Matthew Perry and Julia Roberts: The heartbreaking reason he called it quits

Matthew Perry’s tragic death on Saturday coincided with his ex girlfriends Julia Roberts’ birthday. In his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, he recalled his relationship with the iconic actress and the reason he broke up with her.

Perry and Roberts had struck up a friendship before she guest-starred on the second season of his hit sitcom Friends. For her cameo, she insisted that her character would be engaged in some way with Chandler Bing, played by Perry.

The two talked via fax and sent hundreds of messages everyday. Perry praised Roberts intelligence and talent, writing, “The way she strung sentences together, the way she saw the world, the way she articulated her unique thoughts, all was so captivating."

"Thus began a three-month-long courtship by daily faxes. This was pre-internet, pre-cell phones - all our exchanges were done by fax. And there were many; hundreds,” he recounted.

Perry gushed over his relationship, recalling that "three or four times a day” he would “sit by my fax machine and watch the piece of paper slowly revealing her next missive."

"I did let her in, both figuratively and literally, and a relationship began," the late actor added. "We would already be a couple by the time we started filming the Friends Super Bowl episode."

After dating her for six months, Perry broke up with Roberts, who didn’t see it coming.

Revealing the reason behind this, Perry wrote in his memoir, "Dating Julia Roberts had been too much for me. I had been constantly certain that she was going to break up with me. Why would she not? I was not enough; I could never be enough; I was broken, bent, unloveable. So instead of facing the inevitable agony of losing her, I broke up with the beautiful and brilliant Julia Roberts."