💔 Reflections on Toxic Love Before Valentine's
First Draft Created: 2024-02-12 18:45
Last Updated: 1 month, 3 weeks ago
He had always seemed to understand my needs.
He had seemed to intuit them in a way that nobody else had. It was romantic, to be honest, even though I knew now how bad he had been for me.
It was in the little things that he had asked at the beginning of our relationship. He was always probing to get to know more about me, sensing that there was more I would want to talk about, caring to know the slightest detail of how I felt.
Of course, now I know that he was just a narcissist, seeking to find things that he could use against me. Things like my parent's abuse and my cult-like conservative upbringing.
As initial friends with chemistry, he'd taken me to an antique store, a trip which I would retroactively come to consider to be our "first date", before our OFFICIAL first date of going out for ice cream at a local favourite haunt of our small university town.
But this "date", being unintentional, was instead cute and whimsical, we were unguarded. Our budding attraction was a the point where we'd wander the quirky town's new and ancient streets on late-night meanderings to buy snacks at one of only two stores open that late.
And thus, when walking around during actual daylight on a Saturday where we were both unusually free from our studies, we'd both been excited to stumble apon an antique store while it was actually open, and naturally went in.
Thus, through following our feet, we now found ourselves together pouring over cute, eclectic treasures that nobody used anymore - kept polished to avoid gathering dust, and eagerly longing for a home.
It was where I bought my first actual typewriter - not my mother's old jammed one - for this was practically a steal and even came in a folded-up case as one meant to be portable, used perhaps by secretaries or journalists back in the day!
When we'd spotted it, he laughed at it, but said "You could start your writing on that!"
It was a joke, because I'd told him that while I was at university, my parents would never buy me a laptop, and so I had to make do with the cheap old desktop I had managed to partly afford and partly convince them was in their best interest to help me afford.
The desktop had, of course, immediately been destroyed in my first term by good old South African Load Shedding, and a resulting power surge which had fried the electronics.
The typewriter, while an inspiration, also became a fond memory of the day I'd realised I had feelings for him, and his unwitting endorsement of my rediscovered passion for writing.
After our relationship, I couldn't bear to look at that typewriter without a wave of nostalgia and pain. It'd take me a long time to move past that point, to be able to pick it up again. My sister borrowing it as a decoration and quirky toy for guests to play with at her vintage-themed wedding had certainly helped to build those healthier new associations.
But back then, I took both the comment, and the typewriter that reminded me of the call to write, as a sign of his tenderness towards me, his awareness of my needs, a sign that something between us was indeed blossoming.
It went beyond this moment, I convinced myself. For he always seemed to pay attention to my ramblings, even when nobody else seemed to notice the details of what I said when we were in a crowd of friends.
I was used to fading into the distance as other people spoke, which was perhaps why I was less mindful of what I said, assuming nobody would listen, and also why I preferred to hang out with friends one-on-one.
Looking back, I have to admit I was starved for attention back then, starved of affection and ready to mistake any interest as genuine care. Neglect from my parents who'd attempted to remould me, and Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria from ADHD didn't make any of that any easier.
Spending time with him in that store, I'd felt as if my soul had been in famine, as if he had come into my life and nourished it, someone who had flown in below the radar as my former-partner-then-ex's best friend who somehow seemed to validate me, to hear me, to see me.
But things changed, as they had to, with his abuse. He'd gone from love-bombing kindness to increasing dismissiveness, passive-aggressive comments - which my autistic brain had failed to identify as intentional and internalised as myself being "too sensitive" or him being unaware of their impact - to increasing withdrawal, moments of outright abandonment, cruel taunting and comparisons, and a harrowing moment when I'd thought he would actually hit me in front of a mall full of people, for changing my mind about wanting ice cream at a store.
His aggression had certainly killed my appetite, and yet, tears streaming down my face, I had felt compelled to eat the ice cream he had bought and forced into my hand, before forcibly dragging me outside to a quieter parking lot outside of the mall to berate me in relative privacy.
Through trial and error and a lot of pain, my standards of care have finally become far higher. It can be difficult when your own parents set the standards for your abuse, raised you as an assigned-female person into patriarchy and normalised the tyrannical rule of male figures over your life as "love", and even then, normalised abuse itself as love in general "for your own good", as a "teaching" tool.
Against that upbringing, any interest in hearing my own perspective read as deep interest and respect from another person. What should have been basic equality read as something special, and I had had no immunity against such love-bomb-and-withdraw tactics of abuse.
Still, I finally realise now that what he showed me was not love, but interest and investment, then acknowledgement, and, as the three years of our relationship strethed on, increasing contempt, hostility and violence. At every point in the cycle it was abuse.
This man, who had seemed a miracle, was actually nothing of the sort. I am in this trap of re-hashing the past because I called to mind that I had actually learned another word to describe him lately - or not him, his family dynamic.
His mother is what they call "boy mom" - a woman who is emotionally intimate with her son to the point where people outside the relationship would call it dating.
I have had more than one such partner with a family dynamic like this. I recall another ex, before him, who had actually compared me to his mother, whom he sung the praises of for being willing to "keep the family together" for 20 years. She had been forced to support the family from her income as primary breadwinner for a family of three sons when her husband had suddenly decided to stop working for a year, and had provided no reason or excuse for his behaviour.
"I want my partner to be someone as selfless as her." he said "She was one of the few women in her situation who could actually afford to leave her husband, but she stayed for us kids". Reading now between the lines, I wonder if the reason this calculation had been made by him was that she had wanted to leave, and his actions were a threat against the children, a deliberate mechanism to prevent her leaving.
Looking back, I have no idea why this too wasn't a red flag. Why I'd allowed myself to date men who had tried to force me into a box or some kind of mould, to try to trickle me into the cracks of their pre-built expectation like I was nothing but ink to fill in their stencil.
Angry and hurt, I had in the years following these early relationships rather snarkily decided to just chalk this treat up to the problems with dating straight guys. Men had certainly started treating me better when I'd later come out as a gay trans guy, if Grindr was anything to go by. Sure, there was plenty of toxic behaviour, but it was different being spoken to with some actual respect, and sometimes actual deference, by men who didn't automatically assume they had to be predatory, or "take the lead".
All of this had built up in my head, something I needed to find an outlet to express, to perhaps finally, despite the trauma of abuse, get myself into actual writing, in the way I used to write, freely, as a child. Though this time also for therapeutic purposes, as I confronted these past demons of not only past abusers, but my own past patterns which had made me vulnerable.
And this is exactly where we find ourselves, at this point of reflection, two days before Valentine's day. But I am getting head of myself.
I had been envisioning us - Typewriter Guy and myself - being together forever. I had been thinking of hypotheticals where he would propose, or I would, despite our differences in opinion regarding the decision to have children - which I did not want and which he did want, but which I had considered adoption as a possible alternative and which he later had imposed as an ultumatum that y pregnancy would be the only way he would wish to have a child.
He'd said that his mother had always wanted a girl and, with three sons, had never wanted one, but he'd wanted to give her one as a granddaughter. Why the red flags weren't outright stabbing me in the eyes back then, I'll never know. It's amazing what being raised in abuse can condition you to ignore and look past in adulthood.
I had eventually figured out that the two of us weren't great as married partners - subconsciously I did not trust him with that kind of legal power over my finances and freedom - but I had still expected our relationship to last as a life partnership, somehow imagining him as being as unconventional and society-defying as myself.
I had broken up with him on the 29th of December - several days after Christmas - so as to not ruin his family Christmas, and yet before New Year, which would have been our 3-year anniversary. Super considerate of me, I thought. I even tried to do it in person, during the ONE day I was back in town between holiday stops, since he had mentioned before that breaking up with someone via phone instead of in-person was the most heartless thing someone could do, and something which had really hurt him in the past.
And yet he had been too busy to meet up!
Finally, on a phonecall, I impressed "I really want to talk to you".
Trying not to let on what was going on or make the message too strong over the phone, was difficult because that would defeat the point. I particularly had to avoid the dreaded words "we need to talk" or anything that could be construed as their equivalent, making this don't-talk-about-it conversation even more difficult for my autistic brain.
Finally, his voice asked "are you going to break up with me?"
Pause.
I don't lie, which includes not lying by omission.
And he asked, literally asked for it.
"Well, I didn't want to do it over the phone," I said.
He started laughing, sounding genuinely delighted.
"Oh, no worries! I was also thinking about breaking up with you to be honest! I guess I just didn't have the balls."
This was the telephone conversation we had, while I was standing outside of the crowded furniture shop where I was waiting for my mother to finish her browsing.
I was flummoxed. He had been ambivalent this whole time I had been agonizing over my selfishness and the weight of my decision in finally severing ties with someone I'd loved and planned to spend my life with?
Hanging up I felt a wave of emotions beyond what I had been expecting.
I felt instantly elated! More than that, I felt free!
It was as if I had been carrying some impossible weight, a giant backpack, and literally crawling my way up a mountain instead of hiking, lying on the ground unable to move beneath the weight... and suddenly... I was out for a jaunt without a care in the world!
I had come to realise that I was incredibly unhappy with him.
I hadn't realised how harmful he had been to me and my self-esteem until months after this, when he came to visit me in my new town. But again, I am getting ahead of myself and need to explain.
See, this break-up had been right at a turning point. The decision I had simultaneously been weighing up was to move from Durban to Cape Town in succeeding months, for the sake of my own career prospects as a software developer, but also for the far more open environment for someone like me - polyamorous by what I call "relationship orientation", though living as monogamous for the sake of my partner.
In many other ways, I hoped to find community, and find myself in Cape Town - to find more quirky, eclectic people like myself, as my visits to friends there had always resulted in me feeling - similarly to the break-up - far more unburdened, accepted and at home than I ever had in my own home, the conservative-raised Durban evangelical bubble, where I found myself still living as an agnostic.
Weighing this all up, on the one hand, long-distance was nothing new for our relationship. It had already been primarily long-distance - two years of him studying in Cape Town himself - except when he'd returned home to visit his parents and I'd made myself available - and then another 6 months of him working overseas on an internship.
But the decision for me to move from my hometown instead of waiting for him had further symbolised that instead of constantly waiting on others, I could myself finally start to pursue my own dreams.
So here he was, visiting me in this new town, as we went out for sushi, for old times' sake.
Surprise surprise, he asked me if we could get back together. I had refused, pointed out how some of his behaviour was inappropriate, given the boundaries I had already sent, and he had later turned nasty, sending vitriolic text messages. I don't remember everything he'd said in those walls of text, but I do remember the words "This is why everyone hates you". Seeing someone you used to love show their full colours unbridled as a monster really can give a lot of perspective.
In reality, the writing had been on the wall more than I had realised. In my moments questioning, near the end, whether this relationship was truly for me, I had had the epiphany that just hanging out with random strangers in my lectures at university, discussing study materials and nothing else, was actually preferable to exchanging even text messages with him, to the cognitive load from the anxiety of anticipating what conversation we would have to have next.
When you come to realise that you feel happier and more accepted in the presence of strangers than you do spending time with the person you'd wanted to be your life partner, maybe it is time to move on.
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