- Date posted
- 20h
Wondering if my ex was abusive
I’ve been thinking a lot about my first boyfriend a lot the past day or so and I’m really anxious right now We started dating in the fall of 2022 when we first started college. The whole thing started off pretty quickly, like we moved in and not even 2 weeks later we were dating. Soon after this he began to be pretty mean to a girl we knew of and a few times I had tried to get him to lay off on his comments about her a little bit and he would always have an excuse to justify why it was OK that he did what he did and would be rude towards me for saying something as well, like it was ridiculous that I would say something about it. As time went on this type of behavior continued but focusing on other people, and he would find more and more things to say about people behind their back. If I didn’t support his opinion I was treated like I was being absolutely ridiculous. About 6 months in we became sexually active and it quickly became something that he would use against me, by saying that it made him depressed to not do things with me and that it was the only thing that made him feel OK because he was so miserable all the time. He went as far as to say that it physically hurt if he were to get aroused and not get to orgasm, and sometimes if I decided I didn’t want to engage in anything more after we had started to do things together he would get angry and make me feel bad for not continuing. After we broke up in the spring of 2024 I started being friends with some other people I had lost contact with through the duration of the relationship and they all told me they were glad I was out of it. I was told that it seemed like we just argued all the time, and I found out from my ex’s former roommate that he used to call his friends and talk about how exhausting I was to be around because of my mental health conditions. I am now friends with this roommate, but at the time was only acquainted with because my ex would tell me bad things about him that I’ve come to find just aren’t true. The relationship ended right after our spring break in 2024 when I had a bad situation with my brother because of a toxic home life that I have since moved out of. When I went to my ex for support, he told me that I was to blame for what my brother did to me and then ghosted me for a week before reaching back out to tell me he was done with our relationship. I was generally just very unhappy through the entire relationship and was embarrassed to bring him around people because I was scared that he would be rude and say inappropriate things around them. I have been wondering if this type of behavior was actually abusive? As I said it’s been on my mind and it occurred to me that it feels like he might have been manipulating me but I don’t know for sure. I’d feel guilty putting a label as severe as abuse onto someone if that’s not truly what was happening.