I broke up with my ex (of almost a year at the time) a little over a year and a half ago, and for awhile things were fine and we agreed we were better off as friends. However, a few months in he started acting agressive and petty towards me with no apparent reason behind it. He’d blatantly ignore me or snap at me and when I asked what was wrong, he’d either just shrug or tell me that it was my problem I didn’t know what was happening. At this point, I asked him if he wanted to go our separate ways which seemed to piss him off more and he told me it was emotionally manipulative that I’d even THINK that and that I was blackmailing him. I took this as a sign to GTFO and slowly started distancing myself from him while our fights got worse.
We’d both been regulars at a local coffee shop for a couple years at this point (I’d introduced him to it) and almost all our mutual friends also hung out there on a regular basis, but after our blow up I started distancing myself from that place too. It hurt to let it go since it’d been a kind of safe haven when I’d moved to this city as a teenager and a lot of my social interaction came in the form of events there or eating there during my lunch breaks. I tried to return once a few months ago and was met with open apprehension from the other regulars and staff that I didn’t regularly talk to, with things like “how dare you show your face here again”. I was very confused and upset until one of the staff that I was friends with told me that my ex had been telling anyone who would listen that I was abusing him this entire time.
I blocked my ex and changed my social media handles but my friends said that they were hearing things from my ex that he couldn’t possibly know short of actually stalking me. Every person I talked to had two common threads in their stories: 1) that my ex’s reasoning for telling people about my abuse was that I had anxiety attacks around him and that by “making him deal with my mental health” I was being inherently abusive and 2) that he had actually been talking shit behind my back for far longer than we’d actually had problems in our relationship. When I investigated further, it turns out that even before we’d been in a relationship he’d been doing things like trying to get my close friends at the time to turn on me by saying that I was manipulative and trying to take advantage of them by getting close. One told me that the second I’d had to step out of the coffee shop because of an anxiety attack he’d sprung to telling everyone that I was obviously trying to guilt trip them and that “mental illness isn’t an excuse for abusive behavior”. He then started going off about how I was obviously faking it for attention (this was months before we started dating) and that I needed to be “locked up somewhere”.
I ran into him at a friend’s birthday unexpectedly and when he talked to me I tried to be civil with him and make it clear I wasn’t interested in “causing problems” in a futile attempt to get him off my back and to leave me alone. He started screaming at me that I’d been horrible and unreasonable to him since we’d met and the simple fact that I was alive triggered flashbacks. When my friend (the host) tried defending me and getting him to leave me alone, he started going off on a rant in front of everyone there about how I “would’ve done the same to him if he hadn’t done it first” and that I was dangerous. I just walked out and drove back to my apartment, and I haven’t really talked to anyone from that circle since the incident. I’ve been told that he’s since taken to posting about me online and brings me up in pretty much any situation that he can, blaming me for every personal problem and making barely disguised threats even though I haven’t so much as looked in his direction in months and go out of my way to avoid interaction with him.
SURELY there’s a way to handle this like adults? Every suggestion that I’ve gotten from people I know is that I should go back to the cafe and try to defend myself to strangers or to straight up confront him when honestly, I don’t want any part of this but ignoring him and waiting for this to blow over only seems to make things worse, especially if I want to keep any of the friends that I’ve made in this state, and fighting it is even worse!
tl:dr— After breaking up with my ex, he’s been telling pretty much everyone we know that I’m abusive and I found out that he’d been doing similar things before and during our relationship as well.
Submitted April 23, 2020 at 08:49AM by gummisquid https://ift.tt/3eKuth3
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