S-L Posted February 2, 2011 Posted February 2, 2011 For those who don't want to read the multi-page essay below: We've been together three years, been rocky throughout, broke up a year ago but got back together. He's always been hard on me, very critical of me, suspicious of me and even accused me of cheating (I was seeing someone while we were broken up). He said he wanted to make things better after we got back together and succeeded for the summer but is getting worse again, being a very big hypocrite and constantly criticizing, belittling and mocking me for very similar (or the same) things to those he does a lot. He has bought an engagement ring and I can't move out for three months. Should I break up with him now or count on the ring being another ploy and wait the three months to avoid a lot of difficulty? Is there even the possible hope that he might actually learn, judging by his improvement over the summer? A little background first: I'm 22 and three months away from getting my B.A, with another year's worth of schooling planned for (either becoming a teacher or getting a Master's degree to become an academic librarian). My parents currently pay for my living costs, covering rent and groceries for me. My boyfriend is 26 and works in IT. We've been together for over 3 years (tomorrow is 40 months). I'd been dating since seventeen with short breaks in between relationships when I met him, with my longest relationship only being 8 months. This was mostly because I was figuring out what I did and didn't like as well as because I've always been honest when I have a problem with a relationship and ask for guys to work with me to fix things. My boyfriend dated from sixteen to almost twenty (three relationships, 2 years, 10 months, 10 months) and then didn't date for almost four years. We met online and went on only two dates before deciding to become exclusive. The first three or so months were pretty good: we had a couple of fights but nothing beyond what's expected when you're entering into a new relationship and sorting things out. At that point, we were both still students and both had roommates that we hated. Shortly after he graduated, he got so tired of his roommate that he moved in with his mom. As I was having troubles with my own roommate, I spent a good amount of time with him there when I wasn't in classes or working on homework. He started getting irritated with how I "didn't help out", despite the fact that I did just as much as he did in terms of trying to keep the areas we used clean and doing dishes. We also started having troubles with our sex life when he started essentially demanding what he wanted. If I didn't give in, he'd withdraw from me and stop talking to me until I gave in. We started fighting a lot more too around that time, though I'd always try to keep from doing so when we were at his mom's place and she was around, but I couldn't always manage. He definitely has always known my weak spots. Things were tense because he was broke and searching for a job and so I was feeding him while his mom let him live with her. I kept within the money my parents gave me for food by using up pretty much all of the extra food I had stored up. He borrowed some money from his mom for gas to get to interviews and job applications and that was pretty much all he had for the relationship. After three months of awkwardness trying to balance between my tiny bedroom with my roommate who blasted music until 4am and his mom's place, he finally found a job (same one he has now). We were both really excited and right after his first day of work, we started the apartment search. We thought that at least some of our problems were because of the terrible living situation and that finding a place of our own would help immensely. One month later, we moved into the basement apartment he had fallen for. Luckily, we didn't sign a lease because one month later, we were leaving because the apartment was freezing cold and the owners who lived above us were frequently leaving their TV on very loudly until 1 or 2am. While we were living in that basement apartment, we adopted two dogs. Originally in our discussions about getting animals, I had wanted to get a cat. When we decided to get our own place, my boyfriend said that he didn't want a cat (he'd always had cats as a kid), he wanted a dog. He told me that I should find some dogs that would be good in an apartment and easy to take care of. I found greyhounds and even an adoption group and had everything set up. After finding our apartment and having everything in place, we went to the group. The person running it ended up talking both of us into adopting two dogs, as greyhounds tend to do better in pairs. Both of us agreed on the decision to take two. One ended up having complications from his medical care and he wasn't able to come home with us at first. So we moved in to our second apartment seven months into our relationship, relieved to finally be having our own space that we could just live in. That relief and the hope that came with it wasn't long lived. For all that we had thought the apartment would change things, we hadn't expected it to make things worse. He started up on the theme of me not doing enough around the place, especially seeing as it was summer and I wasn't yet working (I had a couple of jobs where I was one of a few left to be decided between, but neither would start for a month). I was taking care of our dog most of the time and doing what I saw, but his expectations were different than mine. I had him write down one chore every day before he went to work and would do those, but he only did that for a month before going back to just complaining about how I didn't keep the place clean enough, take good enough care of the dog, etc, etc. Our sex life had continued to deteriorate, with me not wanting to have sex at all and him continuing to demand sex. The silent treatment after my saying no had stopped working, so he started putting other pressures on me. At first, he'd just keep asking and bugging me until I gave in to get him to leave me alone. When that stopped working, he started threatening to get rid of our dog or leave me. Sometimes, he'd just paw at me until I either gave in or tried to run away, at which point he'd provoke a fight with me and then try to get make-up sex when I was emotionally vulnerable. This continued to be our sex life for another year or so. At the end of that first summer, I finally got a job: part time work at a coffee shop. It wasn't much but it was what I knew I could handle seeing as I was going to be back in classes two weeks after starting. I figured with me both working and going to classes, things would be a bit more equitable and he would stop blaming me for all the things that weren't perfect in our world. It was a nice dream. With 12 hours of on-campus classes and work going from my requested 16 hours a week to over 20, I was getting busier and busier and that was when our second dog was able to come home. Having been at the rescue for five months with an injury, he was fat, lazy, spoiled and used to going outside six times a day. I was still responsible for the dogs most mornings because my classes were early afternoon ones and most of my work hours were in the evenings. The second dog had issues adapting to home life. He had separation anxiety that he expressed by peeing while we were gone. He also didn't have the five months of training that the first dog did and therefore was poorly behaved relative to her. My boyfriend blamed our having the dogs on me, the fact that the second dog was poorly behaved on his being "my" dog (as opposed to the first dog being "his" dog) and everything to do with both dogs aside from taking them out when I was at work devolved to me. I cleaned up every mess, I did all the training, I took them out two or three times a day. My boyfriend wouldn't even watch them while they ate, despite knowing that the second dog would eat the food of the first as well. Of course, when this led to his needing to go out at 4am, that was my job as well, up and down the three flights of stairs. By the end of a month, I was completely exhausted. I quit my job and my boyfriend laid into me, saying that now I was completely useless because I already wasn't doing anything around the house and now I wasn't even bringing in money. I tried to point out that I was now well into final essays and test period and he dismissed it saying "English (my major) isn't hard at all. It's worthless and you can do it in your sleep". I tried for another couple of weeks before I broke under the pressure. I failed all but one class that term, which I heard about for a good six months after the fact. I essentially hid in the apartment for a month and a half crying and hating myself for being "useless". Up until that point, I'd always done really well at school, so the failing combined with being told that I wasn't doing enough and that everything the dogs did wrong was my fault was enough to break what little self-esteem I had left. That seemed to wake my boyfriend up a bit. He apologized for being so hard on me and we started the new year with some hope that we could fix things. The next four or so months were a bit of a stasis: things didn't drastically improve but they weren't getting worse either. We still fought and the couple of times I actually tried to leave, I was told how worthless I was and how nobody would ever take me and how I couldn't live without him. Him threatening to leave started working as a method of getting sex again because I was terrified of losing him. I had a relatively strong term despite the horribleness of that winter, which restored my self-esteem. That summer, I was taking one online course and had a job that ended up falling through, so I started it with even more optimism. We even got a cat together who was so well-behaved and sweet that it seemed to bode well for the summer. I was looking forward to having something to do and once again having a job. When that fell through because the employer refused to pay me, things started to fall apart again. I was searching desperately for something else but because it had been a late starting job, pretty much everything was taken. I ended up using my online course to get me into as many for-pay psychological studies as I could, making about $100 a week doing them. Through one of them, I met a grad student studying the philosophy and psychology of linguistics. We hung out a few times, mostly talking about our common interests, namely psychology and language. One time, he arranged a get-together using the word "date" in the "it's a date" sense. I was quick to respond with "a friend-date, of course" but unbeknownst to me, my boyfriend was reading my e-mails and had been for over a year. All of a sudden, I was the worst person in the world, clearly cheating on him, terrible whore, etc, etc. When I tried to explain and even showed him my response and my friend's acknowledgement of the fact that we were just friends, he dismissed it all. I shouldn't even be talking to other guys unless it was strictly related to class. Hell, the fact that I still talked to some of my ex-boyfriends and had met up with them for coffee was a clear sign that I was still sleeping with them and making him a fool. There wasn't anything I could say or do to convince him that it wasn't the case. My punishment was that he was even stricter with me than before. My presence had to be accounted for at all times and I had to let him know if I was going to break from the schedule ahead of time, telling him exactly what I was doing, who with and where. A couple of times, he even came to check on me. At the end of the summer, I cracked for the second time, although at this point it was an explosion rather than an implosion. I gave my boyfriend quite the tongue lashing, all my frustration, fear, anger and hurt from the previous year being summarized into about an hour of saying what was wrong between us and how we could either fix it or split up. For the first time, I felt like I might have gotten through to him. After a couple days of thinking about it, he came back and apologized, made promises about fixing his behaviour and asked for my help in working on it. I was happy to give him all of that. We improved things and, like before, sealed it with the choice to find a new place. We wanted a townhouse or home but couldn't afford one so, for the second time, we chose to move in with his mom for the convenience and cost. This time, we all chose a place together and moved in. It was a decent townhouse that gave my boyfriend's mom a living area and bathroom of her own and us the entire upstairs with the main floor kitchen, dining room and living room being shared. The convenience was having direct access to the outside, a patio that allowed for barbecuing and having everything for us costing only $850 a month, what we had been paying just for rent and utilities before essentially giving us free internet, cable and phone. Things improved throughout that fall. We started talking things through and although there were some bumps, especially because of moving in with his mother and now having to deal with her, things were still getting better. Then, after New Year's, I found out that he had been talking to his mother and both of them essentially complaining about how I was doing "no work" around the house. I was still taking care of our dogs more than half the time, was taking care of the cat entirely and took care of all the chores on the upstairs (vacuuming, dusting, cleaning the bathroom, etc) as well as vacuuming the main floor every few weeks. My boyfriend only had to do the dishes and take out garbage outside of his share of the dog work. His mother actually did nothing: after doing dishes two or three times in the first couple of months, she left the dishes entirely up to us because we used more on average. While I admittedly did very little in the shared area, that was because I did my boyfriend's share in our space in return for him taking most of my shared space chores. Even then, the weighting was lopsided towards me, once again because I didn't work and going to school for English had to be easy. That started a downward spiral once again, culminating in a fight over my intended career of teaching special needs children, whom my boyfriend said shouldn't be anything other than battery packers and thus didn't need school never mind a special teacher. We blew up, him over the fact that I was "holding him back" by being four years younger and not yet working (despite the fact that I was 21 and he hadn't started working until he was almost 24) and me over his lack of respect for anything I did in school, around the house or with the dogs (based on his continual crowing over how well "he" had trained them when he had never been involved in that beyond using the commands once I'd already taught them). We broke up officially, him moving into the spare room in the townhouse. For the next month, he kept trying to convince me to take him back but I kept telling him I was thinking about it. In the meantime, I started hanging out with old friends and some classmates to get myself away from him. I ended up meeting a guy I quite liked and went on a couple of dates with him, trying to avoid getting too serious to avoid a rebound without trying to completely quash the relationship. I just told my then-ex that I was hanging out with someone to keep him from bothering me. Once again, I found out that he was reading my e-mails when he came storming in and started quoting the e-mail the guy I was half-seeing had sent me earlier that day. He was yelling at me, calling me a whore and telling me that I was cheating on him (despite the fact that we were very definitely split up). I kicked him out of my room and locked myself in until he calmed down and went away, then avoided him for the next couple of weeks. The relationship with the new guy didn't go anywhere after all, as he started to go in a direction I wasn't comfortable with. My friends started to get busy with midterms and essays so I was once again forced to spend a lot of time around my then-ex. He used that to convince me that he was changing/changed and recognized what he had done wrong and would never do it again. My weak spot is trusting people to do what they say and so I agreed to give things another chance. Things did improve, with expected bumpiness along the way. This past summer was fantastic for us (I was in classes full time, which might have effected that) but not so perfect as to be unbelievable. We went on a five day back-country canoe-trip that went really well aside from the weather and had us working together great (with a little bickering along the way). However, once we got back from that, things seemed to start to fall apart again a little. My boyfriend started to get really quiet and distant, with little things bothering him and causing him to yell at me. We tried to work through that but despite "fixing it", little things still became big things. He became very hypocritical: accusing me of doing things he quite commonly does and getting mad at me for them and then getting mad at me for pointing out his hypocrisy. He's started to get somewhat physical with me again (making me sit on the bed when he wants to talk and grabbing my wrist when I'm trying to leave), something that stopped after we got back together. He's overly critical of me, and any time that I do something wrong is a guaranteed chance for a long lecture over how there's still so much wrong with me. We've been going in waves since the end of the summer and I really don't know what to do. I can normally talk to him about things when he's in a good mood and he'll say that he's sorry but there's still so many things that he's doing to upset me. This past weekend, I was playing with the dogs in the exact same way that he has many times and he yelled at me to stop and then when I stepped on one dog's paw while stopping, he came over right up in my face and screamed at me to sit down, then shoved me over to the couch when I didn't. When that upset me and I started to cry, he started yelling at me about being a child. Once he had calmed down, he started to try to explain why it was OK for him to play with and even occasionally bang into our dogs but what I had been doing just then wasn't fine and then telling me that I needed to get my emotions "under control" because I was still upset. Only after an hour did he finally say that there was no excuse for his reaction other than his inability to control his reactions (see the parallel of my play = bad and his play = good, my uncontrolled emotions = bad and his = acceptable). Today, I had been hoping for a snow day and when I found out that all the schools in the area but mine were closed, I indulged in a little whining and complaining. He mocked everything I said, telling me how my life was SOOO hard and it must be SOOO terrible to have to go out in the snow. I finally told him that I was just complaining and wasn't saying that anything about my life was so horrible, it just sucked and wasn't fun (wading through 2ft of snow rarely is). He then snapped at me that I shouldn't complain about anything when there are people starving. I pointed out that he's the one who will go on for hours about how his boss is "a woman" (i.e. wants to have an emotional trust and bond with him) and how he always has to talk. He responded that that's different because that impacts his life because his boss can fire him and I pointed out that because he works in the public sector (for the city) his boss can't just up and fire him without going through a lot of paperwork and getting his boss to agree and that wading through snow when it's -20C (-4F) is definitely going to affect someone with asthma worsened by the cold. He then told me that my complaining wasn't OK because it was just based on my expectation of a snow day. I asked how his expectation of just being left to do his job without having a boss who wants to supervise what he's doing isn't an expectation. He spat at me to grow up and then left for work. I'm sure when I see him later, he'll say how he was wrong and he shouldn't be a hypocrite. He said that this past weekend and the week before and the week before. He doesn't seem to be learning. I don't know if he can't, won't or is just really really slow at it. The thing is, I know he intends to ask me to marry him. He's shown me the receipt for the ring. I don't know when he's thinking of doing that. I can't move out for three months (because of the lease, the already paid rent and the difficulty of moving). However, come May, I could easily move back in with my parents "for school" and then break things off then. I just don't know if he'll propose to me before then or not. I don't know if I should tell him now that I'm done with him and take the blow-ups, pleading and difficulty for the three months or wait the three months and take the risk that he will ask me and I'll have to refuse. Honestly, I don't even know if he's using the ring to persuade me to put up with him. He's admitted to playing mind-games with me throughout the relationship (unintentionally, according to him), so this could just be another one. He might actually be honestly trying to improve too. He did get much better last summer before devolving again. Thoughts?
utterer of lies Posted February 2, 2011 Posted February 2, 2011 The thing is, I know he intends to ask me to marry him. He's shown me the receipt for the ring. I don't know when he's thinking of doing that. I can't move out for three months (because of the lease, the already paid rent and the difficulty of moving). However, come May, I could easily move back in with my parents "for school" and then break things off then. I just don't know if he'll propose to me before then or not. I don't know if I should tell him now that I'm done with him and take the blow-ups, pleading and difficulty for the three months or wait the three months and take the risk that he will ask me and I'll have to refuse. Honestly, I don't even know if he's using the ring to persuade me to put up with him. He's admitted to playing mind-games with me throughout the relationship (unintentionally, according to him), so this could just be another one. He might actually be honestly trying to improve too. He did get much better last summer before devolving again. Thoughts? Save yourself, for no one else will. Can't you move in back with your parents now? Don't do this to yourself any longer. The paid rent and lease are sunk costs...
Author S-L Posted February 2, 2011 Author Posted February 2, 2011 Save yourself, for no one else will. Can't you move in back with your parents now? Don't do this to yourself any longer. The paid rent and lease are sunk costs... Unfortunately, they live in another city and I still have to finish my degree here before I can move back there. That's two more months of classes and then exams. I don't have anyone still in the city that can take me in, as most of my friends have graduated and the couple that haven't either live in room-and-board situations or in residences. If the rent weren't paid up in full, I'd take that and sublet a room for the three months but without it, I can't afford even the move, never mind the rent.
carhill Posted February 2, 2011 Posted February 2, 2011 My parents currently pay for my living costs, covering rent and groceries for me.Have you asked them for suggestions? If yes, response? Welcome to LS
Author S-L Posted February 2, 2011 Author Posted February 2, 2011 Have you asked them for suggestions? If yes, response? Welcome to LS Essentially, I'm welcome to come home and they'll help move me but other than that, it's up to me to deal with my own situation. The only reason they're paying for me to live while going to school is because I bartered it out of them in high school for another degree designation that they could brag about. They're not really the sort of lovey-dovey "we're here for you" sort of parents, more like business associates who want me to succeed but not if it costs them too much. With rooms going for $500 minimum around here, the expense of moving me out isn't worth it when the only difference this term makes is between a BA with honours and one without. I readily admit that all of the above has likely had an impact on my relationships.
carhill Posted February 2, 2011 Posted February 2, 2011 Since you've been in this R for three years, off and on, two-three months seems acceptable to continue, given the alternatives. You're in control of how you handle the living arrangements and interactions. Think of it as an acceptable cost of doing business, the business being the successful completion of your degree. I see any potential engagement proposal and this business to be mutually exclusive and suggest they be handled as such. Act in a manner which represents your best interests.
Author S-L Posted February 2, 2011 Author Posted February 2, 2011 Since you've been in this R for three years, off and on, two-three months seems acceptable to continue, given the alternatives. You're in control of how you handle the living arrangements and interactions. Think of it as an acceptable cost of doing business, the business being the successful completion of your degree. I see any potential engagement proposal and this business to be mutually exclusive and suggest they be handled as such. Act in a manner which represents your best interests. Thank you for the advice. I might see if there's any indication towards actually putting forward the proposal and if there is, initiate some delaying methods (i.e. abstractly push him to wait for the summer by noting that the winter makes everything seem less awesome or something). I would just rather not take the relationship on the chin for two of the three months then have him propose and have the last month be horrible, especially as that would be right around exams.
utterer of lies Posted February 2, 2011 Posted February 2, 2011 Since you've been in this R for three years, off and on, two-three months seems acceptable to continue, given the alternatives. You're in control of how you handle the living arrangements and interactions. Think of it as an acceptable cost of doing business, the business being the successful completion of your degree. I see any potential engagement proposal and this business to be mutually exclusive and suggest they be handled as such. Act in a manner which represents your best interests. Very good advice, I fully agree!
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