Hi all, posting from an alt as my ex knows my main account and I don’t want him to have the satisfaction of knowing I give 2 shits about him anymore- because once I hit submit on this, I’m done thinking about him. After this I plan to peace out of here for a while to work on myself instead of dating. Strap in if you plan to read the whole thing, it’s long. You can skip to the tl;dr for my lessons learned.

In my late 20s/early 30s I was the archetypal "strong independent woman". I was chased, I did not chase. I was successful at work (still am). I was confident, I had hobbies and good friends and honestly a pretty great life.

Then I took a new job in a new city, because it paid more and got me closer to my family (what I felt was the only missing piece in my life). My new job had me traveling a LOT (>80%) and I suddenly didn’t have many friends, or much of a social life, and it goes without saying my dating life was shite with all the travel. I dated a coworker, it went poorly, then I resigned myself to singledom and few friends because of my (very well paying!) job.

Then one day, a rare Friday I was actually in town, my roommate set me up on a blind date with a friend of a friend. It had been ages since I got laid so I figured why not. He wasn’t super attractive, fit but short with thinning hair, and didn’t have a great job (personal trainer). But I took him home and it turned out he was GREAT in bed. Months later we met up again when I happened to be in town, and suddenly we started texting a lot more and spending all my weekends at home together. He was fun to be around, was happy to introduce me to his friends and family, and again great in bed. He made time for me. At the time this was all I was asking for. Pretty bottom of the barrel standards, eh? The sort of thing ANY guy should be able to do if you’re dating him. We got close super fast and we exchanged “I love yous” only a month or two after we started hanging out seriously.

During this time, mid-2019 as we’re early into dating, I start finding out some serious shit about him as he slowly lets it trickle out. He still lived with his parents – why? Because he OD’d a few years back and was found brain dead in his home by his ex, who stayed with him long enough for him to leave the hospital and more or less get physically back to normal before she peaced out. She left because he was still seriously depressed (the reason he OD’d in the first place) and just had a shitty outlook on life. His depression took over his life to the point where he had to quit his job and move back home. He was still struggling with that depression when I met him in early 2019, but he managed to mask it long enough to hook me in, and he flatly refused to get therapy for it (therapy doesn’t work honey, it’s just bunk!). He still struggled with addiction issues, to the point of stealing my Adderall which I relied on at the time to keep up with my demanding job, then when I threatened to break up he cried and moaned until I took him back and it took me FOREVER to force him to replace the Adderall he’d stolen. He didn’t work on this addiction issue, instead he expected me to buy a lockbox for my meds because he couldn’t control himself. Then he figured out how to sneak into that lockbox, when I caught him again, it was now MY fault that I didn’t secure the meds well enough. He finally got a real job, very low paying due to his poor employment history, but still didn’t move out of his parents house because he was desperately broke and needed to save his money. Yet I watched him spend money on weed (TONS of money on weed), spend money ordering out food (but it’s for you, too, honey!), spend money on over-expensive gym memberships he really didn’t need when there were far more affordable options. Through this I was also spending tons of money – on him. I bought him a brand new iPhone for his birthday. For Christmas I got him the latest Airpods (I myself was still using the last generation ones). I supplied the majority of the weed – he never had to pay for anything, if he felt like it he would buy some on his own to share. I even paid entirely for a post-Christmas beach vacation in Laguna Beach, I booked at room at the Ritz, paid for room service, paid for weed to get delivered to our room; he spent the whole thing sleeping in our hotel room and I think we maybe had sex once or twice. You’d think I would’ve seen the obvious but nope.

During this time, I was still traveling the majority of the week, when I came home we’d spend 100% of our time together. He was a pretty supportive during these times – he would pick me up from the airport, he would cook for me and would help clean up if I cooked, he would help around the house. He would make a point to work with me to plan fun things for us to do together. He bought me flowers a couple times. The sex was frequent (well, frequent enough – once or twice on the weekends, but hey we hardly saw each other). He would pay attention to me. I felt like I mattered in his life. FWIW this one paragraph basically sums up why I stayed with him, in case you are wondering. This really was all I was asking for. I was completely ok with being the main provider, I just wanted to be with someone who made me feel like I mattered to him. Pretty low standards, eh? This went on for the entire second half of 2019.

So we’re 6 months in or so and we’re talking marriage. Fast forward a month and he’s telling my parents he’s going to ask me. Fast forward a month or two, it’s early 2020, and he’s proposing, with a small ring (it’s all he can afford) while sitting on a park bench outside my sister’s house, in a proposal that was so poorly planned and executed it was embarrassing to tell others the story. What happened to a romantic surprise on top of a mountain? What happened to a long romantic speech that would sweep me off my feet? It took us less than 5 minutes and was so anti-climactic and such a disappointment compared to my dreams that when we went to bed that night, I snuck out of bed to go to the bathroom for a quiet cry.

Why did I put up with all this, you ask? The dialogue in the back of my head went like this:

  • You’re in your 30s! No one wants a woman that old. Especially since you don’t want kids. Finding someone who wants you will be like finding a needle in a haystack.

  • No one is perfect. You can’t expect perfection, especially at your age. At your age you’ll be getting leftovers and semi-broken people.

  • You’re not perfect yourself. Never mind that you’re working on yourself, you can’t expect perfection from someone else if you can’t deliver it yourself.

  • You work too much to date anyway. It would take way too much work to replace this guy. Be happy you at least found something.

But it doesn’t stop there. I wanted to move to another city, and his work supported him transferring to a city we both wanted to move to. We got there at the end of Feb 2020, then – coronavirus hit. Quarantine came down 2 weeks after we moved there and suddenly we were stuck with each other 24/7.

Up til this point he’d been living with his parents for several years and was quite used to having his every need provided for – he was a true momma’s boy. He hadn’t had to take care of himself or really do chores beyond occasionally doing his own laundry when he REALLY needed to. On top of that his job started to place more pressure on him, and since up til that point he’d had zero success in a professional role in his entire life, he tied his entire sense of self-esteem to success at that job and made success there a top priority in his life – above all else, including me. For reference, I was making 4x as much as him in take home pay. I was the primary provider, and he told me that rankled him. I was paying the majority of rent (~70%), buying most of the groceries, paying all the bills. I bought most of the weed we smoked, though at this point I started to realize he was bleeding me dry and started to designate “my” weed (bought by me) from “his” weed (bought by him). This made him pissy and upset, because we’re engaged and what’s mine should be his too! Yet he had zero interest in budgeting, or trying to cut back, to save MY money. Instead he wanted to become as successful as me, so he could take care of me – he wasn’t really that ok with me being the provider.

But my job slowed down during quarantine – although I was still making the same pay, I had to work ¾ of the day instead of the full day. He just assumed that with this free time, I should be able to also take care of everything around the house too. He rarely did his share of the chores, and wouldn’t bother to clean up after himself. He was working typically 10-12 hours a day, sometimes more, which I completely understand is tough because I’ve been there too – but I never lapsed the way he would. Yet when I would ask him to clean up after himself, at a minimum, it would turn into a fight because he claimed he just couldn’t do it. I was expected to live in his filth, or clean it up if I didn’t like it. He wanted to adopt a puppy, so we did, but again the little guy became entirely my responsibility. Another example – I would often go out to do errands and pick up groceries, on my own (pandemic, I had free time, w/e). I would come home with armfuls of groceries. I would have to explicitly ASK him for help to bring in and put away the groceries. Even when I asked him, he would put away a couple things, then wander off because he “forgot” he was still supposed to be helping me, even though I am clearly still working and the table is still clearly full of groceries. I mean just dumb shit.

The cherry on top is that between the stress of his work, and the stress I was apparently adding to his life because I was “nagging” him to clean up his own shit, we stopped having sex. But hey, it had been months (since about a month before we got engaged actually) since he’d bothered to put effort into sex at all. Foreplay, if it happened, was 30 seconds or less. He was reluctant to use lube too. Sex itself was maybe a minute, 2 tops, of him pumping until he was done. He didn’t touch my clit, in spite of EVERY time we had sex I would make a point to physically grab his hand, put it on my clit, and tell him to touch me, while I was blowing him or touching him to excite him so we could have sex. I even told him, on several occasions, that I needed more foreplay. Guess how often he initiated foreplay even after I told him multiple times I liked it and was being about as bluntly direct as I could be that I fucking wanted foreplay? HAHAHA I don’t think I need to tell you.

We (I) kept trying though. We fought almost daily. He stopped touching me. He never cuddled me, rarely hugged or kissed me, and buried himself in his work. He’d spend the first 2 hours of his day in bed on his phone, then go to the office for 8-10 hours (even though his work would have let him stay home during the pandemic - but no he “needed” to get out of the house), then when he came home he wanted to be left alone to “decompress” for another 2 hours while he sat on his phone again (I was expected to walk the pup, prep food, and just wait around for him to be available during this). If I was lucky after all this, he’d spend 30 minutes to an hour eating food and telling me about his work. He never asked about my work. He never asked about my day. I would try to tell him details, but he’d be back on his phone while I talked, and when I would bring updates to stories I’d previously told him, it was clear he didn’t remember what I’d told him in the first place. Yet I was his professional counselor, I gave him so many tips on how to succeed at work (remember he was someone who’d never been professionally successful and I had a stellar and successful career). I was still doing the majority of the chores around the house. I was pouring myself into this relationship and he couldn’t be arsed to talk to me, or do dishes, or fuck, even TOUCH me.

Was I bitter and angry with him? Yes. He made me feel guilty constantly for my frustration. It would go like this – he did a shitty thing. I got upset and frustrated. He got angry with me for being upset. I would apologize. He would haughtily accept my apology…and never recognize my very valid frustration, would never change, would never acknowledge his contribution to the situation. It took me a long time to realize that fucking Mother Theresa would’ve gotten frustrated with his dumb ass. My reaction was completely understandable.

Through all this, I was sinking into depression. I’d lost 20 lbs and I was already skinny before all this started, I was barely able to sleep 5 hours a night, and my body literally started falling apart. After a scary brush with my health, I realized that I was slowly killing myself by staying in the relationship. At this point I had begged him over and over to get therapy for himself. At a minimum I wanted couples counseling. When I’d tell him this, he would shrug and say he didn’t have the time/money for therapy for himself (plus he thought it “wouldn’t work”), but that, ok fine, sure why not, we could do couples therapy. I realized he was expecting me, once again, to do all the work – find the therapist, schedule the appt, pay for it. I realized this was going to be my life, forever. I was forever going to do the work in this relationship. It would be more than a full time job and if I was lucky I might get occasionally tepid sex with no foreplay and maybe a half-attentive listener a few times a week. I realized I could literally pay someone to do this role and it would cost me less than supporting his worthless ass.

I realized if I did not get him out of my life, the stress would literally kill me.

What finally broke me was when we had to re-sign our short-term lease from when we’d first moved. I realized that I was tying myself to another year of potentially living with this guy. I couldn’t take it anymore. I told him it was over. I broke up with him and told him I wouldn’t be signing a new lease, and that he needed to find another place to live within the next month or so (when our lease ended).

It doesn’t end there sadly. Instead I went full simp: At this time thanks to my health issues, I badly needed help with some things around the house that I simply physically could not do. I offered to pay him for this help. I did need the help but I also pitied him – he was going to struggle with money and I knew he needed some kind of help there. He agreed, then when we ended up fighting between the time I paid him and the time he was to do the work, he took my money and didn’t help me. I dunno what to even say here except ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At this point he is blocked everywhere I can think of. I hope to god I never see him again. My health is getting better. I’m finally eating and sleeping again. I’m searching for a therapist and “auditioning” to find one that can replace the amazing therapist I had in my old city. My pup is my life and has been my strongest supporter, he is awesome and is literally the only positive thing I can say my ex brought to my life. If not for that pup, I would say the last year of my life was not just wasted but actively damaged by this human being.

Tl;dr:

  1. It doesn’t matter how old you are, or what you look like, or how badly you want a relationship. I promise you a bad relationship is worse than no relationship at all. Even non-abusive relationships can result in unintentional harm to yourself. The pain and anxiety of trying to force a relationship that isn’t working, can be truly awful. Do you love yourself? Because you should. And if you love yourself, you wouldn’t put yourself through that. Do you have a sister or brother or friend who you love? If you saw them in your relationship, would you tell them to GTFO?

  2. You have to be crystal clear with yourself on your standards. But expecting your partner to be a generally good person and have their shit together is not a “standard” for a relationship. It’s a hygiene item. It’s something anyone who is dating should be expected to do. It’s not a plus, it’s a base expectation. Always remember to differentiate what are “hygiene” items, and what are items that would help you differentiate between who you want to date and why. Examples of hygiene items – can he clean up after himself? Is he nice to other people? Is he nice to you? These aren’t PLUSES. These are the BASICS. A “plus” is –Is he a good cook? Is he really fit? Does he have a good sense of humor (for you)? Yes these things are my “standards” and I think they should be standards for everyone, but it is NOT a “standard” to expect someone to do their own fucking dishes. That’s a hygiene item. It’s ok if he is working on some of the “pluses”, some people may disagree here but it is not a dealbreaker to me if a guy is between jobs, or has a low-paying job (to me, I’d rather have a passionate artist than a soulless millionaire), or even if he lives with his parents. Is he actively trying to improve himself? Is he capable of asking for and getting help to improve himself? Is continuous self-improvement a priority for him? THOSE are important markers. I’ll never judge someone for getting shat on by luck or a bad economy, but I WILL judge someone who settles for a job that makes them miserable and never really tries to improve their lot in life, or does dumb shit because they won’t take the time to ask for help or advice and actually act on it. Because here’s the thing: their misery, and their shite approach to life, WILL eventually rub off on you or at least start to detrimentally affect your life.

  3. It doesn’t matter how old you are. It doesn’t matter what you look like. Never sacrifice these standards. Before I met him, my standards had been carved in stone because of tears I’d shed in previous shitty relationships in my 20s. Yet as I started to get older, I thought – if you want someone, you have to lower your standards, because you yourself will need others to lower their standards to love you. What a self-defeating, self-deprecating, shitty way to look at myself. I love myself. I will never shortchange my standards again.