I gave up and told him I wouldn’t marry him anymore, only to find out he had a ring. He’s trying now, but I don’t trust it. The resentment is everywhere. My boyfriend and I had a huge fight on Easter.
It was rare for us, but it boiled over. After almost five years together, most of it living in the same house, I told him I wouldn’t marry him as he is. We’d talked about marriage before, so he revealed he actually had a family ring in his possession. I still said that if he officially asked right now, I’d say no.
I feel alone in this relationship most of the time, and there’s no point in a marriage with no companionship. We don’t have companionship because he games at least thirty-five hours a week, often more, on top of his full-time job. I like gaming too, but I know I’ll binge on it, so I don’t. Instead, I go to the gym, read, write, watch movies, go on walks, visit coffee shops, and see friends.
I’ve asked him to join me in any of it, many times. He yells at his gaming friends over the TV. He games even when we’re watching something new. He doesn’t want to go out, or he says he doesn’t want to stay anywhere late.
He just doesn’t feel like doing much of anything else I ask about. I pointed all of this out in our fight. I’ve communicated these issues countless times. I do about eighty percent of the housework, I’m always the one to initiate it, and I have to nag him, which I hate.
I thought saying all of this, along with telling him I wouldn’t marry him at this point, would wake him up. A few days after our fight, he spent a few hundred bucks on unnecessary gaming crap. I didn’t even have it in me to argue. I just receded into indifference.
I called a few friends about visiting them in other states to get away from the “I’m not cheating on you or hitting you, so I must be a great boyfriend” relationship. I drunk confessed to one of them that I honestly didn’t believe we were going to make it anymore. But I didn’t have the heart to end it either. I drank a lot and cried alone.
At one point, I told myself that since he didn’t buy the gaming crap with malice, maybe he was just that clueless. That made me feel a little better. Then he noticed I wasn’t humoring him as much. “We can go, but I don’t want to stay late,” he said.
“Okay, it sounds like you don’t want to go, so I can go alone. Bye. ”
He started saying things like, “I love you forever. ” He tried to have sex with me, but I didn’t feel like it because he’s pretty selfish in the bedroom.
Finally, he said, “We’re okay, right? ”
“No,” I told him. “But I have nothing new to say. ”
He’s been texting me more, as opposed to hardly replying to mine.
He initiated errands he’d forgotten for over a month. He’s been making dinner despite buying himself a restaurant lunch almost every day. He empties the dishwasher after I wash the dishes and load it. He tells me I’m beautiful, offers to do things for me, tries to give me a massage.
And yet I find I’m mostly just angry. I’m angry that he ignored me every other time I brought these issues up for almost five years. I’m resentful of his countless one-sided orgasms and the number of times I’ve washed and folded or hung his clothes. I’m resentful of the hours logged into WoW, StarCraft, CS:GO, Dota, and the countless other realities that were more important than the one he shared with me.
Even when I was standing next to him trying to speak to him, or just wanted to have a quick meal together. And I’m just so angry that, judging by this brand new and improved version of himself, he knew what he was doing wrong the whole time. It wasn’t until I finally seemed to have given up carrying us that he bothered to hold his own weight. Maybe this is what most hopeless significant others dream of, a hint of change.
But one, I don’t know that I believe it’s a real change. Most of me thinks he’s just doing this to placate me. I’d be afraid to marry him and see him revert when he thinks it’s all settled. And two, I don’t know that holding his own weight is enough anymore.
Maybe that’s the resentment speaking, but I don’t know that spreading ant killer and putting your socks in the laundry basket is enough to make me buy into this relationship again. I don’t want to be resentful. I don’t want to hurt him or be cruel. But he’s acting like a good boyfriend and keeping his head down, I suppose, hoping to make me forget our fight and play along.
It’s not enough. But I don’t know what enough looks like. My friends recommended I put together a specific list of what I need to see to think the situation is truly better. I don’t know where to begin or what to expect.
I’ve thought of asking for counseling as a start, but he thinks twenty-four hours of good behavior means I shouldn’t be upset anymore. So I don’t know that he’ll agree to go. Do I ask? Do I insist?
I want to want our relationship again, but I really need some help figuring out how. In the comments, people told me not to give him the time of day. They said his half-assed efforts after a huge fight were just temporary appeasement. They said I shouldn’t have to put a bunch of effort into asking for a list of specific changes.
It’s one thing to ask for some changes here and there, but another to ask for fundamental change, for him to stop being a sloth, for us to magically know how to start communicating, for him to stop blowing his finances on gaming crap that he uses to ignore me with. I replied that I felt that way too. He told me he’d change, but that I’d have to show him how. That made me livid.
He said he didn’t have good examples. I grew up in an abusive household with an alcoholic and a borderline personality, so how is that a valid excuse? His parents are still happily together, though his mother basically directed their lives. Her saying is, “Men may make the living, but women make the life.
” But I’ve told and shown him a thousand times that’s not who I am or want to be. I honestly think my boyfriend could become a great man and partner, but I feel like it’s not going to happen as long as I’m around. And that freaking blows. People said his actions showed he knew all along exactly what he needed to change.
He just left it until I was literally about to break up with him. He didn’t care enough to change for the sake of the relationship, only when it was going to cause a breakup. They doubted he even had a ring. I thought the same thing about the ring because he’s referenced an engagement before as what I believe was an emotional manipulation tool.
So I looked, and I found it. But it broke my heart that I was snooping for a ring, not from excitement and hopeful suspicion, but from jaded disbelief. I’m a teacher. I told him that if I ask my students as a class to please make sure they’re on task and three of them jump and shove their phones in their bags, then I now know that they know what they were doing was wrong.
So, if the threat of losing me makes him jump and change all of these things, I now know he knew what he was doing wasn’t right. That’s five years of mistreating me just because he thought he could get away with it. And that hurts. Three months later, I had an update.
Against all advice and reason, I committed to giving my relationship another go. We attended counseling. The first session was painful but productive. We worked on goals.
Our counselor said my resentment could heal if I could agree to stop questioning whether my boyfriend’s effort was sincere and if I just took it day by day. He agreed to limit his gaming to an hour or two a night. As long as he was making genuine effort and we were communicating, our counselor said we could work it all out. Within a week, my boyfriend was back to gaming all day.
We were affected by the flooding in Houston, and he was so stressed by all of it, he just couldn’t do a damn thing but kill people in CS to cope. I booked tickets to the opposite side of the country to see friends. He spent my last weekend in town gaming for twelve-plus hours a day. My last night in town, he got my birthday wrong and guessed three times to get it right.
When I got back almost two weeks later, he made a big show of not gaming and doting on me with exaggerated charisma. I’d be watching a TV show and he’d stare at me till I asked why. He’d say something like, “I’m just mesmerized by your beauty. ” He pouted when I didn’t want to have sex with him and told me he was overwhelmed with sexual frustration since he wasn’t gaming anymore.
“It’s like I’m seeing you and how sexy you are for the first time in years. ”
I started getting so anxious being badgered about effing someone who doesn’t even know my birthday that I started having to drink heavily to tolerate it. I went out of town again. When I got back this weekend, he made this joke.
We have two friends who are twin brothers. The slob lives in the neat freak’s house and pays rent. He was paying four hundred dollars a month just for the room, and the neat freak asked for a mere one hundred more to cover the purchase and prep of all food plus all chores, from laundry to cleaning the entire house. Pretty sweet deal, right?
My boyfriend thought this was a hilarious imbalance. He said, “So, slob, neat freak is basically your girlfriend, right? ” Because a girlfriend is someone who stupidly does everything for someone and is too whipped to ask for much of anything in return, I guess. I didn’t even feel like I snapped.
It was more like something softly clunked into place. It wasn’t even a fight. I’m just done. He has since been texting mutual friends to tell them I kicked him out and he had no idea this was coming.
They’ve known us for years and see through it, but it’s still pretty crappy. I’ve since found out he also told at least one male friend about my breast augmentation, and I overheard him telling gaming friends how dope it was that I can’t get pregnant. Good times. He seems to think that five years of bull crap isn’t a good enough reason to break up and is now claiming I’m the love of his life and he’d never have given up on us.
He’s supposed to come over today to sort some stuff out with the lease, I guess, but I could use some support reminding me that I’ve made the right choice. I had a friend come sit on my couch while my ex came over. He came in with really aggressive body language, saw another male was present, and visibly deflated a notch. He was still pretty angry, but he didn’t take it out on me as much as I feared.
He told me he never said I could have our house, the rental, and that if I wanted to leave, then I needed to get out. He originally gave me this speech about how I’m family and this is all his fault, so I should stay. Now he’s saying he never said that, along with a bunch of mean remarks. I know I have as much of a right to be here as him since we’re both on the lease.
But honestly, it’s not worth the fight. Realizing that the person I’ve loved for five years would rather see me have to struggle to find somewhere new to live with our four pets, whom he only guilted me about but didn’t even try to work out keeping any, was eye-opening in a terrible way. He said a bunch of spiteful things to me and the person I had with me, slammed the door a lot, and left. Then he started texting me again about how he loves me and I’m family and anything I need, I can ask him for for the rest of my life.
Except a place to live, I guess. I could never forget how he spoke to me when he told me to get out. So that’s the closure I needed, though it still hurts. I’m already looking for a new home.
Thanks to everyone who commented and messaged me. I really appreciate the stories and words of encouragement. I’m going to cuddle my pets, drink more coffee, and listen to my bad ass playlist while I search rental home listings. People said how do guys like this get girlfriends, let alone get to stick around for years.
They target women who have been chronically abused by their families because their own abuse and exploitation doesn’t look as bad to those women as it actually is. Women are taught throughout history that marriage is meant to be miserable, and we’re trained through media to expect relationships to be unhappy. A lot of men will eventually acknowledge their partner wasn’t happy, but they don’t believe she was unhappy enough to leave. There is an expectation that women will tolerate an unhappy relationship.
Women assume that if they endure, a man will clock their pain and change, when all it does is communicate to them that you’re willing to put up with it. He knew she was unhappy. He just didn’t care. And through her unwillingness to give him any actual consequences for his selfish actions, she’d shown him that she was willing to tolerate an unhappy relationship.
The second story came from someone else. A woman wrote that she’d never been so scared in her life. Her boyfriend smashed their television set in anger when his football team lost. Her sister was letting her stay with her.
Only her and her brother-in-law knew what happened. She’d never seen anyone so furious over something so small. She was going to end their relationship because she couldn’t stay with someone who destroys things over a loss, especially with her cornered in the room while he was yelling and smashing. She was ashamed, but for a second she thought she would die.
It was so scary. Though it happened on Friday, thinking about it still made her cry. It wasn’t over an American football team. She lives in the UK, and they are Southampton supporters.
People commented to stay away. In his rage, the TV could have come her way. She could have been maimed, brain damaged, or worse. Never be ashamed of your instincts.
They were warning you to get out, and you listened. Always listen. Take someone with you to retrieve your stuff. Protect yourself and get a DVO.
She replied that her brother-in-law said he and his mates would retrieve her belongings next week, so she didn’t have to go back there. She said she’d seen the injuries from abuse at her job. She’s a nurse, and she never wanted that to happen to her if she could prevent it. They began dating in June of last year and moved in together two weeks ago on September 4th.
Then there was an update three and a half years later. She came back to post an update, even though she understood she didn’t come across very well in it. She knew she was stupid for believing her boyfriend when he said he would change. She was stupid, and she took him back.
She knew she said she was going to leave him. He convinced her he was sorry and that he would change. She first posted three years ago. They had not lived together very long, and in a fit of anger, he smashed their television because his favorite football team lost a match.
She was so terrified when it happened. She was going to leave him, and she told him their relationship was over. But he convinced her he was sorry and said that he loved her so much. She took him back.
For nearly six months, things were better, and he was much more loving and attentive. But then his anger came back, and he didn’t just destroy things when he was upset. He started hitting her. She was ashamed to admit she stayed with him for three years, and she only left him for good six months ago after he broke her nose.
He never did anything more than leave bruises before that, and she always rationalized that it wasn’t that bad. She was ashamed because she’s an A&E nurse, and she sees victims all the time, and she should have known better. She’s not had contact with him for six months. She will not take him back again, and the police are involved after he broke her nose.
She’s seeing a counselor, but she hates herself because she should have known better. She’s so ashamed, but she’s posting so others can learn from her stupidity. Her situation didn’t get better, and it’s the hardest lesson she ever had. People told her not to be so hard on herself.
Just because she’s a nurse doesn’t mean she’s impenetrable to manipulation and abuse. Nobody would accept that on the first date. It doesn’t say much about her and a lot about how well he lies and traps. What matters is that she left.
That is all.
