Not Me Too - Part 2 "You Haven't Been Tested"

Maybe everything that happened in Part 1 should've been enough to leave. Maybe it was clear there was some abuse happening, but in the moment I didn't see it as that. I thought, "You were in a bad mood, or a bad place with yourself and maybe projecting". The little problem-solver in me wanted to just resolve , find a solution. But I keep having to relearn, just because I can take things and endure them, doesn't mean I should have to deal with them in the first place. I have to learn that quitting and leaving IS a solution. So I own my hesitance to leave, my inability to connect all the dotted red flags. And given the childhood I had, being bullied , slapped around, I didn't think I could be abused by someone else. I was wrong.

Hopping back to 2021, prior to the birthday weekend, right before we had become exclusive

Jan-Feb 2021 - "you don't know yourself", florida dating app update when we're exclusive

March -May 2021 - broken up while he's in florida

May-December 2021 - Casually hanging out becomes us dating again until December 4th, when we agree to a monogamous exclusive partnership

January 2022 - Birthday Weekend referenced in Part 1

October 2021 - The Ex

The ex we will call Rachel. Nitehawk had been advocating for an open relationship while we were casually seeing each other (another victim of the non-monogamy zeitgeist sweeping through Brooklyn and Portland). Even though I wasn't sure it could work, especially with him, I considered it. We weren't exclusively dating yet, but if I were to enter in any relationship, especially this type, I knew there'd need to be a lot of trust, communication, and transparency, all of which I did not get from Nitehawk at the time. When I return from Italy , he tells me he wants to be with me. Yet a strange trend appears. It's apparent to me at the time that he begins weekly meetups with his ex-partner/friends with benefits. He tells me it's platonic. But when she sleeps over, when they cuddle, when her hair is in the shower, and when it’s apparent that they hang out (burlesque show, movies at him, bar/comedy show, dancing in the park) as often as he sees me, the person he's dating, and at a higher frequency than he hangs out with any other friend, I have to ask again. From which, the answer changes to “somewhere in between platonic and romantic”. Having to ask again, made it feel like the first time was a lie. I think if I set a scene of a man telling a woman he wants to be with her and proceeding to have cuddle sessions and hang out with his ex every week, I think most people would sense what is clearly not platonic. To be fair, I wasn't mad about him seeing someone else as I was for the streets too at that moment. I was mad because he was being dishonest, a long-standing trend.

And after that admission, instead of providing me with any sense of clarity or reassurance, he falls asleep. He doesn’t say “Maybe there’s something more here. I’m figuring it out. Or sorry we’re just having fun and flirting, but I have serious feelings for you. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable about this.!” He says nothing. It embarrasses me thinking Mellie, his couch surfer turned good friend of mine, was there to watch this too and later even told me she wasn’t a fan of the way he treated me at the time.

As our relationship progresses, he ignores my offers to meet Rachel to maybe quell my distrust or minimize insecurity he's helped introduce. He makes plans with her and doesn't tell me until after they’re canceled, not even bothering to ask me how I feel about it beforehand. And when I admittedly stupidly asked ( I acknowledge that this unknowingly was a trap with only one right answer), he told me he’d sleep with Rachel if we weren’t together. And as the unaddressed insecurity still persists, and while he says he'd never date her, for obvious reasons this was extremely unfavorable to hear. He did after we broke up anyways. He lied and omitted so much to protect himself, but had chosen brutal honesty here to be cruel to me. That same night, while playing a question-based card game, he got the question of "What do you know to be true about the way I see the world". He responded that I see the world the way I do because I hadn't been tested (May 2022). I'm not sure how someone could ever say something like that to someone they cared about, let alone their own partner.

January 2022 (Post the birthday weekend)

I think about emotional cheating a lot with Rachel and Rory, and the way he intimately engaged with other people in ways that he knew would hurt me if I knew. He was covert, able to have plausible deniability or make me seem crazy. I could feel this thing between him and one of the girls from his improv class Sara. I heard it in his voice when he said "I hope I get to do a scene with Sara". He reignited the open relationship conversation after learning she was polyamorous. I didn't know it was Sara at the time. But she was strange and unsettled around me when we met. I wonder why. With Rory, I wondered how was it that thought came about. Why he managed to essentially plan a date with her while we were together, dinner and a movie. Why he hadn't invited me? Why he had disclosed his trauma to her that night, after 6 years? Almost like putting out a soft feeler to see if he'd find acceptance there.

After he revealed this to me and we discussed proper boundaries, respect, I wondered about how he managed to end up alone with her at a camping trip (letting me know after the fact of course) or all the work happy hours he invited her to, but never me. I think about how he went behind my back to Rachel to discuss his possible romantic feelings for Rory for weeks before telling me ( I had found about this months later). The humiliation is three-fold, the betrayal of this Rory revelation which leaves me wondering what he was doing or what his intentions were at the dinner to discover that curiosity. 2. Discussing this at depth with someone he knew should not have had any part of our relationship 3. Downplaying it to me, completely providing Rachel a very different story than what he told me.

I try to extricate myself, telling him to pursue things with Rory on 4 separate occasions, making a case for why it may be easier and selfishly he didn’t even notice how incredibly difficult this was. Imagine having to step out of your role as girlfriend, having this conversation with your boyfriend as if he’s not even your partner. I think "He’s not even seeing you as his partner in this moment. He doesn’t even realize how painful it is to even have this conversation, but accuses you of trying to be a martyr (wild) when you’re just trying to save yourself additional pain and humiliation". He chastises me for lack of confidence and told me I brought her up so much because I was insecure, despite putting me in situations where I could obviously not be confident, and often tearing me down (gaslighting). But alas, he lures me into a false sense of security telling me he wasn't attracted to her or didn’t find her attractive. He noted she'd meet my unattractiveness threshold for a threesome, a funny joke I often make. But he knew what to say to get me off his back.

I offer to organize dinners or hangs with Nitehawk, Rory, and our mutual friend Lexi and I, all ignored. It makes me wonder if he secretly didn’t want me to see them together, same thing with Rachel, who I'd also offered to meet. I wonder what else happened behind my back. I don't know why he didn't take the out. I said it so many times. Go for it, explore it. Can't say I'll be with you, but do it. I think having to say these words had to feel like stabbing myself in the face. And it wasn't out of low self-esteem, or even graciousness. I was trying to save myself. It was an out for me too. But he used a lie, that my knowingly conceited self would swallow up without question. I should've pushed back questioned more. But I was always doing that, always trying to push for a truer truth.

He's usually a liar of omission. He leaves out a lot of details, ones that would completely shift your perspective if you knew. He says something that's somewhat true or plausibly true to detract from deeper questioning. "I wouldn't date Rachel" , yet would have her sleep in his bed, make plans behind his partner's back etc. It's maybe his subconscious way of protecting himself and his image, but a lie of omission is still a lie. And that's what woke me up to realize , I'd always had to poke and prod to get to the truth , the full truth with Rachel, with everything else. I never had the full truth first, part of it , some of it. He'd even joke about how good of a liar he was and how he was lying to me. I'd often ask "Are you lying to me?" and he'd giggle and say "Probably".

There's more mundane stories between this and the end, moments of belittling, bullying, coldness - a concert where someone faints and he jabs at me for not doing anything (me a non-medical professional). But there's sometimes laughter, conversation, usually revolving around him that obscures these less than favorable moments. And that's why its unclear to me. This is one part of a bigger story, and so it's not clear to me what is real here. That is why I hesitate to leave.

Continue to Part 3 - Content warning for some sexual content.