In October 2007 my relationship with Kirk came to a sudden and very unpleasant end. Our housemate threatened me, threatened my cat, threatened my belongings, and Kirk did nothing. He claimed he couldn’t control her behavior. Well, technically this is true, but what he could control was his behavior, what he did as a consequence, and what he would do and say to her about her actions towards me – which was nothing. No matter how disrespectful to me she was, there were never any consequences.
I should have seen this coming. I should have seen it coming when she invited herself to join our outings. I should have seen it coming when she just expected to join us on a date! (When I asked Kirk to go to Kaboom.) Emotionally crippled and immature person that he is, he thought she could come along, that we would all be friends for the day. He truly couldn’t understand why I wanted a day alone with my boyfriend, not with his hostile ex-girlfriend and disrespectful housemate tagging along.
In the end, he chose her insanity. When we first started dating he swore to me that she would not interfere in our relationship, that she was “just a good friend”, that his “old relationship with her was over”. Now I know better!
The end of 2007 was very hard. The holidays were very difficult. I kept remembering how good life looked the previous year, how it looked like this new relationship would work out. Now I know it only looked that way because I was compromising and allowing my needs to be slowly pushed aside as he kept slipping back into his insane ideas of what “relationship” meant. To him, a relationship is where he does everything he wants with absolutely no regard for how it affects anyone else, and others do the same. Except that when someone else does something that he doesn’t like, he gets to criticize, judge, complain – wrapping it all up in “program stuff” so he can pretend that he’s being objective, when he isn’t.
The last straw came on my birthday in February 2008. A month earlier I told him goodbye. I told him I couldn’t stay friends with him because friendship with him was a one-way street – it always had to go in his direction and that simply didn’t work for me. Then on my birthday he sent me a “friendly” email. This was typical – ignoring my needs, ignoring my desires, deciding for himself that he knew better than I what I wanted and needed so he was going to “give” me what he thought I wanted and needed rather than heed my stated desires.
February became a month to purge. I packed up everything I had that he had ever given me, bought for me, etc., and left it all in a bag in his truck. I wrote a letter – it ended up 11 pages long, and I put it under his windshield wiper.
As I find other items, into a bag they go. I’m purging this man out of my life. He is insane. He is sick, and he wants to remain sick. (More on this later.) I’ve learned from this and I’ve moved ON.