This is the story of the shortest forever, ever.

You know I’ve been through some shit in my relationships… but this one took me down bad.

In my last blog post, seven weeks ago, I was feeling on top of the world. I’d met Truly and our connection was instantaneous and mind-bogglingly amazing. Our relationship felt so fucking good, and it came so naturally for us! It felt golden, like the relief of daylight after a long, cold night. It felt like the thing I’d been searching for but hadn’t actually expected to find. It was a new experience for me to feel such strong passion alongside a really secure attachment, especially with someone whom I’d only known for a short period of time. It felt like a miracle! That is, until it didn’t.

I started to notice some narcissistic tendencies in him. He frequently had an air of superiority, as if he knew more about everything than others, including me. Even in conversations about things that were clearly subjective, he seemed to feel that he was right and he was going to prove it. I tried to look past it, because I know that nobody’s perfect and I believed that his intentions were good, despite his frequently poor delivery of his thoughts, feelings, and opinions. 

But then, he started to leverage my caring and empathic nature against me. He would sit down to talk with me about something I did or said (or didn’t do or didn’t say?) that upset him, and it would be something super subtle that somehow wounded him very deeply. Then he would dump on me a list of other ways I’d hurt him, which would often include things that I had no control over, things that we had already discussed and supposedly resolved, or decisions he had made himself and then essentially resented me for. He never came at me aggressively, to be clear, neither physically nor verbally. He never seemed out of control, intentionally mean, or angry. And I wanted to take care of him in any ways I could, so I tried my best to understand and empathize. But, I could only do that for so long before I was emotionally depleted, at which point I would fall into despair and/or defensiveness.   

When I started to fall apart, he would just keep on going. He would eventually try to comfort me and ask what was going on with me emotionally. He told me that he welcomed my feelings and my tears. But then later he suggested that I was using an emotional manipulation tactic known as DARVO against him. That stands for deny, attack, and reverse the victim and offender. In other words, if you hurt someone and then deny that you did it, attack them by saying negative things about them, and then flip the script so that they are now the perpetrator and you are now the victim– then you are using DARVO. Essentially, he felt that I was invalidating his feelings and making it about my feelings instead. 

And look guys, I know that validating other people’s feelings is an area of weakness for me when those feelings feel like a personal attack. I owned up to my defensiveness and told him I would work on it, and I meant it. But other than becoming defensive, there was no part of DARVO reflected in my behavior. “Reversing the offender” actually refers to bringing up or creating other offenses that the other person supposedly committed against you as a way of diverting attention from the issue that they brought up. I was expressing my sadness and/or frustration about the issue itself, not trying to distract from it. And those expressions only happened after I reached the point of emotional exhaustion from his lengthy onslaught of accusations. 

BUT ANYWAY. 

After several of these cycles, I had somehow fallen into the role of “the problematic partner.” I was always the one upsetting him, despite my best efforts. He used his educational background to elevate himself above me as the “more emotionally mature/intelligent” partner, and I started to believe him. 

Looking back, it’s easy to see the classic narcissistic cycle of emotional manipulation: first, he love-bombed me by showering me with intense affection and attention; then he idealized me and our relationship, telling me I was like nobody he’d ever loved before and painting a picture of an amazing future together; then, he gradually and subtly started devaluing me with unreasonable criticism and by weaponizing his feelings. He made me feel like I wasn’t good enough. But worse than that, he tried to create a narrative in which I was being toxic by invalidating his feelings, and taking more than I was giving in our relationship. 

It got to the point where I knew that I couldn’t be with him anymore, because it was clear that he was never going to treat me fairly. When we tried to work things out, he would talk me in circles, twist my words, and subtly put me down. I started to doubt myself and feel like I was losing my mind. And I so badly wanted the things I was seeing to not be true! I love him so much that it’s been agonizing to realize that I was dead wrong about him and our relationship. I never saw this coming, and the stark contrast between how amazing he seemed at the beginning of our relationship and how condescending he became at the end is honestly hard to believe. I still struggle to understand how any of this happened.

My heart is broken, once again. But this time, I know that it’s going to leave me so much more jaded than I have been before. I’m going to guard the word “forever” much more carefully now. I have learned that no matter how amazing someone seems, I cannot truly know who they really are until I’ve known them for a long enough time to see them in a variety of contexts, moods, and challenges as an individual and as a couple. I know that red flags should not be ignored no matter how convinced I am that they’re harmless. 

Once again, I’m at a place where I feel like something is still missing from my life. I want a boyfriend who can be a regular and frequent part of my life, who gives me butterflies, and makes me happy. For the love of God, can I have a guy who just makes me happy instead of making me cry?! Why is that so much to ask?

I don’t know, but I’m exhausted as fuck.