My ex (we’ll call him Grunge Boy) and I dated off-and-on for about four years total. I first developed feelings for him when I was 15. I was shy, nerdy and innocent and had never received any attention from guys before.
He was, well… troubled. His family was fairly poor (although they loved him to death) and he always had a chip on his shoulder about it. He skipped school, got into trouble with the law, drank, did drugs, you name it. I guess I thought I could save him or something.
It was pretty much your stereotypical teen love story: intense, unhealthy, and plenty dramatic.
Five months after we began dating I moved away and our relationship became long distance. Not long after that I found out that he had hooked up with a visiting ex before I had even left. I forgave him because I wanted to be the cool, supportive girlfriend, and because he seemed genuinely sorry and broken up about it (though he maintained that he just “didn’t know what happened”).
During that time I began coming out of my shell quite a bit. This drove Grunge Boy nuts. He was clingy, needy, insecure and constantly passive-aggressive. He guilt-tripped me into wracking up hundreds of dollars in long-distance phone bills and didn’t really seem to care when my parents began to hate him for sucking my time and energy.
I began to develop feelings for another boy, but felt too obligated towards Grunge Boy to break up with him. Several months later I finally worked up the guts to go visit G.B. and vowed that I would end it. I still cared very much about him, but I felt like he was smothering me. On the plane I drafted a long, heartfelt letter pouring out my feelings, but when I got there, I hesitated.
Unfortunately Grunge Boy wasted no time in involving me with drugs and alcohol and getting both of us in trouble with the police. Thankfully, the cops let us go (probably due to my terrified weeping) but my parents forbade me from seeing him until I was 18. Before I left, I cried and gave him the letter and told him I would always love him. He promptly burned the letter and refused to take no for an answer, effectively bullying me into continuing our relationship behind my parents’ backs.
Why didn’t I just leave? I was young, inexperienced and insecure. I really did care for him, and he knew exactly what my weaknesses were. He was an expert at making me feel guilty for standing up for myself, and justified his behavior by saying it was because he just loved and needed me so damn much.
So I was miserable. My life began spiraling out of control, and after about a year I decided transfer schools. Things got slightly better, though with no real friends to monopolize my time, more of it was spent on Grunge Boy. Which didn’t stop him from forming a suspiciously close relationship with a new female friend of his (we’ll call her Hot Mess). Red flags were popping up left and right, but I swallowed my pride and gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Cut to a few months later, when everything came to light. Turns out he’d cheated on me with at least two girls, one of whom was (surprise, surprise) Hot Mess. The first had been a one-night stand, but it seems that he’d had an ongoing sexual relationship with Hot Mess (who knew all about me, by the way).
Upon revealing his transgressions he promptly dumped me, citing the overwhelming guilt. I tried to be as understanding as I could and, telling myself that I still cared about him, forgave him and allowed us to remain friends. He was far too controlling to let me go, so as we continued to talk on a nightly basis his possessiveness began creeping back into our conversations. By that summer he was pestering me to take him back and whining that my reasons not to weren’t good enough.
By that time I’d graduated high school and begun college while he’d dropped out and been arrested. Dodging court dates left and right, he found that visiting me at school was a good way to lay low, get me to pay for things (he was broke), sell weed on my campus and generally leech off me and disrupt my life. Everyone I knew absolutely hated him, but I guiltily defended him because, as he kept insisting, I had more history with him than with any of my new friends.
Finally, able to evade the law no more, he ran away to the opposite coast in an attempt to escape his record. For a while I could breathe, as he was too far away to really harass me, and I was genuinely proud of him for working hard and trying to make it on his own. My sophomore year I saved up money and bought a plane ticket to go see him for two weeks.
Being there really opened my eyes to how little he had changed. Though he wasn’t getting enough hours at work, he refused to look for a new job and instead guilt-tripped me into spending hundreds of dollars in paying for everything. He got kicked out of his apartment the night I was left due to conflicts with his roommate. I spend the next few weeks doing everything I could to try and find him a new place to live, but he never followed through on any of my leads.
He finally ended up living in a tent with a buddy of his, working a minimum-wage job, smoking weed and getting chased around by the cops. By this time I was beginning to realize just how ridiculous my loyalty to him really was.
That summer a close friend from school (we’ll call him Awesome Boy) came to visit me at home. At the same time, Grunge Boy decided he’d had enough being homeless and decided to move back in with his parents. He called me up and told me to be free when he returned. I protested that I was going to have a visitor, and he flipped out.
He nagged about how he was obviously more important than Awesome Boy and how I should just blow A.B. off to see Grunge Boy. That was it. I put my foot down and said that no, I would not be seeing Grunge Boy while Awesome Boy was visiting.
Grunge Boy promptly stopped speaking with me for the duration of Awesome Boy’s visit. Now, Awesome Boy had carried a torch for me for some time, but I had always held him at arm’s length because I didn’t want to foist all of my Grunge Boy Drama on him. I guess this last episode was the motivation I needed to just go for it, and Awesome Boy and I hooked up.
Grunge Boy was not happy in the least. Sure, we weren’t dating, but I was HIS, dammit. I spent the entire rest of the summer in long, tearful, circular arguments with him in which I attempted to extract myself from his grasp and he attempted to manipulate me into surrendering.
Finally, I took the plunge and told him that it was over, for real this time. He proceeded to act like a psychopath for the following few months, cutting me out of his life one day and pretending that everything was fine the next, admitting to violent fantasies about me and then threatening to hurt himself, telling me he loved me before turning around and calling me a bitch and a slut.
This was exactly what I needed to get him out of my system. I let him rage all he wanted to, knowing that I was finally over the whole thing. Realizing that he wasn’t getting a reaction out of me, he finally stopped speaking to me altogether.
It’s been about a year since then, and Awesome Boy and I are still happily dating. Grunge Boy rears his head once in a while with a brief and carefully nonchalant facebook message, but I have yet to see him. The further I get from that relationship, the more I feel like a narrowly escaped a massive car wreck.
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