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Why I Loved and Stayed With My Toxic Ex: What I Learnt
Hi this is an anonymous personal post about staying in a toxic relationship emotionally abusive relationship. If you’re not looking to understand and just want to drag someone, please go somewhere else. Thank you.
Near the end of my most recent relationship, I was warned by my friends to get out. I chose for a very long time not to listen. My two year relationship and more importantly my 5 years of amazing friendship ended in a very awful way following him breaking into my apartment and invading my privacy via a tablet without privacy settings.
There is no excusing his behaviour; however I still find it hard to think of him badly
....as I believe he is a sweet person who needs help. If you know who he is please do not contact him unless you have a positive thing to say to him. I don't think I can welcome him back in my life but I don't think he has a malicious bone in his body or any kind of cruelty in his heart. Neither of us come from ideal households. Neither of us knew how to treat someone in a relationship.
Admittedly that was part of what attracted me to him. I felt that because we had similar traumas he would understand me better. Maybe he did understand me in ways other people couldn't but there were too many ways that he couldn't accept. I think we had very different ideas about what a relationship is and what boundaries were. Nor could we figure it out because we were terrible at communicating issues to one another without it turning into a fight.
Our relationship came to an end after months of escalating action on both of our parts. My ex's (Who I will here on out be calling him 'A') final actions in the ending of our relationship was an attempt to control me: a pattern which had plagued our relationship since the beginning. As I see these actions as controlling and often manipulative, I'd like to make it clear that I never fought him on them and accepted most if not all without question. This is important to note because I'd like to indicate that I had wilfully chosen to give up rather than challenge his actions and I now believe that was to both of our detriment.
This wasn't always the case but it wore me down. By the end of our relationship I was a husk of who I had been. His constantly telling me that I was 'working too much' caused me to loose all my ambition.
For many years, I had been used to having one or more side career oriented side projects or freelance gigs, on top of having a full time job. This began because I studied journalism but I don't work in the field. I will still do broadcast related freelance work if it comes my way, but I do not wish to pursue it full time. I was lucky enough to find a passion in the field of screenprinting later on. I began working in screen printing full time and learning graphic design from my mentor on the side part time. I also had continued to volunteer once a week at Local Cable 10 until it's closure.
I had many ambitions that slowly faded away over the course of this relationship. My passions which I was indulged in by being in the workforce more than 40 hours a week were put on the back-burner because I chose to prioritize his feelings about me not being able to spend more time with him over my love for my crafts be it journalism or screenprinting or graphic design.
Due in partly to A's lack of ambition, it seemed normal that I give it all up. In giving up my part time gigs, I gave up my work ethic and fell into a deep depression. I was miserable.
Eventually me not being able to go to a second job, turned into me going out to bars on my own and getting absolutely wasted. I would go to bars to avoid going home and listening to my dad yell at my mom.
No longer did I hang out with my friends. I felt isolated as many of my close friends were less than in his eyes. He demanded I delete or unfollow the ones he felt didn't belong in my life. I complied. He felt many of them weren't good influences on me. Sometimes the reasons he gave me weren't entirely rational, there was an underlying sense of jealousy and insecurity and I would let that be enough of a reason. He was always worried I would leave him for someone else. I never did. At some point, I became afraid to bring him around my friends: he would get up in the middle of hanging out without a word to play Pokemon GO, leaving me to explain to my friends what he was doing.
Sometimes after we had been drinking with my friends we'd get into a fight on the way home which more than once resulted in me crying in public because he would be angrily telling me something I did earlier in the night was wrong and I would be very confused. On multiple occasions he berated me over things like jokes I had told earlier in the night or ways in which I interacted with my friends. This sometimes caused me to give apologies to my friends, for things my friends thought weren't a big deal or couldn't remember had happened, because they were that minor. I became convinced that my poor social skills it were ruining my life, even though my friends had not abandoned me, I have a steady job and when I eventually moved out of my parents house and in to my own beautiful apartment with an incredible roommate.
After moving out of my parents house I was able to sober up. However as I was still looking to escape I became interested in harder addictions. After many an argument ironically about my out of control drinking, more often than not we ended up at a party I didn't want to go to or a game bar. All these things made me want to drink. And I did. Excessively.
I was still drinking heavily. I tried cocaine. I returned to self harming my body. He continued to shame me for it. It was a very vicious cycle.
As kind, welcoming and nice his friends were to me, I didn't feel that I fit in. With my friends gone I was truly on my own.
Eventually I decided that I felt overwhelmed by my phone so I “lost it” and chose not to get another one. This drew a further wedge between us as he was super into Pokemon GO, getting into Facebook arguments, showing me the same memes 3 or 4 times and most importantly, it meant he couldn't keep track of me. In fact no one can keep track of me and that's how I now realize I want to live my life.
Despite all of these things I still love(d) him.
The first thing I fell in love with was his voice. He had this deep voice that made everything he said sound pleasant and sometimes sultry. On top of that he was funny. I could always be over the top silly with him and it made me love him more.
He is cute as hell. He has these big eyes that you can just fall into and never climb out of but it's totally OK because you won't want to climb out of his soul. You'll want to cuddle yourself inside of him forever, he's probably the best cuddler/big spoon on the face of the planet. You bet your ass, that dick was the bomb. He was patient with me in a way no one ever had been to me before. He made me feel important and loved. He is a very kind person. I could go on forever about the nice things I can say about him. The only truly negative thing I can think to say about him, even after everything is that he needs to learn to take care of himself, especially his mental health.
And that's the moral of it. This is what you should take from all this:
Sometimes a relationship in your life is toxic and unfortunately that means you have to cut those people out of your life. No one relationship ever boils down to good or bad. There's no such thing as a person who's entirely “bad” or entirely “good”.
There are only acceptable or unacceptable actions. When you accept, unacceptable actions you let the other person think it's OK, and if it's not OK then call it out. Only you can control who is in and out of your life, do not choose to let go of that control no matter how much you love someone.
We are responsible for our own actions. Only you can take ownership for them. Taking care of yourself means taking ownership for your actions.
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