Originally Posted by
WebLurker
Unless, in retrospect, he'd finding that being with Bernard is much more of a clean break. Perspectives change with life experiences and it's certainly possible that Steph did help him find space for a time, but it wasn't enough or things shifted in the relationship over time and threw things out of whack. Also, he did meet Steph through the Bat-Family and she did join it, so dating someone with no affiliation with it would be a cleaner break by default, especially since Steph wound up rooming with Cass and Barbara and going all-in on their Batgirl team.
All that could be true and still not be enough to save the relationship when it fell apart.
I guess, at this point, there seem to be two possible models of what happened. One is that the relationship was on solid ground before (e.g. early Rebirth, going to find the Young Justice members, etc.) and then, around the time that Tim started questioning his sexuality, things fell apart and couldn't be fixed. The comics might be hazy on how it fell apart, but that would
The second is that we take what's being said at face value in the current series and the relationship was never working on Tim's end, but it took him a long time to realize that he needed to end things and wasn't until he started to date Bernard that he was able to articulate why Steph wasn't right for him (hence the comments about him "settling" and that Steph didn't really let him make a clean break from the Bat-Family). It would also be possible for the relationship to be working for Steph despite Tim being on a different page; e.g. a scenario where he was "the one" for her but she wasn't right for him, if that makes any sense. (If you read the Ultimate Spider-Man comics, they did something similar when Spider-Man briefly dated Shadowcat; on her end of things, it was going great and she wanted the relationship to continue, but it fell apart when Spider-Man realized that he was still in love with Mary Jane and that he wanted to reconcile with her. Two people entered a relationship with the intent of giving it a fair shot, but learned they ultimately wanted different things, despite the initial dates going really well.)
Guess it also depends on how meta you want to go with it. Technically speaking, current canon is that Steph wasn't right for Tim and Bernard is. You can argue that the previous series are a poor fit with that idea, it's OOC, or whatever, but that's a different POV. (Long story short, should we take the real-world view of how these stories are written by different authors with different approaches -- e.g. some stories where Tim and Steph are soulmates and others where they never were -- or do we take what's on the written page as how things are and extrapolate from there.)