I've been thinking about that old saying "if everyone around you is an arsehole, maybe you're the arsehole". I worry that I portray my ex-boyfriends in a negative light because I'm thinking in too much of a black and white way, or I'm actually abusive by thinking they were treating me badly, or I'm overly dramatic.
Caveat: I have a mental health diagnosis, so I can be awful to live with when I'm unwell, but I have a professional career (like a lawyer) and great relationships with my family, plus some great friends - some of which I've known since I was at primary school - so I don't think I struggle to get along with others in general.
I was reading a thread yesterday about someone's DP going out all night and his phone being dead, and OP being so worried that he hadn't come home. I was really surprised by peoples' reactions to this. My ex (who I dated when I was 19-22 years old) used to go out all night, get drunk/stoned and not arrive back at our house until late the next day. His phone was off, or he just didn't want to text me. He and his friends called me controlling for getting upset about these incidents. He was out all night with his friends most nights, and a few times I got upset because I'd hoped we could spend the evening together, but he would just say "well I've already organised it, why are you getting upset now?! and usually throw his phone at the floor in frustration so it smashed, or went out and slammed the front door.
He always made out that I was needy and controlling. I felt guilty for getting upset, but I was clinically depressed at the time and couldn't control how I felt. He admitted he was addicted to weed, and I tried to support him to quit. One night when we'd been dating for 6 months and he had quit weed for 2 weeks, he suddenly dropped me at my parents' house, promised to pick me up the next day, then switched his phone off. He didn't reply to my (increasingly frantic) messages for over a week, and if I rang his phone his stoned friends answered and called me a 'psycho bitch' or 'nutjob'. I became very unwell and stopped eating. Eventually, he got in touch, drove me out to a field in the middle of nowhere, had sex with me and said "I will never love you as much as I love weed, so if you want to stay with me you need to let me smoke as much as I want". He had been the one crying on my shoulder about needing to quit, about not being able to dream because his head was full of the drug all the time, but he made out that I had engineered it all. I was 19 with very low self-esteem, and had dropped out of uni to be with him, so I stayed with him and agreed to his terms, which also included going to a BDSM dungeon with him. I regret this.
We later went to the same uni and lived together in a student house. He got in a mood with me during a music festival because he had asked around for weed and nobody had any, so he sloped off on his own, leaving me with his friends. He later returned to camp to find that I'd had fun without him, became resentful and shoved me, then disappeared again. I was terrified and sure he would get with another girl to punish me. He returned late morning, and I will never forget the look on his face when he unzipped the tent - like he hated me. I tried to leave but he put on music about suicide and I agreed to give him another chance, but said he would never touch me like that again.
Eventually he cheated on me (something he had done a lot before) and I found the evidence on his PC. I told him to get out, but he refused to leave the house, and posted on Facebook about hanging himself, so I had to keep checking he was alive. I tried to get some friends to check on him, but they called me an attention seeking bitch and said I was making things up to make my ex look bad.
I started messaging someone I met at a festival because I was so stressed and just wanted comfort of some kind. I didn't realise my ex had installed a 'keylogger' on my laptop and was secretly watching everything I typed. He came up to my room and confronted me, called me a slut for talking to another guy, made out that the man had told him himself. He only confessed as to the keylogger when he was stoned later on, and told me it as if he was proud of duping me like that.
When he eventually left, he made abusive fake profile pictures of me and 'added' me so I would see the horrible things he had written. Stuff like "I'm a crazy cock-eyed bitch who sees demons" - a reference to a time I was hospitalised with depression and psychosis. He always denied it was him, but I knew it was. The last time this happened was, thankfully, four years ago, but he added all the new friends I had made at university in an attempt to shame me in front of them.
I suppose staying out all night is small fry really. I guess the whole relationship left me feeling clingy, needy, overly emotional, crazy, nuts. I've dated other men who have stayed out all night on coke/alcohol binges and been non-apologetic for it. But I thought I wasn't allowed to complain because it's a needy thing to do.
An ex has been contacting me and he's very engaged in our chats if he's sexting me or asking me for sexual photos, but the second I talk about other aspects of my life, he replies once an hour, then stops completely, like I bore him entirely. But I end up feeling that I'm being too needy, wanting too much from him, that I've got an anxious attachment style.
I once spoke to the Samaritans about my ex and the lady on the phone line asked what my ideal relationship would be like. I would like an honest man who doesn't use internet porn, wants to go on walks with me, doesn't mind if I stop to take lots of nature photos, is even-tempered, doesn't cheat, wants to talk about my interests and share his own, cleans up after himself, doesn't want to have degrading sex with me, and maybe even occasionally buys me flowers, but ideally remembers my birthday and even gets a card for me.
Is that a lot to ask? Am I developing this fantasy man in my head that no man can live up to? I see myself reflected in my ex's eyes all the time, the way he looked at me, the way I was never enough for him, the way he hated me. I find it hard to believe anyone could look at me with romantic love, without a nasty lustful streak in it.
Sorry if that was all rambly.