#fetlife feels like sex facebook and I kinda hate it

[neverendingford]

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[maskmakervega]

First entry: clearing my head on the end of the relationship

I don’t know if i’ll really use this much, but for now I’m just going to describe the issues with, and surrounding the end of my breakup. First and foremost, love doesn’t die. It can change, like energy, but it never goes away, once it is present it will always be there.  For her, lets just call her X, she seems to believe that love is the only thing a relationship needs, and if the relationship ends, the love was never real. This was a common thing she would either directly say or elude to after our numerous breakups. We got together in january 2019, but didn’t really start dating until around march, which is when she stopped pulling the plug on it. She was very indecisive at first, and considering we work together, it is both understandable and smart, we both had reservations... but both of us grew emotionally attached very quickly.  To say that she is both very harsh on herself, and hugely jealous, is accurate but underselling it as well. This became very evident after we started having sex, as she was intimidated by how many people I slept with back in my “confused and wanting to feel normal” days. She was also uncomfortable with the fact that i am attracted to certain aesthetics, and she doesn’t look that way, so she would always tell me that she isn’t my type and then let it get to her. This was a big bag of red flags that I should have run from, but I was really into her and figured she would learn that I am absolutely faithful and do not require someone to dress like a goth for me to be attracted to them. That did not happen, really ever, regardless of what she said. During the planning of her friends wedding (march?), they all decided to scour fetlife to see if they knew people on it, and she found my profile. It outlined what i find attractive, but also that I am not looking for anything but friendship, and that I hadn’t used the website in like 4 months. She saw that i liked a face picture of someone she knows, and that irked her (this person is goth). The profile description and lack of time i logged into it (before we dated) didn’t seem to matter, a week or so later she told me about that and that she couldn’t stop thinking about it, and how she isn’t right for me and she doesn’t know if she is happy. After hearing about that and me arguing with her for over an hour, I decided that this time I needed to break the relationship off. Clearly she wasn’t happy, and I didn’t like being told that a personal taste of mine is responsible for her feeling like she can’t be with me, something entirely out of my control and was never brought up to her.  X had returned my key and my things with a “sorry” card. I made the mistake of telling a mutual friend that i wanted her to make sure X is ok, and that shared the information and we started talking again. After 3 days we got back together. Up until this point, she really wanted to keep our relationship a secret from everyone at work, adamantly, but within a month or two a few people knew. Not a big deal. 

In april/may, basically her birthday, she was going on about how one of her friends thought i was dark and bla bla bla, The dude is in love with her and tries to get into her head. It kinda worked, because a few weeks later when she had a little get together where 5 of us drank and played cards, she got hammered. We ended up leaving and going to my place, and that same guy texted her the entire time, trashing me again. She drunkenly broke up with me that night, didn’t remember in the morning. That let to another fight and honestly i don’t remember much about it.   It was about May/June when she really went ballistic, jealousy, over my roommates girlfriend. I had known this person for 14 years, and we slept together maybe 3 or 4 times (this person only remembers once). She was a long time friend, and her long distance boyfriend needed a place to stay in the area, so i let him move in as a favor. I am an unnecessarily honest person, I can’t keep lies straight and i don’t like to lie, so i just don’t. I told X about all of that before he even moved in, and she didn’t seem to make that much of a deal other than calling her a whore and all that (not to her face). The roommate was almost always in his room, and his girlfriend really only came over on weekends.  Things seemed fine, until one day X started blowing up about the other chick at random. Talking about how i shouldn’t be friends with her, how she doesn't want her to come over, how shes a whore and she doesn’t trust her (by proxy me) This was a vicious fight, and it made no sense. To make a long story short, i broke up with her because of how ridiculously unreasonable she was being. Her jealousy caused 2 breakups at that point, and we had only been dating for a few months.  I can’t think at the moment, there were several more breakups, i think 6 more. She counts 1 as me breaking up with her, but really it was her drunkenly making a fool of herself, embarrassing me with this in an up-scale bar, telling me every horrible thing she can about me, and breaking up with me on my birthday. But, she doesn't remember any of it and expected me to just forgive her. What caused it? Well we went out to dinner and then went to a club i like, it was a really great day until 30 seconds after we left the club. 

Outside there were 2 chicks and she was telling me they were checking me out, and i said something along the lines of “eh it happens”. It kinda snowballed for the next few minutes, delicately, enough so we drunkenly walked into the nice bar and sat down to order our desert martinis. This is where she kinda goes off on a tangent and then brings up how she doesnt trust a long time friend that i talk to, because MONTHS before, she got onto my COMPUTER while i was in the shower, and read my old messages with this person. Old messages from before we even started dating, and saw that i had told her i missed her (we had a romantic connection but never met in person, again, this was a different 16 year friendship). I was not making the best judgement, and gave her my phone to scroll through my messages to that person. to the effect of “really? prove it, prove where i said i miss her”.   She scrolled through about 6 months of texts, going “oh you talk a lot huh?” and things of that nature, but she never found what she was looking for. She accused me of deleting the message, which i didn’t even know you could do. I told her she had major trust issues and was blowing everything out of proportion and cant hold it against me that i have female friends, and she said “yeah well i’m not a whore, like you”.  Then went OFF as we were leaving. This went on for about 20 minutes, as we are driving home and she is piss drunk. Its at this point she gets even madder and says she is done with me. We get back home about an hour later, i have to shake her to get her out of the car because she is so blackout drunk. she goes inside, takes my blankets and wraps herself in them in the middle of my bed, so i have to go sleep in the living room.  Justifiably hurt and pissed off, i made a jab on facebook about how great it is to be dumped on your birthday.  She sees this because one of her 4 friends that is in love with her, buzzes her asking to hang out, so we wakes up to the knowledge that people understand her to be single. Then she freaks out at me, i take the post down (its about 7am), only a small handful of people saw it, unfortunately they were coworkers. I didn’t think or plan it out, i was hurt and angry and it seemed like a good idea.  We get into a big discussion about it, and how she would never break up with me, i tell her about every detail from the night before and she doesn’t even remember leaving the bar. That made it worse, because i drank A LOT when i was with her. About a bottle of scotch every 10 days, and we would go to get beers and stuff sometimes. She loves her booze, a lot of people do, but she doesn’t pace herself.  Days went by with her trying to whittle me down and take her back, i think it turned into about a week by the end. When she had whittled me down to the bone with begging, i folded to an extent. I told her she needs to cut back on the drinking, and we got together.  This lasted a few weeks (toward mid september) until she got into the jealousy issues again. It was a friend on facebook, who posted a workout photo and they had lost a lot of weight. I liked the photo, and that turned into a fight. Between that, and her telling me she was feeling like i didn’t love her as much since the last breakup, i broke it off again for about another week.  I was going to have surgery in a few days and we started talking again, we made peace and agreed that as long as she started seeing a therapist we could try dating again, but i didn’t want to jump back into it super quickly, just hang out.  That lasted a good while,and she really seemed to be trying.  Bla bla bla, 2 breakups later we are where we are now.  The final breakup was January 10th.  We had been together, secretly, for about 6 weeks at that point.  It was secret because her friends all hated me by this point, and her roommate (her ex of 5 years) said he would kick her out if we started dating again. Yeah, she left that last part out, which really burned me. Her housing situation was dependent on her roommate not finding out we were together again, and that meant she had to spend less time with me.  Between the 2nd week of december and the first week of january, i saw her probably 8 days... we used to spend nearly every day together. I started seeing the pattern more clearly, and saw how this would not work. It was also about this time that my depression started to kick in again (huge theme that entire year, go figure), and i couldn’t help but over-analyze. You think quite a lot when there is deafening silence in your head, you feel nothing but empty, and the dark swallows you whole. I ended up doing what I should have done months ago, which was to be good to myself and take some much needed space.  I needed to look out for me, because this relationship was making me feel unwanted and depressed.

The relationship was a roller coaster every few weeks, of whether she would freudian-slip some jealousy (that she said she fixed in therapy), or seem to withhold affection and time alone because of reasons she wouldn’t share (usually relating to those incidents). I couldn’t continue question myself because she’d question me, i couldn’t feel like i was nothing but a warm body to cuddle up next to. We didn’t have the ability to get into long conversations, she was afraid of them, and it made me feel a growing divide between us.   At the one month mark of the breakup she was still trying to hang on. We talked about trying to hang out as friends, and she swore thats all it would be, but within 2 days she completely changed her tune and said she didn’t want to hang out unless it was to move toward getting back together. As of last week (valentines day) she had to leave work because someone decided to give her anonymous flowers and she thought it was me. She started messaging me and i had to shutdown what she was thinking, which made her cry and she left for the day.  This has not been an easy process, because i deeply care for X. Although we had a lot of good times, i am a realist and to many, a pessimist, and looking back I see more bad than good. Distrust is a demon that must be slain to make a relationship function, and that is why ours was so dysfunctional. Hell, i think i have trust issues too now at this point. A lot of detail has been left out here, I don’t know if she will ever find this so I left a lot of personal and identifying details out, many of which are crucial to why the relationship failed so many times... but, i also don’t think anyone will read this.