Hi all. I suppose I’m writing this because there are so many posts on here describing men’s experiences in relationships once they fall into red pill thinking (which are absolutely valuable!), but not as many from the perspective of someone who has been on the other side of that relationship. I figured I’d share my experience being with someone who was red pilled, and the toll that it took on me, in the hopes that it will perhaps drive someone still struggling with this way of thinking to have more empathy for the people they subject to red pill tactics.

I met my ex in college as part of the same large friend group. We didn’t start dating until after college, but I did feel an immediate spark and chemistry with him unlike I’d really ever felt before. After college he lived across the state from me, but we’d see each other when we reunited with our college friends. We started hooking up, and then making trips to visit each other, and eventually dating. By the time we started officially dating, I was completely in love with him. I loved how he was so up for making fun experiences happen with me, like backpacking the Grand Canyon on a whim (we both really loved the outdoors), or even just sharing a bottle of wine and wandering across the city at night and seeing where our legs took us. He was a musician and I loved how passionate he was about music, at times I’d see songs or even his own guitar bring him to tears and I thought nothing was more beautiful. He could be so goofy with me and we’d just laugh for hours over nothing. I saw the way he loved and cared for his younger siblings and swooned. I adored how we could spend hours and hours talking about anything and everything, from our aspirations, to our childhoods and families, to politics, to music, and more. The first couple of months felt so blissful, he was by far my favorite person to spend time with.

Our first big fight came a couple months in, when we were talking on the phone and he’d been drinking (more than I realized). He ended up asking me how many people I’d slept with, and when I told him, he flew into a rage. I won’t get into all the details, but it was scary and so incredibly hurtful, as he said things like “everything I thought I knew about you is a lie,” as though the number of people I’d slept with somehow negated everything else about the person that I am, and all the things I thought he liked about me, including my perspective on the world, my ambitions, the way I strive to care for the people in my life, our common interests, etc. It all seemed to go out the window. The next day, he seemed regretful of how he’d lost it, and we talked it through and he reassured me that he loved me and didn’t care, and I believed him. But it really never went away, and many times later in our relationship it really felt like he hated me for having a sexual history before him (of course, he also had a sexual history before me, but he never owned up to that hypocrisy).

From that point on, the relationship was extremely tumultuous. He would be extremely hot and cold and got mad at me, seemingly out of nowhere, all the time. He started withholding affection and became harder and harder to please. I felt more and more like I couldn’t do anything right, like no matter what I tried to do to show him my affection and devotion, it wasn’t enough. When we’d argue, he’d say the most belittling and hurtful things, and never apologize for them even when I explained why it hurt me. I wanted so badly to get us back to the place we’d been in at the start of our relationship, and believed that if I could just be the perfect girlfriend I could convince him to trust me and to treat me with respect and have disagreement in a healthy way, but it just got worse and worse.

Sometimes, we’d have conversations that would just confuse the hell out of me. The way he’d talk about men and women’s relationships and what women wanted or how men were valued in society just didn’t make any sense to me and my experience of the world. It all seemed so formulaic in a way that didn’t account for the vast diversity of human experience. I pushed him to think about all the people and relationships he knew and asked if they could really all be defined in this transactional way--the ones in my life certainly couldn’t. He’d use weird terms like “emotional tampon” to describe people sharing their feelings and providing emotional support for the people they care about. He’d insist that men needed to be emotionless in order to be valued, disregarding the fact that I’d always felt closer to him when he showed more vulnerability and opened up to me as a confidant for his emotions. He’d tell me that all women wanted to end up with someone with more money than them, which drove me crazy because I thought he knew me better than that to say I’d be like that too. (He didn’t have a job for most of our relationship, and I was making a sweet salary at a tech company, and that had never once come up. Nor had I ever asked or expected him to pay for anything for me and had in fact bought him expensive gifts and sometimes picked up grocery tabs when I went to visit him since I knew I was in the better financial position.)

I came across r/TheRedPill and all of a sudden all of these wild conversations made sense. He had used so much of the exact phrasing and terminology they used, I suddenly understood where he got it from. I started reading the subreddit and saw so many people validating his worst impulses and insisting that women are never, ever to be trusted, and that all of our behavior can be attributed to certain infallible biological “rules.” Reading all of that stuff profoundly scared me and depressed me, to see so many people viewing women in this way. I internally decided that I wanted to do my best to prove all of those ideas wrong, and to pull him out of that hole (spoiler: did not work).

The most frustrating thing about dating someone who buys into all that crap is that they refuse to believe you are capable of accurately articulating your own needs, wants, and feelings. Women don’t know what they actually want, according to TRP, therefore anything I say to contradict his opinions is immediately moot. Certainly emotional self-awareness is something everyone must work towards, and some people are painfully unaware of what drives them, but in order to have a healthy relationship you HAVE to believe your partner when they tell you what they need and feel. I can tell you with absolute honesty that the moments where he broke down in front of me (he once called me in a frenzy at 2AM telling me he missed me and needed me and needing me to talk him down) made me feel nothing but compassion and love for him, but he’d insist that he couldn’t be vulnerable or I’d lose interest. I can also tell you that I was so madly in love with him I never even remotely thought about other men in comparison to him while I was with him, yet he told me that he knew I was constantly sizing him up in comparison to other men, and he’d constantly suggest that I would cheat on him (side note, he had cheated on former girlfriends, not been cheated on). I’d tell him that it would really mean a lot to me if he apologized after saying or doing something he knew was hurtful to me, that it would make me feel so much better about the place we were in after a conflict, but he would not take my word for it.

I want to be clear that many of the tactics advocated for on the red pill fall under the textbook definition of emotional abuse. And while these tactics may “work,” meaning they may succeed in getting someone to do everything you want them to do, or preventing someone from leaving you, they do so at enormous emotional and psychological cost to the person you direct them towards. I was so scared of his temper or his coldness, and wanted so badly to win back his affection, that I adjusted to everything he wanted me to do, even if I didn’t think it was a reasonable expectation for a relationship. I basically ghosted my guy friends who were not already his friends because of how cold/suspicious he’d acted about such innocent interactions with them (fortunately I have since been able to rekindle some of those friendships). He once mentioned that he felt like he was catering to me when I came to visit him, so I made sure to find ways to cater to him and never asked him for anything. He would get angry if I was ever out with friends and didn’t answer my phone or if my phone died or even if I just went to sleep and he thought I was out, so I made sure that I was always reachable, and always texted him when I got home. So sure, what he did was “working,” but that is in no way, shape, or form how a relationship should function.

Over the course of our relationship, my self-confidence was fairly destroyed. To have someone you love and care about so much make you work so hard for their affection, refuse to trust you, belittle you, act like you have a defect, it really can crush you. To not know whether you are going to get the kind and loving version or the cold and hateful version from one day to the next, it will drive you crazy. I became constantly anxious, constantly exhausted. I felt that I was walking on egg shells around his suspicions and temper. I cried constantly. People in my life were really worried about me. For a while, I really held on to the belief that I could make the relationship healthier, could win his trust and respect. Later, though, I knew that that would never happen, but was so emotionally exhausted that the idea of breaking up with him felt impossible. And even in those bad times we’d still have good moments, we’d still sometimes go on amazing trips or have moments of real bonding and connection, and I was so scared to lose that.

We finally broke up because I called his bluff. He was stonewalling me, telling me he didn’t really care about me that much, that being with me felt like more of a chore than anything, so I finally found it in myself to tell him that if he felt that way we should break up, and amazingly was able to stick to it (I had started going to therapy a couple months prior because of all the relationship stress and it helped me find that strength). I was heartbroken for many many months, but I finally got to the point where I realized, truly, how much better off I was. How much less stressed, how much more energy I had, how much improved my relationships with everyone else in my life were, how much more confident in myself I felt. I will be working very hard to ensure I’m never in another relationship like that.

TL; DR Sorry for this long post. I just really hope that anyone who reads this and is still struggling with a red pill mindset recognizes that we’re people too, in all the same complex ways that men are, and that the misogynistic shit TRP encourages is so, so harmful to the women it touches.