pushing it through at the easy/cheap part and having it blow up when you have kids and a mortgage.

A friend of mine was in a relationship that his girlfriend ended after 7 years. Turns out, she decided that it wasn’t going to happen after the first year and kept stringing him along for … reasons? Mostly because she feared that she’d be seen as a failure if she ended it at an earlier time.