I am writing to you to tell you my experience with our relationship. You said you wouldn't read something I wrote, but if you want to know what was really going on, you should. 

In our relationship, I did not have the bandwidth to take care of and pay enough attention to your needs. This was partially because of my commitment to my PhD, and there is a lot I can and did take accountability for in terms of how I didn't show up the way I wanted. But because you never have indicated awareness of your role, I want to talk about what I think was a bigger part. I want to tell you how I felt you treated me as objectively as possible.

Throughout our relationship, you got angry at me, threatened to leave me, and shamed me on a regular basis,  often reacting unpredictably to my behavior, to the point where episodes were often not even related to something I could call a mistake. Because of this, I felt constantly on edge, as though if I tried to express my needs the relationship would end or I would be verbally abused. I became afraid of you not because of projection but because you were emotionally abusive. 

Early on in our relationship, when you first cooked for me, you told me you were lightheaded and wanted to sit down. I asked if there was something I could do to help with dinner, and you would shortly tell me that you would “never be that uncaring”, that you were feeling a way about me for my behavior that you felt about an ex you had dumped. I understand that this probably came from a desire to have a partner who would be more attentive to you and your body, but this made me feel like our relationship was fragile, and that feeling, which persisted through similar and frequent incidents and threats that would occur regularly made it hard for me to talk to you about my needs without fear of being broken up with or verbally abused. I did not realize it at the time, but an imbalanced power dynamic arose out of these episodes. I constantly felt like I was in the doghouse and needed to compensate by bending over backward for you–how could I ask for my needs in that state? When I did challenge you, you either acted like I was abusing you or screamed at me. This is, I think, what people mean by saying they felt like walking on eggshells. When I served myself food in a way that you didn't like, or read song lyrics in a way that offended you or showed you a TV show with themes that rubbed you the wrong way, you cried and were upset at me, sometimes telling me you felt like leaving me afterward. It was not limited to food, but there were a lot of incidents like this cooking for you that eventually built up to an intense fear for me. For New Years, you were on a very specific diet. I researched the diet and came up with a dish that respected it. I shared you the recipe and asked if it was OK. After you ate it, your stomach hurt, and you directed that pain towards me. You told me that what I cooked didn't count as a meal to you (even though there were leftovers). You told me that i needed to communicate better and cried. On another occasion, I planned to start cooking at 5:30 one day. But an emergency in the morning interrupted my shopping, so I asked to push it to 6pm. You became so upset at me and told me I wasn't honest with my bandwidth, and as I tried to console you I lost more time still. It turned out in part that unbeknownst to me you were trying to coordinate with me to keep challah warm. When you showed up to my apartment, you cried and we had to talk it out. I started dinner at 7:30, and didnt finish until almost 10, the same time you served me the week before. When you realized how long it was going to take, you locked yourself in my bathroom and screamed. I realize now I should have given up cooking hours earlier and ordered takeout, but I was blindsided by your reaction, and it wasn’t the first time–I was becoming afraid of you.

Weeks later, I would have a panic attack over the idea of cooking for you. I would tell you it was because I thought I had a vitamin b12 deficiency because at the time I couldn’t admit to myself how you were affecting me–it would have meant admitting we should break up– but it was because I was not sure how to confront you about how your behavior was hurting me. When you talked about your emotions, you often offloaded the responsibility of handling them onto others–saying that many people can't handle them, or even that one of your exes “let” you treat them poorly. I did not feel safe talking to you about them and naively felt like the only option was instead for me to somehow just get good at not setting you off. I thought I would be strong enough, but I wasn’t.

The reality was that early on in our relationship, you stopped taking meds and you stopped going to therapy, and we were both in denial about how bad things were. I took accountability for every way I was mistreated and let you off the hook, enabling your abuse.

The attacks on me were not only related to food. They could be over any percieved mistake by you. One egregious time was at a music festival. A blister formed on your foot. I asked you what you had bandwidth for and if you wanted to go back. You asked me what I would do without this problem. I mentioned the ferris wheel. You screamed at me that you didn't have bandwidth and that i should have understood that the skin on your foot was falling off (that's almost an exact quote) and of course you couldn't do that. So I offered to buy you a tote bag to carry your shoes. When I did, you told me that you would never buy something so frivolous, that it was evidence that we were on different pages financially and cried. I was on edge, and you got upset at me for “being afraid of you”. You offloaded responsibility so much that my being hurt by you was framed as a failure of mine.This was always what being afraid of you was about. The truth was that I was on edge but I understood what was happening. I knew it would pass if I just endured your splitting comments, because you always came around. We got through it. But over time, these incidents hurt me more and more and truly drained me. You didn't have grace for me to make small mistakes, like putting a bedsheet on the wrong way, which you said meant I didn't care about you and even said I “froze up” over something I felt was easy to fix and unurgent. When every little thing can make you explode, suddenly the stakes are very high for little things, leading me to be fearful, on edge when doing even the most basic chores (rightfully with how you treated me for, god forbid, cleaning a bathroom) and ultimately run out of energy. That is why I was afraid to let you see the soup I was cooking, and that is why I was afraid when I didn’t use the leftover onion in a meal–I thought it could result in an explosion, blame, that I would be villainized again and made to feel like a monster–a way you made me feel that my ex never did. The way that dynamic arose was over time; I was in a pot of water that had been brought to a boil and I didn’t understand what was happening. I wanted to fix it with couple’s therapy, which you asked to delay for four months, leading me on until I had taken care of you through your last surgery. It felt random to me whether a mistake of mine would escalate into anger, shaming and tears. Worse, not only were you acting each day like these things were not happening, when I tried to apologize you wouldn't let me find repair, often telling me I reminded you of your ex whose sorries meant nothing or that I was groveling, accusing me of gaslighting you if i tried to clarify, leaving me feeling like I was in the doghouse constantly with no way out but to be perfect, and like I needed to do better to appease you–making it impossible further to ask for anything from you, like to ask you for more kindness or grace or respect. When I did hint at any problems with your behavior,  you acted with rage and denied things or blamed me. 

When I asked for couples therapy, you delayed it 4 months. When i asked for conversations about the relationship, you said you couldnt handle the idea of talking once a week about how things were going. When I brought up issues, you were angry at me and deflected. You waited until you didn't need me any more after I helped you through a second major surgery to break up with me, telling me that you had been thinking about doing it for a long time, which solidified a feeling in me that you had just used and abused me for your own gain. I gave up so much for you.

And the day to day life was full of intense micromanaging, where you would get upset at me over not doing exactly what you wanted at any given time–even if the requests were literally impossible or paradoxical. At one point you asked me to walk slower, and then got upset at me for not recognizing that i needed to walk faster than you to go single file (on a wide hiking trail). These frequent and impossible to predict directives led me to feel like there was nothing I could do to avoid your snapping at me–it was a contradiction to have to walk both slower and faster. Often there was no way to win. These sorts of comments, where you were directing what I was doing on a microscopic level and acting incredulous or upset that I couldn't intuit what you wanted, might happen ten or twenty times a day. They were what eventually made me feel unsafe driving with you, since I felt unsafe with you nitpicking everything. At another point, I opened a pizza box while you were right next to me, about to click play on a movie, and you snapped that it would get cold before you could eat it and that I should have waited, even though you were seconds away from grabbing a slice. These sorts of things left me feeling like I couldn't do anything without asking first, which left me feeling intensely controlled. When I did ask your opinion on things, you would massively take over what I was trying to do, reject my input, and seemed upset that I “needed” your help. These were not isolated incidents but things that would be happening every day, at any collaboration we tried. There was no collaboration with you. Its not surprising that as a defense I stopped giving these comments any weight and stopped doing everything you asked. Feeling insecure, and unable to ask you for help without you taking over and belittling me, I started trying to take charge at times and didnt listen to your attempts to take over. I was trying to become the perfect human that you seemed to demand, and I would become upset when I couldnt and take it out on you. I'm sure this left you feeling unheard. Meanwhile I resented you for all of the ways you were not returning the favor; you wouldn't even tell me before going shopping, leading to us both buying the same things sometimes. When you did, you would tell me to stop whatever I was doing to see what you had bought, even if my hands were completely full, or if I was working. (I'm aware I was also very forgetful and would more frequently double buy things).

Those were the double standards I lived with. If, while were talking, you walked away from me while talking, I was expected to follow you around the apartment or else you would be upset with me. Likewise, if I tried to walk somewhere while were talking you would be upset with me too. I was always the bad guy for doing anything less than complete subservience.

I remember you being upset at me for taking up too much space on the bed. At night, when I would wake up, you would be taking up three quarters of the bed while I was falling off my side. You acted like you were doing some kind of selfless favor to me, saying that when you were in bed you tried not to take up space but that I needed to learn to do the same. You acted like I was in your space when you were in mine. You would then berate me in the morning for taking up too much space. So often your attacks felt like projection. I would sleep with one arm over the side of the bed. Minimized, my character attacked by someone I loved, where even sleeping became something with moral weight, I shrunk. What else was I supposed to do? At every turn you were accusing me of incompetence or malice with no middle ground.

When I tried to make decisions about where to put my stuff, you consistently disagreed and told me to put them elsewhere. You snapped at me for putting a single thing on an unused shelf. You would ask if anything I did was permanent. You would disagree with me about where to put things and be unwilling to compromise. If I disagreed, it became a problem that our preferences were so different over things as simple as furniture orientation and at times you threatened to leave me over it. It felt like when you disagreed, it was just to disagree and keep me in my place and not to service some goal for the apartment. It made me feel like i had to have you walk me through where you wanted any of my stuff because I couldn't read your mind and you didn't seem to tolerate small deviances from what you wanted–nor take responsibility for those being things that you wanted; it had to be that I wanted the same things as you innately. This led to a lot of small protests on my part, like when it came to my frustrations with your telling me how to load a dishwasher. This is why I took so long to move my stuff in and out of the one room that felt safe, because you had claimed the kitchen, hallway and bedroom in various ways (e.g, telling me you wanted to organize the kitchen because you baked and getting upset at me if I put something in the wrong place over things we hadn’t discussed; or telling me I couldn’t get things for the hallway because there wasn’t floorspace; or telling me that your desk was in the bedroom and that you needed that space and not to touch anything that was on or near your desk); the living room was the only safe place. Later, something as simple as buying a clothes hamper would go down like this: you shamed me for not seeing you move your hamper, you told me I wasn't observant, and when I said I was looking at yours to try to find a good aesthetic match you told me I needed to get one that was smaller. I would put in effort to try to make a decision, plan, and do something right, and it would be completely undermined by you. That was emblematic of everything: you literally minimized me in these decisions, shamed me and controlling what I could do and in our relationship I lost my sense of agency and ability to feel confident and like I had ownership of the space.

When I was upset that I had to explain my preferences in detail to get what I wanted, what you said was downright manipulative. You told me that the only way for me to get what I wanted was to convince you that my way was better. You said this verbatim and then told me I was lazy when I protested. You acted like I was crazy or unhealthy for asking for you to sometimes compromise without an explanation. This is not how compromise works. You defend this by saying that all you are doing is expressing your needs, but if what you said is true, your need is absolute control.

You offloaded a lot of anxiety onto me by blaming me for uncomfortable situations. If we were out and about and somebody cut me off, you would berate me for having poor spatial awareness. This happened while driving or in the supermarket or on the sidewalk–things that were 100% not my fault, you were blaming on me. When I recognized what situations would provoke you, I would try to just get us out of a situation as fast as possible, which would result in more mistakes, like when I bought basil that had gone bad and you would come home like nothing had happened and then get upset at me for those mistakes too.

When we moved in together, I tried so hard to put in work. Before the first week, I made a list of everything we needed to have to make things smooth, like silverware, sponges, trash bags, paper towels, soaps, and more–to buy what we needed and make accessible what was important right away. I took all of the spices and ingredients you liked for oatmeal, which you had been eating at my place, and set them on the counter in case you wanted. I made a Google sheet and invited you to read it over so we didn't both bring the same thing. You said you didn't have bandwidth. It really feels to me like this was a way to minimize me and stop me from being able to contribute. Your inability to let me contribute or communicate about what you wanted from me and then anger when I didnt contribute in the ways you wanted drained me, leaving me overcompensating, anxious and depressed. I did so much that first week, and even more after. When i got to a point where I wanted to put trash bags in our trash cans, i initially put them in yours and then remembered how many boundaries you set around touching your stuff and didn't. In the end you ended up replacing sponges I bought with ones better for smell, which frustrated me because I had made an effort to communicate with you about what I was buying. That week I made a romantic dinner on a picnic blanket, and asked for a nice walk around the reservoir which you turned down. Then on the weekend, you accused me of not taking initiative. When I tried to clarify, you accused me of gaslighting you. Not only did you not let me help, or acknowledge how much I was doing, you were villainizing me. I internalized that I wasn't doing enough, in part because you had been upset at me a few times for things I recognized now were not healthy (for not having a plan to get boxes 2 months before moving, or for not measuring the square footage for the AC unit, and so on). So I took on more and more responsibilities. I was in charge of communications with the landlord, getting him to come fix the shower. Every month I did work on the washer/dryer to make it dry better. I bought rinse aid for the dishwasher and kept it full. I assembled more of our shared furniture than you. I took out the trash and recycling more than you, cleaned the bathroom more than you. When, at one point, I let boxes from all of the things we were purchasing pile up, you told me you couldn't imagine anyone living the way I had, that it was disgusting, and when I told you I had been largely the only one taking it out every day for weeks and had stopped just to be efficient, you just said you did it once and it reflected more poorly on me because I was the one staying home. I did more of the dishes than you, cleaned the bathroom more than you, vacuumed more than you, washed the sheets more. I did not keep us totally up to date on our chores, and forgot to dust surfaces some weeks, but I grew resentful of you for telling me every once and a while that I wasn't doing enough (while I was the one who was busiest with my PhD!), and the biggest concession you gave was saying “it's getting a little better”. I even was the one who had to plan special events like our anniversary dinner–it wasn’t just physical labor I was doing.

You were transparent in your accusations, even when you tried to repharase things. You would say that I was only leaving so many dishes to clean on nights when it was your turn because I didn’t expect to have to do them, which hurt me because I would never intentionally have given you more work to do. These rephrasings were, transparently, and whether you can admit it to yourself or not, accusations. I had told you to just tell me what you wanted–and to be honest, I thought maybe if you verbalized everything you would realize how demanding you were–but I was starting to lash out because of the weight of everything. Yona, you were pissed at me. You were resentful of me, and I could tell, and that is why I was so high strung. That’s why my memory gave out, why I became a zombie, trying to caretake the unstable wrath of someone I loved, unable to focus on my own needs because yours always, always came first.

Worse was all of the emotional labor I did that went unappreciated. When you offload your stress about Brandeis,  or Michael, or Kat, or Marik, or James, or your exes, or any number of things and unstable relationships (i had to stop you from doing the same to Alex) that you had to cut out of your life in the short time I knew you; or are angry while driving or about traffic I was there to talk you down or remind you to spend time with your plants or help you troubleshoot. After our breakup, it became clear to me just how angry of a person you are–you hurt people, and occasionally people decide to stop putting up with your shit, and you feel wounded. When you later complained that you had been doing emotional labor for me, I was shocked because of how lopsided our relationship had been in terms of that labor. My crises were every few weeks, usually amounted to me being quiet and needing space, about my PhD or my ex–the reality was my biggest emotional crisis was our relationship–while yours were hourly.

Throughout all of this, my needs started to express themselves in desperation. For me, physical touch was something I needed for reassurance, especially when I couldnt apologize or repair the problems and awful things you accused me of. I was bad at respecting your boundary for touch, but I think it was because I was hurting so much and you were not allowing me the repair I needed after your hurtful episodes. I have never had a problem with boundaries. And when you did confront me about it, I was hurting even more because you had not been enforcing or clarifying or communicating that boundary. It was as though you hadnt used a safeword and I hurt you, I apologized and didn’t get the aftercare I needed so I was upset. When I tried to explain to you that I needed reassurance, you screamed at me and told me that it invalidated all of my attempts at repair–projecting your exes lack of accountability on me, and worse, establishing that the only way was absolute submission to you, my emotions had no room in the relationship. 

There's more I want to say, but I think you get the gist. Yona, you have been diagnosed with bpd but dismiss this as a misiagnoses, went off meds and therapy and claim the main treatment is torture. You treated me poorly and cruelly, possibly because of this refusal to take repsonsiblity for your own mental health. I wish I had been better for you but I did not deserve to be treated like that. So that’s it–goodbye, good luck, and fuck the faux “maturity” that you used to abuse me when you broke up with me, unable to even acknowledge the way you were displacing me during a vulnerable time for me. And fuck you for using the last therapy session to belittle me and lie to the therapist about how helpless I was. I consider you an abuser, I do not trust your interpretation of the relationship and think you are unsafe to be around. So I'm not going to be friends with you.