I haven’t really told this story before.
I’ve been pretty open with my experiences with depression
and anxiety, medication, and therapy, both on this blog and in real life. I
speak and write in the hope that my experiences will resonate with others and
encourage them to find help. I hope that this story will do the same.
---
This is the story of my most recent romantic relationship,
which began in 2009 and ended in 2010. There are plenty of reasons that I haven’t
had a boyfriend since then (college, grad school, internships, and work, among
others), but the more I reflect on this, the more I begin to wonder whether this
experience has also played a role. I haven’t even talked about this much in therapy
(which is unusual for me), and since my therapist is still on maternity leave,
I’ve had lots of time to think on it.
I met Nick through my summer job in 2009. Nick is not
actually his name, because I want to protect his identity as I talk about our
relationship. Plus, he’s married now and it wouldn’t be fair to identify him
now after all these years. Anyway, it had been about 2 years since I had had a
boyfriend, so I was very excited to be
feeling things for Nick. You know how it is when you’re just starting out in a
relationship – all flutters, and smiles, and covert flirting, especially if you
are seeing each other at work. We started dating for real in mid-August, and
did our best to act like nothing was going on between us. I’m told that we did
a spectacularly bad job at this and everyone knew we were dating.
The first few months were really great. Nick was majoring in
electrical engineering at Grand Valley, and I was doing my third (and final)
semester at Grand Rapids Community College. He had a townhouse with a couple of
other guys near GVSU’s main campus, and since I lived with my parents, we spent
most of our time at his place. We spent time together almost every weekend, every
Thursday night because we loved NBC’s primetime comedy lineup, and whatever
other evenings we could manage. I never had much homework (I was at CC, after
all), so I would just go over to Nick’s and keep him company while he did his homework.
September 17 was one of the highlights of our time together.
Nick took me to Grand Haven, where we had first met, and we went out to dinner.
We wandered around on the boardwalk in the mild evening air and as the sun was
sinking toward the horizon, we made for the pier at Grand Haven State Park. We
watched the sunset from the end of the pier, which was and continues to be one
of my favorite places on earth. Just as the sun disappeared under the water, I
turned to Nick, he turned to me, and I just knew.
It was the first kiss of our relationship, and my first kiss
as a human being. It was perfect. We were basically a rom-com called
Engineering Bliss.
September rolled into October, and with it, my 20th
birthday. I had never had a boyfriend during my birthday, so I was very excited. Nick picked me up at my
house, bearing a dozen red carnations (because “they last way longer than roses,”
he said. I loved how practical he was.) I had never gotten flowers from a guy
before, and I fell for him even harder. He took me to dinner at Bentham’s,
downtown, and afterward we walked along the river hand-in-hand and being all
young-lovey. He took me back to his place in Allendale and presented me with
birthday gifts, one of which was my favorite movie, Dirty Dancing. He knew that
I absolutely loved that movie, but vowed he would never watch it with me
because he “would have to turn in his man card.” I thought he was funny at the
time when he said things like that.
When we weren’t together, we were on Skype Instant Messenger
almost all the time. We always had an IM going while we did our homework in the
evenings. I didn’t have texting at that point, and neither of us was big on
talking on the phone, so IM was perfect. We talked about everything, from how our days went to big life questions. We
discussed things like where we wanted to work when we graduated, what our ideal
company/organization was like, where we might want to live after we got
married, what places in West Michigan had good schools and safe neighborhoods,
how many kids we might want, what names we liked, and how much we wanted our
families to be involved in our kids’ lives. We talked about these things as if
marriage was a given. I don’t know how that happened.
We were 20 and 19. We were halfway through college. Neither
of us had a full-time job or any significant income. A stranger looking in would
have thought we were out of our minds, planning our entire future together when
we knew nothing of the world or life’s experiences. However, I was 100%
convinced that Nick was The One and that getting married was only a matter of
time. As a love-blinded 20-year-old, I thought I was ready any time. Several of
my friends had serious boyfriends with marriage in the near future, and I was
terrified of being left out. Or left behind. Nick, on the other hand, felt that
we should wait to get engaged until after I studied abroad. We both knew I had
to do a semester abroad for my program, and he said several times that he didn’t
want to be without his fiancée for five months. I didn’t love this plan, since
I wasn’t leaving for another 12 months, and then would have another 5 months on
top of that in Spain. I could see his point, though, and agreed that we would
have to wait. It certainly didn’t stop us from planning aspects of our wedding,
though.
---
As I’ve thought all of this over, I can’t pinpoint a moment
when the relationship started to go south. Looking back, it was a bunch of
little things that I ignored and minimized and rationalized. One event that
comes to mind is Thanksgiving that year. School-wise, I was doing fine. Classes
were a breeze (except for Chemistry I), the end of CC and the transfer to Calvin
were in sight, and I was just crossing off days. That Chem class was super
hard, and I had to get at least an 80.0% to transfer the credit to Calvin, but
everything else was just peachy. Nick was struggling with his classes. He was
failing one and close to failing two others. All three classes were in his
major, so he would have to take them over, and they were very specialized
classes, so only one professor ever taught them.
During Thanksgiving Break, I spent my time at his house
whenever I wasn’t needed for celebrations with my own family. That became a
point of conflict – Nick brought me to all of his family parties and was always
so excited to introduce me to people. I didn’t quite feel comfortable bringing
him to events with my extended family, though. I thought this was reasonable,
since we’d only been dating for 3 months at that point, conveniently forgetting
that, on some days, I was ready to marry this guy. I was afraid to bring him to
meet all of my family – on one side of the family, I would have been the first
person to ever bring a significant other to a family function. I knew he didn’t like to be the center of
attention, and I knew that my family would be all over him. I was trying to
protect him, but Nick saw it as me trying to keep our relationship a secret. He
asserted that I was ashamed of him or trying to phase him out of my life. I
chalked his reaction up to being stressed about his schoolwork, and didn’t
worry about it much.
Things kept sliding downhill into December. Nick’s grades
weren’t improving, no matter what he did, and failing at least one class was
quickly becoming a very real possibility. I tried to help him in any way I
could – I wasn’t much use, since I knew nothing about electrical engineering or
complicated math, but I figured that, at the very least, I could be of
emotional/mental support to him. It was hard to be around him at this time, partly
because he was so stressed out and frustrated, and partly because I didn’t know
how to make it better. I tried to help him see his situation a bit more
rationally, saying, “Nick, even if you do fail this class, the world won’t end.
It happens to people all the time. Nick, I’ll still love you even if you have
to take a class over again.” He was silent for a moment, then turned to me with
a scowl. He asked, “Andrea, have you ever failed a class before?” He knew that
I hadn’t, and I had to admit that I hadn’t. He turned back to his computer and
said, “Didn’t think so. You have no idea what I’m going through and you never
will.” He didn’t speak to me for the rest of that afternoon.
For some insane reason, GVSU decided not to post final
grades until after Christmas that year. This meant that I spent the bulk of my
Christmas vacation with an anxious and grumpy Nick. Wanting to be the
ever-loyal and supportive girlfriend, I spent most days at his house, even
though it was tense and difficult to be around him. Nothing I did could cheer
him up, and I felt terrible about that. My final grades were posted about a week
after final exams, and to my enormous relief, I passed Chem I with an 80.6%. I
could transfer it to Calvin and never have to take it again. Nick knew how much
I had been struggling with that class, helping me with the homework whenever he
could, and sending notes of encouragement when I had tests or big projects due.
I thought he would be happy to hear that I could transfer the credit and not
have to worry about it anymore.
He had the opposite reaction.
“How could you throw that in my face like this?! You know
what I’m dealing with right now! Seeing your passing grade just reminds me that
my grades won’t be passing. And now, thanks to you, I’m feeling even worse
about it.”
I’m not great with confrontation. I shut down. I
backtracked, I apologized over and over, and tried desperately to make things
right. I began to feel really terrible about myself, telling myself that I was
a terrible girlfriend and deserved to be treated that way. I know now that his treatment of me was unfair,
but at the time, I believed what he said to me and I accepted how I felt
afterward.
2010 started and I hoped that things would turn around. New
semester, new classes, new start. I forget now how that class ended up for
Nick, but I do remember hearing that more than half of his classmates failed or
were close to failing, and so he felt a lot
better about things. I was eager to forget about it and put it all behind us.
And things went pretty well for a while – I didn’t start at Calvin until the very
end of January because of Interim, which meant that I had lots of time to hang
out with Nick without having homework to focus on. I spent lots of evenings and
just about every weekend at his house, keeping him company while he did
homework and watching The Office. We both absolutely loved that show.
Once I transferred to Calvin, a lot of my free time got
sucked up with homework, projects, commitments outside of class time, and the
socializing that goes along with a school like Calvin. I was still living at
home, but I had a lot more to do, so I couldn’t go to Nick’s house as often as
I used to. He often talked about how he was lonely in his townhouse when I wasn’t
there. I asked him why he didn’t invite other friends over, or go over to their
houses to do homework and stuff. He told me that he didn’t have many friends,
and the friends he did have were the ‘school-only’
kind. “That’s why I want to spend so much time with you – otherwise, I’m just
sitting here by myself, lonely.”
It was around this time that I started as a hired musician
for a worship team at a church in Grand Rapids. I jumped at the chance to make
some extra money doing something I loved, but it meant that two of my Sundays
every month were spent doing that instead of attending church with Nick. I don’t
think he liked this new commitment I had taken on. I would still go to his
house for lunch afterward, but he kept saying that it just wasn’t the same and
that he really wanted to take advantage of every minute we could spend together
during the week. Minutes that were being steadily diverted to other things in
my life. Shortly after this, he started picking up weekend shifts at his job,
and it turned out that his Sunday shifts were opposite my worship team gigs. He
would be working when I wasn’t playing, and when he wasn’t working, I would be
playing guitar, and couldn’t come to church with him.
I began to feel really bad about all the things I had taken
on. Again, Nick asserted that I was phasing him out of my life and spending
less and less time with him. He told me he wished that I could cut down to once a month, or,
better yet, that money wasn't a concern and I could cut it out completely. He told me that he
hated sitting alone in church and that it was always much better when I was
there sitting with him. He warned me that if I couldn’t rustle up the time to
spend with him, he would break up with me and find someone who did want to spend time with him.
Pause. If we had
been rational about this, there were so many potential solutions. What if he
tried switching his work shifts to the same weekends I was playing? What if he
came to the Grand Rapids church on the Sundays I was playing? What if he sat
with his parents at his church? These should have been warning signs – why couldn’t
he be happy (or at least neutral) that I had found an easy $50 every month doing
something I really loved? Why wasn’t it enough that I spent Saturdays and
Sundays after church at his house on weekends when he didn’t work? Why was I
the one responsible for his social life and his dissatisfaction with it? Why
did the burden fall solely on me to ensure that he was getting social
interaction and not going crazy alone in his townhouse?
Unpause. Oh my gosh,
he’s going to break up with me. I can’t let that happen! I don’t want to be
dumped! I love him! There’s gotta be something I can do to make this better. He
means so much to me and I can’t lose him. In short, he had taken us out of
the rational and into the emotional with that threat of a breakup. He began to
use the “if you really loved me, you would…” any time he was upset about
something. And I fell for it – I believed him when he said that I must not love
him because I wasn’t doing whatever it was at the time. I was constantly on
edge about the status of our relationship.
My emotional state became directly tied to Nick’s emotional
state. I was afraid to celebrate anything until I was sure that he was in a
good mood. I was afraid to spend time with him, yet knew that I had to in order
to make him feel better. I came away crying almost every time we chatted on IM.
For those who don’t know me, this is pretty significant – I don’t cry at very
much. But now I was crying daily. I didn’t know that this was not normal for a romantic relationship. I was double-thinking every
single thing that came out of my mouth when I was around him, terrified that
the smallest comment would send him spiraling, and that it would be my fault.
Sometime around Valentine’s Day, Nick began to say things
like “this relationship is the only good thing in my life right now,” and “If
you break up with me, I won’t have anything left to live for.” Breaking up with
him had never even entered my mind –
remember, I was terrified that he
would break up with me! No matter how
many times I reassured him that I was in this for the long haul, he wasn’t
convinced. On days that he was really
upset, he would end many sentences with “we’re done.” For example, “say that to
me one more time and we’re done.” Or “if you don’t start liking eggs and bacon
and sausage, we’re done.” Some of them seemed jokey, but there was a layer of
seriousness underneath. Looking back, I can see how unbalanced this was – Nick constantly
expressing worry that I would break up with him, but, in the next breath,
threatening to break up with me over the smallest things. In the middle of it,
though, I didn’t see it. My pulse ratcheted up every time the word ‘breakup’
was tossed out and with that, we fell on the emotional side of things.
During my spring break from Calvin, things fell apart. I was
on IM with Nick, things were heading south quickly, and I could feel tears
coming. I opened up a new chat window with my best friend at the time and
started copying and pasting some of the things he had been typing to me. She
said to me, “I think it’s time for you end this. This is not a healthy
relationship.” She had expressed similar feelings before, when I would tell her
how I was feeling about Nick. This time, though, it clicked. She was right. I did have a choice here.
I ended things with Nick that same night over Skype. I KNOW. You’re not supposed to break up
with people over text or IM. But here’s the thing – I was crying so hard that
talking on the phone was out of the question, I was afraid that I would lose my
courage if I waited, and I was genuinely afraid to break up in person. I had no
idea how he would react. He had never so much as threatened to be physically
abusive before, but I was afraid that a breakup would set him off. After a few
minutes, he wrote back:
“Fine.”
Then he logged off.
I haven’t successfully communicated with him since then. I
sent a handful of texts, Facebook messages, and emails his way, but each went unanswered.
I even tried calling him, but he sent it right to voicemail. Even a year later,
I sent him an email saying that I was sorry about how I had ended things and
wondering if we could go back to being friends. I did truly miss him. He had a
new girlfriend by this time, and I figured that he would be more willing to
speak with me now that he was in a different place emotionally.
He never responded.
---
My intention in writing this is not to paint a terrible
picture of an ex-boyfriend. My intention is not to assassinate his character or
carry out some sort of vengeful vendetta. I still truly believe that Nick did
not say or do those things with the purpose of hurting me. I’m sure a lot of it
was borne out of stress from school and the fact that we had pulled each other
under so deeply and so quickly into a serious relationship. I know that I did
things wrong in that relationship too. I was very sarcastic and didn’t always
know when to stop. In the heat of joking and ribbing each other, I pushed buttons
that I knew he was sensitive about, like the fact that he was younger than me. At the same time, though, it has taken me
six years to understand that I was not responsible for all of the blame he laid
on me. I’m not looking for an apology from Nick. I’ve come to terms with the
non-closure of our relationship.
It is what it is.
Rather, my intention in sharing this story is to provide
information and help to people who may find themselves in a similar situation. I
am extremely hesitant to classify this relationship as ‘emotionally abusive.’ I
go back and forth – some days I’m sure it was abusive, other days I wonder if I
am overreacting. I do have a history
of overreacting, after all. At the very least, this relationship was unhealthy.
It was painful, it was scary, and it has changed me. For those of you who know
Nick or remember him, my intention was not to smash your perception of him.
This all took place six years ago, and I am sure we have both changed
considerably since then. He is not a bad person; of that I am confident. I
genuinely want him to be happy, and I hope that he has found that happiness and
the life he has always wanted with the woman he married.
I balance all of this with the knowledge and acceptance that
this was a relationship that went south and should have ended before we both
ended up so hurt. Can we hold both of these things? In one hand I hold a
painful experience that messed me up for a while; in the other hand I hold best
wishes and forgiveness for a man I used to know.
---
If you have resonated with any part of my story, let me
speak for a few moments about what I’ve learned in grad school and what exactly
made this relationship unhealthy.
1.
Someone who wants you to drop certain activities
or certain relationships in order to spend more time with them is not thinking
of your best interests. They may be trying to control your time and, by extension,
you.
2.
Someone who threatens to break up with you with
the slightest provocation is not taking your relationship seriously and may be
trying to manipulate you into doing what they want you to do.
3.
Someone who can’t be happy for you when good
things happen in your life is demonstrating that they want full control of your
emotions. They won’t show happiness for you and they will manipulate you into
thinking that you don’t deserve to feel happy about that good thing.
4.
If someone gives you the silent treatment or
freezes you out when they get upset, they are not resolving conflict in a
healthy way. Further communication is on their terms, instead of dealing
with things like adults.
5.
Someone who threatens to take their own life if
you break up with them is either truly struggling with depression and suicidal
ideation, or they are manipulating you into staying under their control. Either
way, you both need to find help.
Compared to most unhealthy and/or abusive relationships, I got out relatively
unscathed. I was physically safe, and the emotional healing was a matter of
time. But other people aren’t so lucky. If you start to feel unsafe in your
relationship, it’s time to talk. It’s time to reevaluate with the help of a
neutral third person. It might be time to leave, and that will be really hard. But you do not deserve someone who treats you well only when they feel like it. A
healthy relationship does not leave you begging for scraps of respect.
You are worth it. I promise.
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