I am a big fat Austrich......

[CatButler]

Aaaaarrrggghhh - please humour me and allow me to vent!!??

Another weekend lie-in ruined because of his epic snoring....wakes me up at least twice every weeknight as well when I have to be up at 6 for work. Of course he doesn't do anything like that and I'M the one keeping him awake all the time with MY snoring.......

This feels like the straw that broke the camels back at the moment and feel like telling him to get out of my bed and life when he finally wakes up.

I've recently been posting about me and DP deciding whether to have children or not but hink I knew all along I was being delusional.

These are the main things that are really bugging the living daylights out of me and have done for ages now:

• No communication - at all, about anything not the little things or the big important things.

• We never and I mean never go anywhere unless I organise it and usually pay for it as well because he constantly pleads poverty.

That includes restaurants by the way because hhe's worried that eating out will give him a bad stomach due to their bad hygiene......(hmm)

• He smokes cannabis and has done ever since I met him. Fine, knew that when I got involved with him however, it makes him too tired and disinterested to do much else besides work. He swears blind it doesn't affect him at all - it bloody does, when we've been abroad on holiday and he hasn't had any he's a different character.

• Is glued to his games console every chance he gets and wants to 'chat' about what is happening in virual reality yet clams up when asked to share his thoughts and feelings in he real world.

I could go on some more but just reading back my own list makes me feel pathetic for putting up with it. Trouble is, immediately after thinking, god what a pants situation I feel guilty for even thinking and feeling that way. Sounds like I AM a nutjob......!!

I'll shut up now, but thanks for letting me put this in writing (blush) - it'll help get my head out of the sand it's been stuck in for the last ten years......!

It really is a good book. I recognised a few things about XH from it (a definite Passive Aggressive), but I gasped when I recognised my ex-manager described to a T!

Straightforward people like me don't quite understand what games are being played on us, as we expect to be able to take others at face value. Something is wrong but we can't quite work out what... and wouldn't everything be easier if we all told each other the truth and treated each other decently? I'm not naive enough to believe everybody does, I just have a hard time getting my head round why some people don't. I think the book went some way towards explaining it, and more usefully suggested techniques for not being taken in. If you can get hold of a copy I'd definitely recommend a skim through.

Haven't read the whole thread, sorry, but I thought for a minute you were living with my ex, til I saw the age. Good-looking, needy, pothead, angry with world, etc etc etc - yep.

One day I just snapped and dumped him. Admittedly we weren't in such a serious relationship as you are, but I never feel his absence from my life as something very sad. Amongst his other lovely qualities (really), he had a dampening effect on me and my life. You don't miss it when it goes.

You're so spot on Annie, wish I hadn't but just googled manipulation etc and found an aritcle entitled 8 ways to spot emotional manipulation.

Really wish I hadn't tbh as I'm sat now feeling physically sick.

Wasn't going to keep going and going with this thread but have to add the applicable ones just so it's in writing and can't deny it later:

4. Guilt. Emotional manipulators are excellent guilt mongers. An emotional manipulator is a great victim. They inspire a profound sense of needing to support, care for and nurture. Emotional Manipulators seldom fight their own fights or do their own dirty work. The crazy thing is that when you do it for them (which they will never ask directly for), they may just turn around and say they certainly didn?t want or expect you to do anything!

I struggle with that one soooo much. Feel like somehow I need to do stuff for him and then he turns around and says 'I didn't ask you to do anything' Which is true and I don't know why I bothered then and feel really stupid.

3. Crazy making - saying one thing and later assuring you they did not say it.

Lots of that - the amount of times I've told him I'm going to buy a dictaphone and record our conversation during an argument......Funny enough whenever I end up shouting I feel like I'm going crazy in conversation with him he gets all reasonable.

8. Emotional manipulators have no sense of accountability. They take no responsibility for themselves or their behavior - it is always about what everyone else has "done to them

9. If you have a headache an emotional manipulator will have a brain tumor

My friend dumped her pothead P after 9 years - he found a new girlfriend within six weeks - that stopped her feeling sorry for him sharpish!

ElephantsAndMiasmas - perhaps I have been re-cycling your ex :) :)

How long were you with your ex pothead for then? Being nosey now I know but I love hearing 'me too' experiences

only a couple of years, and luckily for much of that time we were living separately (work/studying). He was sweet and nice and interesting, sometimes, when we were quietly at home on our own. But anything else - any socialising say, unless it involved sitting with other potheads in their rooms - he was just a big lump. He never had a conversation with any of my friends/flatmates/family. He just wouldn't talk. He wouldn't go out during the day, he was nocturnal. Drank loooads too.

Nice looking though, but you get fed up of just staring at him :)

*fed up with

"Nice looking though, but you get fed up of just staring at him"

Oh dear, I recognise that from the very early days of seeing him. But old muggins here jumped right in there.

In my defence though I'd never had anything to do with pot so just thought he was tired from work in the beginning......what a naive bint I was.....

me neither, I've never smoked.

he suffered the repercussions of psychotic episodes too, CB. Your P is risking his own mental health let alone yours.

Well I didn't have the background that you do, CB, so after 2 years of frustration, boredom and having to "explain him" to hurt friends and family, I just thought whythefuckamidoingthis?

If only I'd had the good sense to stop struggling after 2 years.

If there was an 'endurance through stupidity in relationships' event at the olympics I'd stand a very good chance of going home with a shiny medal

That's a MN campaign in the making, CB.

You can break up now, today, if you want to. It's not too late, you're only mid-thirties for goodness sake. You'd have to forfeit the medal but in return you get a new life without all this stuff to worry about.

Being in a relationship like this is two steps away from a happy one - that is what I eventually realised. There's the break up part, then the find-someone-nice part. Even if you met Mr Perfect now it would all be very complicated and you might never get together. You need to be single - then a nice relationship is only one step away. Find the right man.

I met a really fantastic guy when I was with exboy, by the time I had dumped exboy Fantastoman had a girlfriend. Don't let it happen to you! (And on a more serious note, try to read up on your rescuer complex before even letting another bloke over your threshold!)

Oh yes Elephants - when I get out of this latest mess I've created I intend to stay single for as long as it takes.

As long as it takes to really realise that I don't need a man to complete/make me happy blah blah.

Of course by then I'll love having the bed/remote control/television/fridge/etc etc to myself so much I'll probably decide to just become a mad cat lady

Right, off home now (taking the p today by being on MN at work....)

Thanks for sharing your story!

No probs, but listen you need to get out of there. It's one day after another - there will never be one that comes highlighted in your diary saying "leave". Unless you write it in there of course.

I've got my threads crossed apparently but I know a brilliant poem about that:

Dog Days

?when you stop to consider
the days spent dreaming of a future
and say then, that was my life.?

for the days are long ?
from the first milk van
to the last shout in the night,
an eternity. but the weeks go by
like birds; and the years, the years
fly past anti-clockwise
like clock hands in a bar mirror.

Cat

Never had an abusive relationship thank god but my parents were and remain not great and my inlaws are just bog standard dysfunctional!. I have never had much help there from them either.

Have also seen friends in not to a dissimilar situation to yours particularly with regards to x box/ps game playing manchild and they without exception have gone onto form new - and more healthy - relationships.

He is certainly passive agressive and that is also emotional abuse territory here. Your background too made you easy pickings for such a character:(.

I can only reiterate that you need to get away from this bloke asap otherwise he will further destroy you emotionally. You can and should start over.

As Elephants also rightly points out investigate further your own need to rescue and or save such men from themselves.

You say yourself that you (and by turn your current man) would not recognise a healthy relationship if it fell on you so why are you together now?. Two damaged people as you both are cannot and cannot hope to even begin to form a functional relationship here. You are not getting anything good or positive from it, you're only together now out of habit and inherent apathy to make a change.

Elephants - thanks for the poem, uncomfortable but true!

Attila, you relentless truthteller :)

Feel like I'm slowly waking up from a fog atm. Keep looking at and listening to things around me thinking, crikey never looked at/thought about things like this before.

Like the noise from his blinking game - not joining in any of the ocnversation I'm trying to initiate, all I can hear is crash bang wallop and the repetetive screech of violins.

Things we get used to and accept as normal........unless that's just me of course.

Thank you all again for another lot of education today. I will continue to wake up to my own life with the help of this forum :)

You sound lovely CatB, no doubt about you being wide awake and interested. Do you have friends/family/colleagues to socialise with? Or activities? I was thinking that the more time you spend out of the house the worse it'll seem when you go back in, and the easier it'll be to leave.