I can't tell if my (22F) boyfriend (22M) is gaslighting me, or if I've lost my mind and he's really the victim.

I'll call him Jake. Me and Jake have been dating for three years. Some of it was long distance, but we spent all of our free days and holidays together and even introduced each other to our families. We both made some dumb mistakes in the beginning, but we tried to forgive and forget and everything was great for a while.

Then about a year and a half into our relationship I started noticing some red flags, but here's the catch: Jake claims these events never happened. A few examples:

• I wasn't comfortable with doing certain sexual things, so he would compare me to his exes and tell me I was lazy and just coming up with excuses and that I didn't care about his pleasure.
• He often called me demeaning nicknames because he was a 'dom'. I asked him nicely to stop many times, but he would just double down and call me a sla*e or submi**ive on purpose (excuse the weird censorship, I don't know if this is allowed), because (according to him), I was trying to change his personality by telling him what he could and couldn't say and he wasn't okay with that. There are many examples of this in our WhatsApp conversations. He only stopped after I asked him not to speak to me until he fixed this behavior and we went without contact for a week.
• He would constantly breach my boundaries and accuse me of being childish when I reacted. We went camping once and I told him I was scared to death of big spiders. So he brought the biggest one he could find into the tent just to scare me and then accused me of ruining his parents' tent and being a spoiled brat, since they had to work hard to be able to afford it and I was willing to ruin it because of a spider (I tried to unzip it and get out). This is just one of many examples.
• I told him about a previous bad experience and asked him to stop doing certain things in bed for a while until I figured it out. I was in a bad place overall, but he promised not to do what I was asking for. Then after I agreed to have sex with him, he basically cancelled the promise and said he only promised to stop because he felt like I was manipulating him. Again, there are several messages in our WhatsApp conversation in which he admitted to this, but he claims it never happened and I just made it up for attention. If I show him the messages, he'll just say it's bs or something to that effect.
• He basically gave me an ultimatum: either I'd agree to have a threesome with him, or he'd break up with me. Then another one: either I'd have sex with him three times a day, or it's 'not for him'. I also had to 'make up' for the time we spent apart from each other.

I was in multiple bad relationships when I was younger, but somehow they were all more straight-forward than this. I feel so lost and I'm almost convinced that I've lost my mind and am this horrible, emotionally abusive girlfriend that's just trying to control him. I KNOW that every time I said a mean joke by accident or called him a nickname he didn't like, I apologized and made sure it wouldn't happen again. I KNOW that I never tried to hurt him on purpose. But I'm so scared that I was mean or cold while trying to make sure that he wouldn't breach my boundaries again and that I gave him a reason to act this way towards me. If I point out that he's admitted to certain things in our chats, he'll either laugh at it or deny everything. I've tried asking him to explain specific messages in which he admitted to stuff, but he won't. I don't know. I'm scared that I've hurt him and this is just him reacting to my abuse. I'm scared that I'm the narcissist and am just making myself feel like a victim. I've asked him to go to counseling with me multiple times, but he won't because he doesn't want to pay for it.

It might seem clear to everyone reading my post, but it's such a labyrinth of emotions when you're the one inside the relationship. I know I have acted on my emotions many times (i.e. left the conversation when he told me I was acting like a b*tch; called him a narcissist; told him that he basically coerced me; called him nicknames back when he would stop calling me a sl*ve) and that I'm telling the story from a biased point of view and he would definitely tell it differently. Yet I'm incredibly afraid of losing him and whenever I stand up for myself and tell him what I think really happened, I just feel like running back and apologizing and giving him a hug.

So I guess my question is: how can I navigate this mess? How can I establish firm boundaries without being mean to anyone? How can I stop questioning what really happened when I have it all written down and there are literally hundreds of messages to support it?

TL;DR: Questionable things happened with bf, he claims I'm making everything up.

Submitted May 29, 2021 at 04:05PM by Ok-Fall-7155 https://ift.tt/3c57FsF