This is your brain. This is your brain on Messed-Up Men.

[Catseye8]

This situation is driving me crazy. Or maybe it has already driven me crazy, and some day in the future I will be touring schools, a haggard and wide-eyed trembling wreck, warning teenagers of the dangers of relationships with Men With Issues.

 

Well, except that I don't know whether warnings would have helped. I had no idea he even had any issues, and then: ka-BOOM. Whole subscriptions he hadn't let me in on. Some messy family stuff in his past, and that's all tangled up with depression that came on suddenly and a weird fear of intimacy that axed the relationship right after that, and, well, it's all messy and complicated. My long, woeful story is elsewhere on the boards, but in short - depressed commitmentphobes, just say no.

 

One of the things he said to me when he broke up with me was that it was definitely a break-up, not a temporary break, because "a clean break would be better for both of us." Behold, his idea of a "clean break":

 

- Mixed messages during the breakup itself: "I'll probably try to come crawling back," "I'd like to think we could be together one day in the future when I'm fixed" (that's 'fixed' via therapy, which he openly admitted he needed), "I hope that in the future we can at the very least be very good friends."

- Oh, and the last thing he said on his way out of the door was reassuring me that he loved me.

- Since then, happily agreeing to backtrack on how permanent the breakup is; now it's "just time and space apart we need for now," with view to future reconciliation.

- Dragging his feet about sorting out any of the big practicalities; I owe him some money, and the several times I've tried to make arrangements about paying it back, he waved it off with an "Oh, we can sort that out in the future." Gah. (Eventually I said "I'm paying you back in monthly instalments of X, let me know if that doesn't work for you.")

- Constant contact. Like, constant contact. Like, for the first few weeks of the breakup, he was emailing and texting me multiple times a day. Always about little things, links, book recommendations, stuff he thought I'd like. It felt like a dog constantly dropping squeaky toys in my lap.

- Signing off an email with kisses. Where I'm from, straight men just don't do that platonically!

- Keeping up with my life via the Internets - Facebook (I deleted him), Twitter (I locked it).

- Reading my blog; specifically, reading old entries about him and how much I loved him on my blog; specifically, reading old entries about him and how much I loved him on my blog, and then 'subtly' quoting them to me via email. whaaaaaaaaat.

 

I snapped at him for being bratty to me in an email, and backed away. He came back all guns blazing with a stream of e-mail kisses and remember-the-good-times hints. I decided this was screwing with my head, and went NC. He stayed quiet for a week, then e-mailed to let me know about a really bad family situation, one of the few things I would have said it was ok to break NC for. (I'm not suggesting he made up the family situation, btw, but I think the timing in telling me might've been a bit... convenient.) I express sympathy and ask for the details; he gives me the details, drops in a bit more and a bit more about how it's affecting his day-to-day life; and then before I know it, we're discussing his work schedule and travel plans, and dammit where did my NC go?

 

This is the weirdest breakup I have ever, ever, ever had. At times it really feels like I was the one who broke up with him. And yet, I wasn't, and he's adamantly Not Ready to meet and talk about where we stand, and we're still broken up and it's been six weeks and aaaaaaargh.

 

Anyway. It's all driving me crazy. I go from sobbing cryathons to rolling my eyes so much I get dizzy. I'm learning that breaking up with this particular species of messed-up man is like throwing away a passive-aggressive boomerang. I suspect that the only way I'm going to get full NC is total, furious, get-out-of-my-LIFE enforcement, but:

 

a) I don't wanna, because I want him back and this way I know he's not over me and I don't want the breakup to be permanent and... [insert standard patheticness here]

b) Last time I laid down the NC law with a depressed ex-boyfriend, he spent two months stalking me and threatening to kill himself. So I'm a tiny bit touchy on the issue.

c) I'm just... tired. When I back away, he always finds a way to reel me back in, and I am a normal well-balanced human being who's a total amateur at mind-games. He, on the other hand, seems to have been in secret training for those all his life.

 

LS has helped. Counselling has helped. And I'm sure that in six months' time I'll be feeling much better, yada yada. But, God, I want a fast-forward button for my life right now! Can someone invent one, please? And how do I call out the Men in Black to hunt down the bodysnatchers that took my wonderful, sweet, loving boyfriend and replaced him with this mindf*ck in human form?