I've been hanging out with this one guyfriend of mine a lot lately, mostly because I am anti-social as fuck until someone else actually takes the initiative to ask if I want to hang out, and he's pretty much the only one who ever bothers to do that.
He's kind of your typical privileged sort when it comes to a lot of things. This bothers me, but he normally doesn't say anything bad enough to seriously piss me off, so I just kind of subtly inject my feminist ideas into conversation whenever it comes up and hope some of it will rub off on him by osmosis or something.
But yesterday I was hanging out with him and he was telling me a story about how one of his exes dumped her fiancée recently because he "wasn't taking enough initiative with the wedding planning" or something like that. He mentioned that that was a bullshit reason to break up with someone, as traditionally the woman does the planning. I didn't entirely disagree, but emphasized the "traditionally", and brought up that since he only heard the info second-hand that there could have been other aspects to why she left him that she just wasn't eager to bring up. "Maybe he was abusing her or something," I said. "You don't know the whole story."
"Well, they were long-distance, so he couldn't have been physically abusing her."
"Well, there's always mental/emotional abuse."
"Yeah, but you have to be pretty stupid to put up with someone who's doing that, and I don't think she's the type."
"...What?"
"I said--"
"No, I heard what you said. But seriously, what?"
I don't really remember exactly how it went from there, but since I've alluded to the fact that I've been in abusive situations before he basically backtracked, and it ended with me suggesting that maybe I was just naive to have put up with it and of course I would never be dumb enough to get into that situation now (because I am perpetually a people-pleaser and my default response when I vehemently disagree with someone IRL is to agree with them to get them to shut up and move on to another subject, which now that I think about it is probably a side effect of having been abused because I avoid any sort of conflict of any degree like my life fucking depends on it. Yay?)
And sure enough, the subject was changed and the rest of the evening was fairly uneventful other than, in a totally unrelated conversation, he basically admitted that the reason he'd been hanging out with me so much in the first place was because he knew I was technically in an open relationship and he was gauging my interest in him.
I just kind of rolled with it while making damn sure nothing I said could possibly end up stringing him along, and filed it away to think about later.
And then I completely avoided thinking about any of this the remainder of last night, because I knew it would probably end with me having an anxiety attack or something.
And then last night I had a nightmare about a certain abusive ex of mine, of fucking course.
And it's been about 24 hours since all this happened now and I've been having anxiety attacks and shit all day, and have pretty much spent the entire day a.) self-loathing for not standing up for myself yesterday b.) self-loathing for not standing up for myself pretty much ever c.) self-loathing in fucking general, even though I know it's entirely irrational and I ought to fucking stop already, geez d.) thinking about all the myriad ways I've been abused and flashbacking, etc e.) feeling used by the guyfriend since it's evident now he's pretty much been trying to buy his way into my heart for the past two months (and it almost worked, too) f.) self-loathing for it almost working g.) feeling sick to my fucking stomach and wanting to smash things h.) cyber-stalking various abusive people to make sure they aren't stalking me and moved to my state or something, and wishing I had a way to contact the girlfriend of one of my abusive exes to let her know she should gtfo of that relationship at her earliest convenience before he fucks her up like he did me i.) debating cutting off all contact with the guyfriend without even giving him a reason, but fuck if I'm just too much of a people-pleaser to ever do that to someone unless they are seriously a colossal dick, which despite all this he generally isn't j.) just generally feeling like utter shit
So yeah. I'm in a great headspace right now.
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