Stop right there!
Halt! Yield! Alternative phrasing for hold the fuck up!
In the name of scandal, I command you to settle down with your favorite gossip snack. Go get your preferred bite to eat or drink of choice to hear some SCALDING tea.
Back from the kitchen? Have a seat bestie.
Okay okay okay, so in previous posts I’ve given brief overviews of my past super-toxic relationship.
Long-distance gal who tracked my location and kept me on camera 24/7? Ring a bell? Yeah, that one.
Let’s call her Pink because that’s her favorite color.
So, prior to her, I had already been cheated on once, then I met Pink and knew I needed to tread carefully with my anxieties for fear of scaring her away. Turns out, she had the same anxieties. I thought to myself, I wanna take the healthy, productive initiative and sit down with this (seemingly) lovely person I enjoy spending all my time with to have a heart-to-heart about our relationship’s boundaries.
What is cheating? What is infidelity? What is a breach of trust?
I thought these were all tough, wonderful questions to ask, and yet, every time I brought it up, she pretended not to hear me for weeks.
I finally got her attention and we had the talk. The typical things for two monogamous people were laid out. Itemizing what felt like respectful no-brainers immediately felt a tad silly and tedious but lightheartedly cute in the spirit of understanding.
The first two rules felt obvious, but then she suddenly introduced a third rule.
No physical shenanigans with someone else. Duh.
No flirting with someone else. Other couples might think differently, but we weren’t other couples. Not our cup of tea.
If someone is flirting with you and you don’t stop it, you’re cheating.
Huh. Never thought of that before, but sure, why not. I knew Rules #1 and #2 would never come up on my end, but I hadn’t even considered #3 probably because the concept of someone flirting with me just flies right over my empty head.
So, how did I meet Pink?
I met Pink through an online gaming group in 2020. I’ll refer to it as the GTA Group since our game of choice was Grand Theft Auto V. The pandemic was just starting and all the gamers knew the drill: gaming computers run till the apocalypse happens.
Still with me? Pink? GTA Group? Cool.
Now, in the GTA Group was an unbelievably creepy dude. Let’s call him Cars because he was obsessed with them.
Throughout the months, the GTA Group of maybe 10 or so people logged on every day during the peak of the pandemic to have fun well into the night, the lot of us often gaming for 16 hours a day. We became decently close, but Cars became obsessively possessive over Pink.
Now, Cars loved to call every guy in the group a simp. Colloquially, a simp is someone who expresses way too much affection to someone who doesn’t reciprocate it.
Logged on at the same as Pink? Simp.
Played Grand Theft Auto V with Pink for more than an hour alone? Simp.
Helped Pink out against enemy players? Simp.
Had a normal, human conversation with Pink? Oh my god, siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimp.
Summer ends. Everyone goes back to school. Cars isn’t in school, so he continues to play video games for 16 hours a day while everyone else gets on with their lives.
Fall semester ends. Everyone comes back online. Cars is salty. Cars claims everyone only returned to play video games with Pink. Cars goes on to slander every guy in the group until most leave and a handful of emotional hostages remain.
Cars gets drunk one night and tells a story about sexually assaulting an inebriated woman.
Yikes, right?
I tell him that’s not right in any way, shape, or form. Cars starts calling me “The Enlightened One” after that and saying I’m virtue signaling to get Pink’s attention.
Regardless, Pink starts spending more time with me and we start dating in secret from the GTA Group.
Months go by. Cars starts catching on that we’re a couple, loses his mind, and begins doing anything he can to get between us, ranging from openly flirting with Pink in front of the whole group to trying to convince her to buy two-player games to play with him and him alone.
I remembered Rule #3 which Pink came up with herself. Now, I wasn’t bothered that someone was shooting their shot. Your partner is a lovely person and that’s why you started dating them. You saw what made them special and so will others. No biggie.
What bothered me was that this was in violation of what she herself defined as cheating. Cars was blatantly being as disrespectful towards our relationship as he could be, so why wasn’t she drawing a boundary?
Was she oblivious?
She couldn’t be, because she deemed all the women in my life to be homewreckers over the smallest of hellos, yet Cars was doing an absurd amount of flirting with zero pushback from Pink.
I pushed for Pink to come clean about us to Cars for over a year. She brushed me off every time.
I left the GTA Group because I refused to tiptoe around Cars just to interact with my own girlfriend. Whenever I’d bring him up, she’d roll her eyes and go, “Oh my god, I’m not talking about this again.”
Her aforementioned toxicity crept toward the surface. This reluctance to draw boundaries made me anxious about her interactions with flirty men and I became insecure. She preyed upon this insecurity and leveraged my anxieties to get what she wanted from me. I had to block close gal pals and exes just to make her happy. Meanwhile, she freely received validation from other men at my expense.
Time goes on. I had enough of the lies, gaslighting, and surveillance. I broke up with her after 15 months. We go our separate ways to heal.
Pink studies abroad for 2022’s summer. She messages me that she still loves me. She sends me crying selfies.
Come autumn, she blocks me on everything. I assume this is so she can move on.
Now buckle up, bestie. Here’s the tea.
Today, I reached out to an old friend from the GTA Group to say hello. I’d missed him lots. Let’s call him Rockstar because he is one.
Rockstar was overjoyed to hear from me and updated me about what happened after I left the GTA Group.
During 2022’s autumn, Pink returned to the GTA Group and began dating Cars.
Holy shit. The validation of 15 months’ worth of bad gut feelings.
Cars immediately hated putting up with exactly what I had to put up with. Pink had the ever-present red flags waved in her face when Cars’ possessiveness amplified with exclusivity. Pink and Cars have a falling out. Pink leaves the group. Cars forbids anyone from being her friend. The group gets sick of Cars and gets rid of him after three years of controlling nonsense.
I’m invited back to the GTA Group. I regained all my old friends that I gamed with for the entire summer of 2020.
Pink and Cars hate each other and are on their own, their daily doings a mystery to us all.
But wait!
Pink dating Cars lined up with blocking me. She never drew that boundary for me but did so for Cars after I broke up with her.
The AUDACITY, sis.
I blocked close friends, distant friends, barely friends; if you had the gall to be a present woman in my extremely taken vicinity, blocked.
But Pink? Childhood lover, fraternity boys, and Cars were all free to flirt away as long as she could use it to get something she wanted.
If only you could’ve seen the way I jumped up from my office chair yelling “I knew it! I fucking knew it!”
All the hunches. All the gut feelings. All the sentiments I voiced of “Hey, shouldn’t you NOT stay up playing video games till six in the morning with someone trying to break us up?” All the ties to the universe that I ignored for the sake of romantic companionship.
They were all right. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t just being insecure.
I was so scared to voice my feelings for fear of the relationship ending, but in hindsight, what did I lose?
I learned so much from that awful relationship. I learned, most importantly, never to burn myself to keep someone else warm.
As I continue to unpack all the trauma I endured from the relationship, I learned something about myself when I dug deep and asked the hard, painful, uncomfortable questions.
Why are my partners always unfaithful in some way?
Why do I stay when it happens?
Why don’t I speak up for myself?
The answer was: a mindset of scarcity from a lack of self-esteem. I would think:
Well, relationships don’t happen often for you. If you draw your boundaries and this comes to an end, you might be alone for a long time because you’re not worthy of much affection.
By not loving myself, I would settle for being treated in the most awful ways.
Pink slapped me outta nowhere once. Full blast. It stung.
Pink would dream about sexually assaulting me at knifepoint. She thought it was funny.
Pink was horrendously disrespectful in intimacy. Sometimes my body still suddenly feels dirty and ruined.
I could’ve avoided it all had I just loved myself a little more and said enough is enough sooner.
But oh well. You live, you learn.
Since then, I’ve remained consistent at the gym and explored skincare and fashion as best I can. Dating has been whatever; I’ve tried the apps, but they’re just not for me. I’ve had some endearing times with sweet people but nothing major.
I’m taking it slow and being tender with myself as I reenter the dating scene and gradually open my heart back up to others.
I look forward to meeting my next lover with giddy excitement. I’m being patient and gentle with myself, of course, but I just know she’ll be amazing, and NOT because I’ll convince myself she is, but because I won’t settle for less than someone who holds me like I’m glass.
She’ll be sweet, kind, gentle, respectful, loving, and so much more because that’s what I bring to the table too, and I say that not with ego but with acceptance of the good in me.
Plus she’ll give me unlimited forehead kisses. Those are mandatory.