daddylongleg Posted June 8, 2013 Posted June 8, 2013 (edited) It's been seven months and it's not getting any easier. In fact, I feel worse than ever. I tried dating, and I just couldn't do it. I would have hurt the other person if I had continued. Every time I attempt to pursue my hobby of rock climbing, the physical exertion stirs up so much anger and grief, and it just comes crashing down on me. The reason it's so hard for me to get over is because it seems to have happened for the flimsiest of reasons, suddenly, and without any attempt at fixing the issue - well, sort of. First - and I feel like no one I've talked to, including my ex, has really given this fact the amount of weight it deserves - she was a workaholic, for 6-7 of our nine years. Let's focus on the last two years of our relationship. There might have been a few 40-hours weeks, but if you include work she brought home, phone meetings, emails, then there were none. 60 hour weeks were the norm, not including the work she did from home - phone calls, emails, managing the business's website, facebook. There were more 70-80 hour weeks than there were 40 hour weeks. During the holidays, we're talking several 100+ hour weeks, perhaps some 20-22 hour days. I'm still not including the work she did from home. This wasn't just the last two years either, but they were the most concentrated. She didn't take sick days. She took personal days here and there, but they were always spent rock climbing, which we sort of approached as a job. We spent all of our free time (which was practically nothing) rock climbing. She had one week of vacation during the last two years. So, we're talking constant work. The thing is, she didn't even like her job. She managed a bakery. Her bosses have always taken advantage of her willingness to work endlessly. I don't know why she does it. She literally works like a dog. She's has a dog's devotion to her master. She can't bear the shame of letting her master down. But, and here's the thing, she wouldn't acknowledge how much she was working. I don't think she had a clue. I don't think she could see how it affected her, or me, or us. And, I made no secret of how I felt, but every conversation about it devolved into an argument. I think it just sounded like nagging to her. Several times she agreed to quit and follow my dreams for a while. But, it was always like: "Just wait one more months until this happens. Now, just wait until this happens." And, she showed no signs of stopping. Towards the end, all she did was come home, play on her phone for an hour, then fall asleep. And, when I'd bring up how unhappy I was with her work, she'd say something like "I just had two days off" as though the first two days off for months were supposed to mean anything, when I'm staring at another 8 60-hour weeks in a row, with no real days off, and more hours working from home. A few years earlier, I had moved to Florida for her, where she worked like this, following her dreams of being a pastry chef, working 12-13 hours a day, every day, for two weeks straight, one time. And, it was like "Well, I told you I was going to be working a lot" as though that somehow made it right. The thing is, she had only wanted to be a pastry chef for like a week before enrolling in pastry school. She didn't talk to me about it. We had been dating for 6 years at the time, and she gave me no say. Remember, this is my first relationship. I didn't want to be "controlling" so I just didn't complain. I didn't realize that my feelings should have been taken into consideration. But, I've never heard her acknowledge how her working impacted my feelings or the atmosphere of our relationship. In fact, she said she was sick of being my side-car, when I was basically following her whims around the country. The other main issue was her dealings with her ex. They had dated for two years in junior high and high school. So, not serious at all. In fact, pretty ridiculous, considering he cheated on her several times within months of them going out. But, when she started dating me, he started feeling like he was losing her, and he fell in love or some other such bull****. This started a bunch of antics that lasted our entire relationship. She maintained friendship with him, despite it obviously hurting my feelings. It was so long ago, I don't know how the **** I put up with it. Again, it was my first relationship. I didn't want to be "controlling." So, I put up with it. I definitely made it known that I didn't like it, that it hurt me. I don't know if I wasn't clear enough or something. Here's a list of the bull**** though: He comes to our apartment and tried to have sex with her. He grabs her ass. He man-handles her. He explicitly asks to have sex with her - the girl I love and live with. We had been dating about 2 years at the time. She doesn't kick him out, but leaves the apartment instead. She calls me and tells me that she had to leave because he was making her horny. He moves to our neighborhood to try to be closer to her. He tries to convince me to break up with her, that it would be good for me. He comes to her apartment, at some point when we weren't living together, and bangs on the window, drunk, in the middle of the night. This is like 5 years after we started dating, 6-7 years after they split up. Granted, they were still friends, and ****ing when we started dating. In fact, she may have ****ed him right when we first started dating. I can't remember when exactly it occurred, but I know it hurt me a lot. We were definitely becoming closer at the time. She runs into him at a bar. It just happens to be the first time she's ever gone out drinking without me. We didn't drink. She let's him stay the night because he's too drunk to find a way home (bull****) without telling me about it. He has so many ****ing friends. It'd be so easy for him to find a ride home. His mom dies, and she is the one whom he turns to to console him. She stays the night with him, and spends the next day with him. This too, was years and years after we had started dating, and it's not like they were close friends. ------- So, in between all of this, she kept up contact with him. She's go out to get coffee. He'd invite her out to dinner. He'd invite her out to lunch. And, he had this way of making everything seem really friendly. He had this way of always making it seem like they were old friends, just catching up, like he had turned over a new leaf. He was perpetually turning over a new leaf, and she bought it. And, all I could manage was to sound like some little buzzing fly, not because I was afraid of putting my foot down, but because I, for reasons unknown, didn't want to be a "jealous boyfriend" or controlling. At some point, after all this, I convinced her to sever contact with him, and she did, for a little while. But, after maybe a year, enough time had past for him to make it seem like they were old friends, just catching up, and why should I care about that sort of thing. When we broke up, he swooped in and tried to have sex with her. Like, the texts started flowing in immediately (we were still living together, for a few weeks) - dinner invites, mentioning he was masturbating, **** like that. I was so upset that she could be ignoring me, refusing to speak to me - her best (and only) friend for nine years, who had done nothing to hurt her - while going out with this dude, who had no respect for her relationship. When I told her that he was trying to get back together with her, she told me "John's my friend. He knows I'm not into that. He was talking about all the girls he's had sex with and I was getting grossed out" as though he wasn't just talking about that to seduce her. And, when I bring him up, she just says "Oh. We're doing the John thing again. I'm so sick of this. I don't understand what he has to do with our relationship." She doesn't understand that I'm not trying to guilt trip her, that I don't really care about him. I'm trying to show her her level of care. I'm trying to show her the part she played in our relationship, the **** I had to deal with, the **** that made me into the person I was in our relationship. Like, she complained that I wasn't affectionate. How was I supposed to be affectionate when this sort of stuff was going on? I know it was all innocent. I trust she didn't have sex with him. I trust that she wasn't attracted to him. You have to trust me on this. But, still, she should have realized it hurt me. She should have realized that I struggled with it, that I tried to be okay with it, but that I couldn't, especially when I asked her to sever contact, then when the asking turned to begging because she just wouldn't do that for me. I know I'm painting a very pathetic picture of myself, but it was so tricky, so hard to see what was really going on. She was very loving, and very affectionate, and I felt guilty for not feeling well. I felt guilty for not showing her enough affection, for not feeling the things I wanted to about her. I was trying to do what I thought was right, and it was confusing enough at the time that I thought I was doing what was right. She still doesn't understand how wrong she was. And, any time I bring up things she's done, in an attempt to get her to see what she's done, so that she might change, she just gets angry. So, besides these two main issues, there were lots of other specifics. She'd go out with guys who were just trying to have sex with her, or who wanted to date her, or who wanted to fall in love with her. She was so naive that she didn't believe that that's what they wanted. Then, when it turned out that that's what they wanted, it was always a joke to her. She'd laugh about it, and saying something like "You know I could never be attracted to so and so." Then, she'd continue seeing the person, as though it was cool, since I knew she wasn't attracted to them. She spent the night in a cabin with one dude whom I'd never met because they got stuck in a snowstorm. Sometimes I'd get sad about family stuff, and she'd just fall asleep in the middle of me talking about it. Sometimes, I'd pour my heart out to her, or talk about something I was passionate about, and she'd fall asleep in the middle of it. So, I hope you can distill a sense of how little she cared. I don't know if she lacked compassion, or sympathy, or if she just couldn't take my concerns seriously because she thought our love overrode any issue we might have had. It was so frustrating trying to get through to her. And, I progressively became an angrier and angrier person, and more intense. I had to ramp up the intensity in an attempt to try to get through to her. I was thatangry. I didn't have an anger problem or anything. So, it finally got to the point that I couldn't handle it anymore. It was her job. I was dead. Our relationship was dead. I tried to get her to quit. I couldn't see any way out or it going anywhere. The thing is, we got along pretty well, all things considered. We didn't have any huge fights. We had never split up. We still wanted to be around each other. Even after we had broken up, we'd gravitate towards each other at the climbing gym, and hang out and laugh. In fact, we were still sleeping in the same bed after we had broken up. She even let me snuggle up to her. But, to go back a bit, I decided I had to break up with her because "she refused to dream with me." That's exactly what I thought. All she did was work and I couldn't get her to see what a problem it was. And, when you've been living with someone for nine years, and they're working that much, you're working right along with them. I was trapped in her work schedule. We could never relax. We didn't have weekends, for years. Plus, we had gotten this dog, who was driving me nuts. She's two, now. She eats literally twice as much as my parent's 3-year-old dog, who weighs as much as she does. She eats as much as as our other dog who is 30 pounds heavier and just as young and active. She doesn't have worms. She's super lean. So, imagine how much energy she has. Imagine how much she had as a puppy. She drove me nuts. And, my ex was just completely unaware of all this. So, I decided I had to break up. I told her I was breaking up with her. It went on for a few weeks. We were kind of living in this happy we're-breaking-up place. That lasted until she showed the slightest bit of emotion. Then, it all came crashing down. I didn't want to lose her. I loved her. I just needed out. But, I could not give her up. It was too late. She embraced the breakup wholeheartedly. That's when the actual breakup started. She was so cold. I mean, she saw me weep like a little boy, and sat there not feeling anything, telling me that the apartment had never been cleaner, telling me that she wanted me to try dating other people. And, she just gave me some perfunctory reasons why she wanted to break up: We didn't make a good couple. She wanted a "deep romance." She needed space. That's it. That's all I heard from her. She wouldn't address any issues. She said she realized what a bad couple we were when she had some sort of "epiphany." She realized that the way we were living was "no way to live." I begged her to try things to fix it. She said we had tried everything, despite the fact that we had tried nothing. She was all over the place. One day she was calling herself crazy, the next she was getting mad at me for calling her crazy. There were times that I caught her in the act of just making **** up. She just made **** up and said it - about the past, about the way she felt, about things that had happened. She believed it too. When I pointed it out, she said she was crazy. She didn't want to see the truth, but she knew we had to break up, that our relationship was not mendable. One day she was asking me "So, when am I going to come dancing with you." Then, she moved to another state and completely severed contact with me. Yeah, she quit her job, just like that. She gave our cat away too. After denying that it was even a problem, she quit her job. Now, I just can't accept that our relationship, that I struggled to support, that I devoted myself to, through all kinds of neglect and hurt, came to an end because of an epiphany, which I'm sure just amounted to her cherry-picking the worst moments of our nine years. Everyone I've explained this to just assumes that there was some reason she needed to get out, that I must be missing something. But, I simply can't accept that. I don't doubt that she wanted out. I'm sure that that want manifest somehow, but there's a difference between a simple desire, and a need. I know she didn't struggle. I know this wasn't something she had been hiding. It was something I had been struggling with, something I had been hiding. I was unhappy for a very long time. And, one simply does not act the way she acted. Right before we broke up, she was trying to get me to go on a vacation with her. A few months before, she was trying to get my name added to her bank account. She was bubbly and affectionate. She talked about me constantly to her friends at work. She always wanted to have sex. She didn't express any concerns with our relationship, except toward the last month, when I had made up my mind to do something, and things actually started getting bad. It was like she took that last month and pretended it was our entire relationship. And, she just wouldn't talk to me about any of it. She wouldn't accept that the way it feels, the way we were, the way I acted, couldn't be separated from the circumstances. How was I supposed to be who she wanted while she was treating me like **** and working all the time? I even said "You weren't just dating me, you were dating you as well." But, it was all just talk to her. She didn't really listen. It was all just "Blah blah blah. Get back with me." Also, my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and I told her, and she still wouldn't even talk to me. My parents treated her like their daughter. They gave her all kinds of money. They let her live with us. They let her live at my grandma's condo for a year. They made gifts for her, bought her all kinds of **** on Christmas and her birthday, and she didn't even seem to care. She just gets these impulses and they become the most important thing in the world to her, and she doesn't let anything get in her way, then she later regrets it. One day, she decided she wanted to get a cat. I tried to talk her out of it because I thought it would tie us down. She ran out and got a cat that day, without thinking about it, without discussion. She rushes into things so that they can happen before anything else happens to stop them. She no longer has the cat. Some girl talked her into getting laser hair removal. She signed up for the $2000 procedure that same day. To be fair, she had always wanted it. But, she didn't explore options. She just dropped the cash right then. She went to a few sessions then just gave it up. She decided she wanted to be a pastry chef. She wouldn't talk to me about it. She wouldn't do any research into schools. She didn't do any research into the actual profession. She just took out a bunch of loans and went to pastry school before anyone could talk her out of it. She gave it up, after a year. She was so happy throughout the entire breakup, not happier than usual, but her normal carefree self, even when I was around. In fact, the first time that she really told me she was serious about the break-up, that she never wanted to get back together with me, she dragged me to the climbing wall, right after that, and laughed and flirted the whole time. And, after that, we never really talked. Well, we only really talked once, until she became to tired to continue, after an hour, every conversation after that was less than 30 minutes, and her just telling me she was too tired, had to be somewhere, or that we had already been over everything, despite us having been over nothing. She ignored all my emails and all my texts. I could fill a book with how much I've said to her, and it wasn't just insane ranting. It was careful reflection on our relationship. Her stance could be summarized in a tweet. And, I love her and I want her back. I think she thinks she is a mature, kind, caring person. She comes of as very sweet, very innocent, so I think it's impossible for her to understand that she isn't. If I brought up her dealing with her ex, right now, she'd probably laugh, look at me disgustedly, like I'm pathetic and stupid for even bringing it up, and explain that he meant nothing to her, and that she doesn't understand why I care, or what he has to do with our relationship. But, she doesn't realize what she's doing. She doesn't realize that I care about it now because I did care about it then, and because I did care about it then, it affected the way I felt, it affected the way I felt about her, and it affected how I viewed her attitude towards our relationship. Thus, it affected the entire course of our relationship. And for her to not realize that, is even more evidence to her not understanding what went on, so how can I take her wanting to breakup seriously, until she acknowledges these things? Edited June 8, 2013 by daddylongleg
lovelifexx Posted June 8, 2013 Posted June 8, 2013 Sorry what is it that you are asking? What is it that u want?
BrokenHeartedSavior Posted June 8, 2013 Posted June 8, 2013 Here, I'll that question for you. You need exactly TWO items: 1. A baseball bat for her disrespectful ex SCANK. 2. NO CONTACT FOR HER!! RID HER FROM YOUR LIFE! MOVE ON. DO NOT ENTERTAIN HER! Seriously? You allowed her ex to sleep at your place??? NO! You'll never win pal. Drop it like it's hot. You're worth more than the disrespectful doormat she's treating you like. Trust me.
BrokenHeartedSavior Posted June 8, 2013 Posted June 8, 2013 Here, I'll Answer that question for you. You need exactly TWO items: 1. A baseball bat for her disrespectful ex SCANK. 2. NO CONTACT FOR HER!! RID HER FROM YOUR LIFE! MOVE ON. DO NOT ENTERTAIN HER! Seriously? You allowed her ex to sleep at your place??? NO! You'll never win pal. Drop it like it's hot. You're worth more than the disrespected doormat she's treating you like. NO CONTACT! Let her be the miserable excuse for a human being she is, and will only EVER be. Trust me.
Author daddylongleg Posted June 8, 2013 Author Posted June 8, 2013 Sorry what is it that you are asking? What is it that u want? Well, it was late, and I was venting, but I guess I'd like some perspective. I lived with her for nine years, with only the two of us privy to what was going on. So, it was basically her feeling okay about everything, and me being convinced that I should be okay with everything, and blaming myself for feeling negativity. I mean, when we argued, I never took the moral high ground. It was always a level playing field. This all started immediately and I've been living in it for nine years, trying to make it work, being beaten down. But, it's a story I've just come to formulate. Am I making too a deal out of things? Or, was I being neglected and mistreated for nine years? Could I have been more affectionate? Could I have made her feel more wanted? Or, was it impossible in that scenario? I know it sounds like I have it all figured out, but I don't. It was my first relationship. I don't have friends who talk about their relationships. I don't have anything to compare it to. Was her working that much even a big deal? Could anyone have a healthy relationship under those circumstances? She blamed some inherent incompatibility for our breakup. She wanted a deep romance and claimed that I wasn't romantic, wasn't affectionate. Wasn't I, or was it the circumstances. Was the romance beaten out of me? Was the affection beaten out of me? Or, are affectionate people affectionate up until the very end? She told me that she felt uncomfortable around other people, when I was around, like she couldn't be herself. That was the only specific, meaningful reason she gave for breaking up, though it was the first time she had ever mentioned it (I'm certain). Well, all her dealings with other people had been hurtful and unhealthy as they related to our relationship, so I criticized the way she acted. Was I a jealous boyfriend, or had I been made to feel jealous? She never had any girlfriends. She never had good male friends whom I was friends with. The only people she ever hung out with were single guys, not because she was a "skank" but because those are the people who were interested in her, and she was so naive she thought they wanted to be her friend. I mean, all our climbing buddies, who were supposedly friends with me, started hitting on her literally the day after we broke up. "Isn't that disappointing?" she said in her mature, grown-up tone, not realizing that these were the people she was hanging out with, alone, when we were still dating, and that I was in the position of having to deal with it. I know this all sounds like "beta male" ****, and perhaps I am a "beta male" but I always put up with this kind of stuff because I didn't want to be an *******. I wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt. I didn't want to go up to people and say "Stay away from Jess or I'm going to beat your ass."
Lostint Posted June 8, 2013 Posted June 8, 2013 She sounds like a horrible person - sorry. Be glad that it's over and you can now concentrate on finding someone who deserves you.
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