New here, and exhausted.

[TiredOfNarcs]

So back in early February, I broke up with a long-term boyfriend only to realize later on that our "relationship" wasn't real at all.

Prior to meeting him, I'd been in a seriously fucked up relationship when I was very young with someone who was definitely too old for me - I still bear the scars from it to this day. It took three years of abstaining from relationships, only doing casual arrangements, and working on myself to finally feel like I was mentally and emotionally in a place to let myself open up to another person romantically again. Even during the "talking stage" with my recent ex, I kept mentally going back and forth on whether I was emotionally available enough to be there for this man who was telling me how much he loved and adored me and was falling for me, even after COVID hit and we had to be apart for months. The last thing I wanted to do was to lead him on, but I thought I felt a connection with him, and with some encouragement from my friends, I went for it and told him I was interested in us being together.

Little did I know, my own emotional availability was the least of the problems that lay ahead.

After we got together, it was kind of like a switch just...flipped. He stopped reaching out to me, so I would always be the one to initiate our hangouts and quality time together. When he did hit me up, it was because he wanted me over so we could have sex. When we went to events or parties together, no matter how casual, he would be more focused on "working the room" and networking, leaving me on my own and acting aloof with me when I did approach him. It felt like we weren't really being introduced as a couple or acting like one, and it attracted odd looks from others that would only serve to embarrass me and make me double down on my denial about his coldness and my efforts to strengthen our relationship. Sadly, I initially found this to be an okay situation, because it was such a stark contrast to my overbearing grade-A clinger of a previous boyfriend who would constantly accuse me of cheating if I didn't always stay with him and answer his many calls and texts immediately. So this new boyfriend's coldness seemed more like mere independence to me.

He always had something snide to say about people whose choices and lifestyles didn't perfectly align with his own - even if those comments were also applicable to me. A big one was drinking - he was quick to brand people as "alcoholics" for having more than a single drink in one night, and the only thing that would get him to stop his tirade was me pointing out that by his definition, I'd be one too. He'd go on tirades about a sweet friend of ours (who actually looks up to him) about how "annoying" and "weird" and "abnormal" the guy was because of his social awkwardness - right after I'd just opened up to him about being autistic myself. When a friend of mine was SA'd, he made comments to me about how she needed to report it to do the right thing, suggesting it was selfish and cowardly not to do so - right after I'd just opened up to him about how my last ex SA'd me and I didn't report it. Basically, although he didn't tend to directly berate me, he would bash me indirectly by making constant pejorative comments about other people that could just as well apply to me. He always had something nasty to say about our mutual friends, usually pretty undeservedly, and he'd often contemplate a bunch of ridiculously insensitive things to say or do to them that I'd have to talk him out of. He'd find it funny to inconvenience friends, especially the ones who lived with him as housemates - yelling at 5am to wake them up, making animal noises while our friend was in an important zoom interview for medical school - and as long as it didn't matter to him, no one else was allowed to be angry or resentful about it. He'd laugh at their anger, and it would often take me explaining how they feel before he'd "get" why his actions were wrong. I'd almost kind of become the protector of our friends, the person who could get through to him in intellectual terms why our friends felt the regular emotions they felt, the voice of reason who could curb some of his worst impulses.

But there was no one to "protect" me in the same way.

The thing about my ex is that he understands morality and emotions in a textbook sense, but it's a very superficial, surface-level understanding - if something isn't "technically" morally wrong according to a prescribed set of codes, he won't have any hesitation to do it. For example, he can recognize when I am embarrassed about something, but he can't make the connection between my embarrassment and my not wanting him to broadcast said embarrassing thing to groupchats with his friends. If I confront him about it, his defence is that I never outright told him not to air out embarrassing things about me to his friends - probably because it never crossed my mind that this was something he'd even consider doing. He can recognize that you're supposed to care about your loved ones, but has no clue how to do it beyond stating "I care about you/I love you" - and unfortunately, there was a time when those hollow words felt like enough for me. There was a night when I had to be put in an ambulance and rushed to the hospital and my friend had called him to let him know what was going on - his response was to nonchalantly say "ok" and that he was going to bed. No visit, no push to learn more about what was even going on or come over to help, no attempt to contact me - the situation didn't elicit any sort of emotion from him, and my friend was so taken aback by his callousness that she didn't have the heart to tell me until after we broke up. Now, is there any concrete moral obligation to act any differently to the way that he did? No. He didn't "technically" do anything wrong. He just didn't hold any emotional investment in what was a very scary situation for me at the time, because he doesn't experience the same depth and range of emotion that empaths do. My personal favorite anecdote has to be the time I got robbed and showed up in front of his house in tears before fainting - only for him to coldly tell me to "behave." His justification was that he didn't want me to embarrass myself, which on its surface seems okay, but only in a vacuum, where you don't consider that the realities of the situation would naturally elicit a sense of care and compassion from a "normal" person. But again, nothing "technically" wrong was done - there's no rule in the rulebook that says you have to feel the urge to be caring and kind to your partner during a time of such distress, just as long as your actions can be justified through some sort of prescribed morality. And there's no technical "rule" where you have to care about the things that are important to your partner - probably why I was made to feel stupid for caring about things that held no meaning to him.

Eventually I caught onto the fact I was putting in all the effort in maintaining our relationship, and tried communicating with him about how it hurt my feelings when he ignored me and it hurt knowing that if I didn't text first, there would be no communication between us. Instead of engaging in a dialogue about how our relationship could become more equal, he told me that if I was unhappy in our relationship that it wasn't fair of me to lead him on and that I should just end things then and there. And against my better judgement, I stayed, and the conversation just devolved into me having to reassure him that I still loved him and was happy being with him. After that, he'd have brief periods (usually lasting about two to three weeks) where he'd take more initiative - by that I mean occasionally text first and ask to make plans - and once that seemed to have won me over again, he'd revert straight back to his old overly-distant ways. He was very good with words when we were alone, figuring out all the right lines and all the right kinds of physical affection to make me feel loved and appreciated by him, but it only served to substitute any meaningful interest in me, my life, and my aspirations. I mistook his hollow words and gestures for genuine love, and I gave him far too much credit for merely not breaking up with me when I was going through depression, even as he was actively taking me for granted and constantly ignoring me. Even after a year of our relationship, he didn't have any desire to meet my family or get to know my friends, even though I'd gotten to know his friends very well, to the point where I considered most of them my friends as well. He refused to post about me at all. He still acted cold to me in public settings with our friends. He would tell me he felt like he wasn't good enough for me because of my comments about wanting him to take a bit of initiative in our relationship, basically trying to manipulate me into validating his behavior. He would promise again and again to stop taking me for granted, only for it to keep happening; then I'd say something about it, he'd admit to it and promise again that he would stop - the vicious cycle would continue.

But with each repeat of the vicious cycle, I'd become better and better at picking up on his behaviors, and I got better at not letting him get away with them. I went home for a month last winter break, and to put it succinctly, this period was downright traumatic for me due to a series of delicate family situations. I thought we'd been making a lot more progress with him being an equal partner in our relationship, but right when I needed his support the most, he all but ghosted me the entire month. He'd propose a time to call, only to no-show me again and again. I let him know that what he was doing was extremely hurtful, especially when he ignored the message of mine updating him on the shit that was going on in my life. It fucked me up immensely to know that not even my own boyfriend cared about me.

Then when I got back, a mere forty-eight hours after a really scary episode that caused me to lose memory of at least half a day, he decided to tell me that he no longer felt a romantic connection with me anymore. After letting all our close friends know first and putting them in an awkward situation with me, of course. I dumped him there and then, even though I still felt like I was the one discarded. He'd almost gotten away with still having me around as his "supply" in the form of a friendship he insisted on still having with me (even dangling the possibility of us getting back together), but spending a week apart from him gave me more hindsight - and many horrible, brutal realizations - about our relationship than I was prepared to handle. I smartened up and refused to have any form of a relationship with this man unless he owned up to the foul ways he treated me in our past and no longer took me for granted - I wanted nothing to do with him if our newfound "friendship" was anything like our relationship had been, where I was the one putting in all the effort and taking all the initiative and putting up with his insensitive behaviors. Of course, he was initially apologetic and promised not to behave like that anymore, offering to take me to dinner as friends. He must've imagined one dinner would just blind me to his behaviors as it had in the past, because during the dinner he began going back on the apologies he'd just  made, insisting he had done nothing wrong and that many of the things I'd talked about with him never happened. I pointed these discrepancies out to him during the car ride back, and upon realizing he could no longer manipulate me, the mask began to slip. Blatant gaslighting, abrasiveness, hostility, dismissiveness throughout the car ride home that only ceased once I began tearing up when we stopped by my house, in which he made one final effort to win me back by pulling me into a halfhearted hug - an effort that didn't last long when he realized he had a photoshoot and I was unceremoniously told to get out of his car.

The hostility ramped up again when I revealed to him that I no longer trusted him. See, he has this image of himself as this hero, this paragon of rationality and honesty (he wants to go into politics, go figure), and my revelation put a damper in that self-image. So what does he do? Bark at me to tell him the things he even did wrong, and that they didn't happen; or if they did happen, that they weren't his fault; or if they were his fault, that they weren't that bad and I was "making him out to be a monster" and blowing things out of proportion.

Finally I gave him an ultimatum: he could stop trying to dismiss the things I say, he could own up to his hurtful shit, and he could stop taking me for granted if he wanted anything to do with him anymore. He agreed...and then didn't reach out to me again for another week.

Next time I encountered him, we were at a party and he had already found a new supply, go figure. The kicker is that he met her during the event he told me he wanted to bring me to as his "plus-one" to show everyone that we were still cool, only to then tell me he didn't want to go to that event anymore. He did want to go - he just wanted to troll for new supply upon realizing I was no longer susceptible to his manipulations.

Well apparently I wasn't as unsusceptible to his manipulations as I'd thought - I'd gotten thoroughly drunk, and one of our friends told me that the new girl he was with had "been with half his friends" and that other friends were already talking shit. I've known and experienced enough judgement from past friends about rebounds to know how brutal that kind of scrutiny can be - especially when on a superficial level, this new supply was a blatant "downgrade" in terms of conventional attractiveness. It's the kind of shit that can get hung over your head forever when you're the subject of ruthless jokes about how "desperate" you became post-breakup due to impaired judgement (though I'm sure my experiences stemmed in some part from being a woman in a slut-shaming culture). Though I still distrusted my newfound ex, and I could have just joined in laughing at him, there was a part of me that still cared just enough about him to open my mouth with very drunken words of caution the next time we were alone.

And, of course, this was all the ammunition he needed to villainize me. He didn't want to pay attention to what his own friends were thinking and saying - he wanted to shoot me, the messenger, claiming I was lying about others talking shit and that I was crazy and being petty. His mask had finally come off in its entirety, now that I had foolishly given him the green light to be as mean and aggressive toward me as he'd been wanting to be for ages now. And I was left feeling absolutely horrified with myself about the disparaging comments I'd made about this new supply, whom I didn't even know, for the sake of someone who never deserved an ounce of my care, respect, or loyalty. There was nothing to do but to go NC with him after that incident - I didn't like the person I was becoming around him, stooping to his level and having it used to sic flying monkeys on me and justify his aggression.

I have no room nor time in my life for someone incapable of having any sort of regard for me.

It's just such a fucking slap in the face when I put in so much work and so many years into regaining my ability to trust and love again, only for me to fall into the arms of another narcissist who abuses it. His toxicity was such a polar opposite to the past narc's toxicity that I mistook it for love, and now I feel an idiot for having learned nothing from before.

Is it too much to ask for a partner who has empathy and loves me?

[xredshoesx]

welcome to the group,

i'm sorry you are finding yourself here in this situation with a partner-

to answer your question- it's not too much to ask for a partner with love and empathy, however it may be too much to ask from this person who has hurt you deeply over your time together.  another thought- no matter how much work we do on ourselves we're not bullet proof- folks like this man are out there and the deception is real. 

once you write it all out it becomes real,  and you seem determined to move on from this as a stronger, more resilient person who is not going to allow this kind of treatment in their life.   i know it hurts to see a replacement already but in some respects that means he'll leave you alone so you can move on without being harassed or stalked by him.   

no matter how much work we do on ourselves we are still human- so be gentle with yourself as you move forward.