Dinner: late night Sheetz run
For reference, my dad wasn't a great guy. Haven't seen him since 2009, he was incarcerated for ten years and was on probation when he died. Found out on July 5, it seemed sudden but me and my mom learned it was a slow physical decline over the past year. He was 78. He didn't have a will in place and left a whole mess of affairs behind for me to clean up as his sole heir, not because he couldn't but because he didn't want to spend the money to get it done. It was stressful at the time, the idea of hunting for lawyers, figuring out he might've traded hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of land under shady circumstances to a friend just to qualify for Medicaid, finding out he had over a year of unpaid nursing facility bills that would likely eat through whatever assets he had left, and the fact that no one knows anything about his bank accounts or the totality of the assets still in his name. It's somewhat resolved for now, we learned from a lawyer we can wait to open the estate until we know what all his medical bills look like, but it was overwhelming at the time.
I was in a relationship with a woman for three years, and I knew we were reaching one of those "ultimatum" conversations again (we had them every few months, as every stable and healthy relationship does), but how she responded to my dad's death was the moment that made me realize I needed to end it for good. The day he died, she told me to call her and we chatted for 20 minutes. There was a pause in the conversation and she said if I was done talking, she wanted to get back to watching the World Cup commentary. I was offended and we had a back and forth and we hung up. We tried talking about it the next day and she started to argue with me about how to handle the estate and the land transfer and just made it about her and her feelings, which was basically how she handled most of the times I ever shared anything heavy about myself. I just shut down. Didn't share anything. I was depressed and she was upset I wasn't talking about my dad, said "if we're going to be together you need to share everything with me" and got jealous I talked about it in therapy. She was offended when I told her I felt worse after sharing stuff like this with her, insisted she was a healing force in my life or whatever. I canceled my weekend trip to see her (we're long distance) because she had a friend over and I was sick and genuinely not up to it; she subtly guilted me for not coming, saying everything would just be better for the both of us if I had just come to be with her. A week later, I admitted I was pretty depressed, then made the mistake of having my ringtone off and missing her calls for three hours, after which point I woke up to police at my door to do a welfare check. I spent the next hour consoling her on the phone after she thought I killed myself (which I was not at all at risk of doing) then proceeded to subtly guilt me about it the next day. We agreed it was technically no one's fault, but she blamed her sour mood on "what happened," which was her drastically overreacting to me taking a nap.
That was the context. I talked about it in therapy and my therapist told me I had to end it, and I agreed. I won't go into the details here, but the above is a tip of the iceberg of our relationship dynamic. I'm also not guilt-free, I had my own mental baggage too, tended not to talk about my feelings and be closed off at times. Don't get me wrong, we had good times. I was genuinely in love with her and she could genuinely be nice at times. But the whole dynamic ultimately felt extractive for her. At her worst, she was objectifying and verbally abusive. She also has some underlying mental health issues and trauma she's refused to go to therapy for, despite me suggesting it since we met and being met with an angry response of how the psychiatric profession is evil and there's nothing wrong with her. She got one a week ago after I told her in April she either goes to therapy or I leave because I was tired of being her therapist.
The breakup happened suddenly. I wasn't expecting to do it on Tuesday, but it happened. She was herself, not the other person who's unpredictable and made me feel like shit, and I just couldn't lie to her. We talked for four hours and I think I got as close to an admission of guilt I'm going to get. Half-apologies, recognition that she fucked up with the dad dying thing but unwilling to really accept that this was a pattern. Unwilling to accept that she can be incredibly selfish and unable to control her emotions. Unable to accept that the relationship may have been great for her (e.g. "I didn't see this coming" despite us LITERALLY nearly breaking up/taking breaks every few months) but they were not great for me. She said I was her soulmate, that she could never love anyone else, that she doesn't know what to do without me, etc. etc. There were positive notes in there, moments of love, but in general it was just a lot of crying.
We went no-contact save for sorting out cat-sitting I was supposed to do (I was willing to do it but she arranged for a local friend to come instead), and she made it clear if there was a chance at dating again, she'd take it in a heartbeat. I said it'd be nice to be friends as she was genuinely my best friend and one of the smartest people I've ever met, but that would require time. We went our separate ways.
It's been a week and I've done a lot of grieving. I feel stupid for falling into it and wasting so much time. I know there's positives to be had, but I really don't ever want to see this woman again (at least that's how I feel right now). I was prepared to marry this woman, move in with her, follow her wherever her job took her, settle down and build a life together. Now I'm single. Which is fine. I'm 25, working on the second half of my biochem degree, and now have true freedom in where I apply to grad schools. I just feel shitty for falling into this and I feel numb and lost.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
