i'm feeling mixed up. this is possibly the longest thread ever to grace poor mumsnet. the first para is one question and the rest is mostly details and then another Q so the first bit will hopefully make sense on its own! i'm just posting to vent mostly....otherwise i would cut it down....I should namechange because I sound so horribly critical and angry, I should be ashamed, but I'm not known on MN so....and I'm not sober so I might be writing total non-issue rubbish down, sorry.
Yesterday talking to my housemates we got onto the topic of my boyfriend (been together six months) not doing much around the house (something that personally I don't get riled up about) and suddenly all the things I'd been resenting him for but blaming myself for inventing about him were one by one ticked off by them. They see it too, they see everything and I'm not overreacting they said. They said they didn't know why we were together. I also found out about a big lie that was recent (Sunday) and it kind of poured gas on the whole thing. I wasn't calm and ran off a long email to my mum hoping to be told that I was being too difficult, sensitive. She sent me back one unusually quickly saying that she was angry on my behalf and she sent me another one this morning, a really thoughtful and long email completely on my side. I had started to feel guilty about being so angry with him the night before especially since he put a piece of paper under my door saying have a lovely day, feel better soon. But my mum's email has made me angry again. I had said that I wasn't saying it was EA, I was just saying that I was realising how unhealthy his attitude towards me and other people is, but she said that she was recognising all the signs. If it is EA....I respect women so much, I thought I had got so much out of feminist ideas, I really thought they protected me because I'd absorbed them and they were just built into how I saw the world. Obviously not.
I broke up with him this morning after writing what I was thinking down and I feel so shaky because I'm afraid of the fallout from this. I feel like I've been kidding myself that I'm assertive, alert, that I value myself- I feel like someone's just made me see everything clearly. I've been reading threads on mumsnet and thinking that oh at least he's not this, that, whatever but it's all starting to sound familiar now. How do you cope with this? I feel like an empty flat person who's been tricked or something.
So as not to drip feed- we both take ADs which help to some extent. The behaviours that feel like warning signs to me must be aggravated by his depression. These are: lying but expecting the strictest trust between me and him (i.e. bank cards, facebook passwords from the word go, concrete things which matter), making grand gestures but not really showing that he cares, histrionics at every setback, saying anything for attention, like offending people just for the hell of it, alcoholism (passing out/peeing in bed/his room smells like hell), sulking whenever things don't go his way or I say I want time alone, thinking that any effort is as good as the right effort (i.e. he washed my sheets as per a previous agreement but left them damp and smelly and thought that since he'd put in the effort I couldn't complain. i say, get off your arse and learn how to use a washing machine), constantly putting me down in jokes (I can't help laughing because he can be so funny, but later you don't remember the humour, you remember the sting- and always, constantly letting me know that everyone knows that he's the more attractive partner), making me feel guilty all the time for acting the martyr, I buy 90% of our food but he would never thank me for it. He's always complaining that I don't cook enough for him, I should because he likes my cooking and can't cook himself. Oh god, there's so much. He stands other people up and thinks it's funny. He's constantly trying to make me jealous because he thinks that I'm not lovey dovey enough with him, but then the tighter he holds on, the more I want to be free, it's the same old pattern.
I would always link him to good threads on mumsnet and ask him specifically each time not to try and find me on there because I like having my own space here, and he promised me each time that he wouldn't. I found out accidently the day I got back from the summer that he'd been hacked into my account for months and been reading all my private messages and posts all the time all the while he was telling me he understood that it's something private for me. He plays stupid pranks on our housemates and won't take them seriously afterwards they're unhappy and just tries to make them feel guilty and humourless.
He is a mixture of very confident and very underconfident. He gets his confidence from feedback about his academic performance (was hothoused by his mother and got into an Ivy League uni at 15) and his looks (he is very good looking). I know he is underconfident because he will bring those two things up all the time- often in a jokey way but he does it so much that you can guess he needs people to know this stuff to feel at ease around them. I was going to ask a friend over a while ago and he stopped me saying that she wasn't "like us". I thought he must be joking but he was serious so I didn't ask her round so he wouldn't be upset. And he is underconfident because he feels rejected by his parents, he feels inferior to many people, because he needs crutches such as alcohol to appear charming, cheerful and outgoing and he would prefer to be in control, unusually so. His parents are very rich and he went to boarding school for most of his life, suffered a breakdown circa 17 and had to leave his first uni because he was struggling.
He loves attention and can deal with it when it's him that calls it. For example he will be brilliant around loads of people, funny and flippant and cool, but when someone else has a idea for him he finds it hard to follow through. So for e.g. he will go to great lengths to prove he loves me but if I suggest something that I would appreciate more (i.e. doing his own laundry- I act like his mum I really do) it's not shiny enough for him, he doesn't get the amount of credit he craves because someone else thought of it, so it's not attractive enough for him and he won't do it. It's not a selfless love, and anyway it's not love. He wants me to owe him, really, I think. He bends over backwards to show that he's thinking about me all the time for but it's always the same gestures and I feel like there's no support from him for the important things- he would never try and think of advice for me if I (ever on one of the few rare occasions) try and lean on him emotionally, it's too much effort for him.
I feel like he says everything and anything to create a persona and I feel like he is constantly performing. He does it so well but I know his patterns of behaviour so well as well (ooh it's gone funny now). When I met him and we talked on facebook he sounded so pompous and styled, different to IRL, and seemed to concerned with protecting a precise image of himself, dressing flamboyantly but then moved onto saying really hurtful cutting things about me: how no one liked me except him because I was too strange, too ugly, fat (I'm not fat at all but obviously if I were looking at this through the 'he's a mysognist' lens I would see that he's using fat as an umbrella term for 'all that is bad' and making me feel bad generally- no offence to anyone here, it is not what I think). We had a LOT of arguments about this and he finally made an effort to stop and I noticed a difference. I have been very assertive with him and we've had so many arguments so it's not like I'm a total doormat.
He can be so much fun and when I mention my obscure favourite writer he's heard of her and I can't get embarrassed in front of him....I think he is less judgemental than a lot of other people.
But I'm just going from angry to guilty to confused because I don't know if he does all these things unintentionally and he just needs to grow up a bit, or if he does some things intentionally because he feels like he's under a lot of pressure and must have an outlet, or if some of the things he does really are EA. I really would be grateful for any insight or comments or thoughts....I am young yes. Please tell me if there's something off kilter about what I'm saying- my head is spinning and I'm doubting everything I'm thinking at the moment, and I want to know if if what I'm feeling is an instinct or something irrational. Also, I'm not really sure I know how to be angry in a very healthy way, I see it as something I should avoid. Should I be angry? I feel like an inch tall. am i overreacting?