I don't know how to find the words to articulate exactly what I am feeling, where I'm at in my life or in my relationship. I only know that I have become this person that I don't like. I barely recognize this person who looks back at me in the mirror. I am riddled with self doubt, anxiety, fear, guilt, depression. And my relationship did this to me but more importantly, I allowed this to happen to myself.

My partner and I have been together for 2 years and 3 months. We had 7 amazing months. We've had 20 months of total destruction with rare glimpses of what we once were.

I am told week after week that I am an abuser, a manipulator, a liar, a cheater, a sociopath. I've been called white trash, a milquetoast, a fraud... I've lost track of the name calling. I've been bullied and intimidated into submission, time after time. I've been physically abused at times and I have been physical with her at times. The fights are unlike anything I've ever seen. Being talked down to and yelled at within centimeters of my face while she is literally foaming at the mouth. I am by nature a very calm person who rarely shows anger. I am not a communicator, she is. I try but it's hard for me to find my voice and even harder when I feel like I am being bullied and intimidated by another. The smallest of things can turn explosive. She demands her voice to be heard and I often find that she talks at me, not to me in a gentle tone. I become frozen in terror at the yelling and the belittling which inevitably happens. The less I say, the more frustrated she becomes. This bullying aggressive stance she takes makes me feel like we've morphed into these parent/child roles where I'm cowering in fear.

I feel like a prisoner in my own home but I don't know if she's done this to me or if I've done it to myself. The trust in our relationship was shattered 20 months ago. We have been in the "rebuilding" phase ever since but things have only gotten worse for the both of us.

I was once a very confident person. Full of life, filled with wanderlust, eager to learn and grow and experience new things. I had my flaws, as we all do but my heart is good. I shattered the trust in our relationship because I entered into this relationship as an immature, selfish person. This love I have now, it's unlike anything I've ever experienced before and likely ever will. At 35, this is the only person I truly thought I could marry and spend forever with. Paradoxically, this is also the only person that has destroyed me to the core and taken my self worth. And through it all, my love is as deep as ever. I spent the longest time pining for those first couple of months, knowing if we could just work this out, we'd be good again because without all this noise, we are good together. Then I spent several months mourning the loss of what we had, not understanding why this process had to happen this way. I didn't cheat on this person, not even close. Now I spend this time wondering how did it get so bad, how do we get back what we once had nearly two years ago. Is it even possible? I'm so deeply hurt, I feel the resentment festering within me and this inner voice in me is saying, 'you need to get out'.

We fight constantly. It's so bad I physically feel the toll it's taking on my body as I know she does, too. If I'm crying less than 6 days a week, it's a good week. I'm with someone who has become so frustrated with me, with the length of this process, with me just not getting it right, she has now begun to abuse me. I'm talked down to constantly, called names, intimidated, bullied. The threats, my god, the threats. For 20 months there's been a suitcase which appears on a regular basis, in and out of the closet, sometimes sitting, packed, by the door, for a week at a time. She's leaving, she's not leaving. She's calling her mom, her friend and telling them what I've done to her and over the last few months, that's just what she does. We currently work together and she owns the car and I'm told, at least once a week, to find my own way to work/home from work. She's told me she hates me, that she really doesn't even like me. Then I'm told she loves me. There's no sex in this relationship anymore. I've spent the last 20 months being accused of cheating I just can't even feel close to her in that way after all the false accusations, belittling, lack of trust. I need to trust someone, just as they need to trust me, to feel that true intimate bond. She doesn't trust me and although I've tried, it's just not the same without trust. She is withholding all affection now. She often sleeps in the other bedroom. She doesn't touch me. Several months ago she would pick me up from work and lean in for a kiss and I noticed it's because she wanted to smell my breath to see if I had been faithful, I suppose. This went on for weeks before I called her out on it. I said, if you want to smell my breath, just ask, don't feign kissing me because that deeply hurts me. We just don't kiss anymore. The last time she tried, I just stood frozen waiting for her to smell my breath and she got angry that I didn't try to kiss her back because that one time, she didn't want to smell my breath and somehow I should have known that.

We've been through a lot as a couple. She was diagnosed with cancer 7 months into our relationship. She had surgery and several weeks of radiation. As a result, she was fired from a well paid corporate job. Most "friends" in her life just completely vanished and I know that devastated her. She's reminded me ever since that I was not there for her during that time. Sure I went to all her radiation appointments, surgery, doctors visits but the trust wasn't there and I wasn't doing what needed to be done. She accused me the entire time she was going through this medical crisis of having an affair with her best friend of 20 years who she later cut ties with.

She tells me the cancer should have made us stronger but it didn't, we're worse off and it's because of me, because I didn't do what it took to get the trust back because I wasn't patient or always kind and because I was defensive when I was accused time and time again of having affairs, of lying, of hiding things. It got so bad that at one point, for a stretch of about 1 year, unless I went to work, which she dropped me off and picked me up, I never left her side. Shortly after her surgery, I wanted to go to the corner store and she asked me who I was going to see, demanded to see my phone, who I called. This happened a few times and it was always the same thing, implying that I was going to see someone, call someone... I began to experience deep anxiety at the thought of even leaving the house without her. To this day, I still feel that. In the average week, I have maybe 1 day a week where she works and I don't and I spend that day inside, unless I run to the store and it gives me deep anxiety. I make sure I get receipts everywhere I go to show to her what I've been doing. Two weeks ago, she came home that night and said 'did you see or talk to anyone today'. I hadn't, I never do but for nearly two years now, every single time I get a text or someone calls, I immediately tell her so I don't know why she would ask. This makes me feel like a child, as well. I feel like everything is monitored. I share all my bank accounts, I leave my phone and ipad unlocked and she knows she can pick them up at any time. Three weeks ago we got into a big fight because she demanded my banking password. I said, I've been showing you that account for over a year and anytime you ask to see it, it's open to you, I'll log in and show you anything but I am not giving you my password because I don't want to be policed or spied on. If you have a question or concern, you come to me and I'll show you.

Look, I'm just rambling now because it's just all so much and it's just so constant. Bottom line is, about 3 or 4 months ago she told me that she will not listen to any of my concerns. She says I never addressed the initial complaint, I never repaired the trust and until the trust is back, she's unwilling to hear me out. She also said the trust may never come back. There are not guarantees but essentially what this tells me is that the line of communication from me to her is cut off indefinitely. I have no close friends or family I can talk to, I can't afford therapy and as a last resort, I've come to this forum, desperately hoping to gain some insight, to be offered advice, to be told what I'm doing wrong. She always says 'I can't be held responsible for what I don't know' and I truly believe this is why she has cut off the line of communication from me to her. She knows it'll be negative and some of it will be. I feel controlled and manipulated and abused and bullied and she doesn't want to hear that and she doesn't want to hear what it's done to me, how I walk on egg shells all day, waiting for her to explode, how I can't feel intimate or close with her when she treats me like a child. I don't know what to do, I don't know if it can even be repaired. A few weeks ago she told me 'I hope you get cancer and someone treats you the way you treated me'.

Am I an abuser? Yes, we fought throughout her cancer scare. We fought because she didn't trust me, because she accused me time and again of cheating. I only defended myself but she says that's not the way to go about it. I've never been in this situation before but I'm only human. To this day, she reminds me on a weekly basis about having cancer, which I can't even imagine how that has affected her. I wish it had brought us closer. I thought I was doing the right thing by being by her side through it all. I was being transparent, I was being honest, I was being faithful. I guess I just didn't allow her to be angry at me and talk sweetly to her and say, I understand why you're angry, I understand why you think I'm having an affair. The truth is, I guess I really don't understand why she thinks I am a cheater. I've never cheated on anyone I've dated (she has). I don't think that what shattered the trust is worthy of her associating me as being a cheater. Do you?


The required background info needed is as follows: I am not a very good communicator, she thrives on communication. I am/was an innately private person. Although I felt I never had secrets or things to intentionally hide, I just innately always felt that my life wasn't interesting enough or that other people didn't care enough (I half-kid when I say it's a side effect of middle child syndrome) to know the minute details of my life and for all of my former relationships this was largely how things went. In a sense, because I didn't ever think those former partners were going to be longstanding relationships, I also felt I didn't need to answer to them. So I walk into my current relationship, carrying these same bad habits with me except now I meet someone that demands complete transparency and earnestly cares about the minute details of my day-to-day activities. In an attempt to make a long story short, the major events that shattered the trust were one night while we were out, she picked up my phone to look at it and saw a text from a friend where we had discussed meeting up for drinks. I can say with complete honesty that I never had intentions of actually meeting up with this person and it was more of a 'yea let's get together for drinks soon'. My partner knew of this person as they had house sat my apartment 3 months prior when her and I went on a 10 day vacation. But due to conflicting schedules and my seeing this friend less and less, they had never actually met. This was a completely benign relationship with someone I had only known about a year in a strictly friends manner. Two: at the time, I was working as a bartender and my partner was now living with me. I was open with her that occasionally one of my exes would come into the bar for drinks. This was a person I had known for 12 years and someone I had been separated from for 7. We had worked through our post breakup bumps and eventually grew into becoming friends and had seen me through 2 relationships prior to my current relationship. What I failed to tell my partner is that we would occasionally share cab rides home when I got off work at 2-3am, as we lived within 3 blocks of each other. This isn't something that she secretly found out, I was open and honest with her but several months after the fact because again, I guess I didn't see anything wrong with it to mention it, I had already been forthright with her when I told her that my ex would occasionally come into the bar and she seemed okay enough with that but sharing a cab home at night, she was not okay with and it's because I didn't tell her that right away. Three: On a handful of occasions, I introduced her to a handful of my friends. These events did not always go over well. The first time, on a double date, I felt that my friends partner, whom I did not know well, was extremely antagonistic towards my partner, on their very first encounter. I sat at the dinner table in disbelief and I said nothing. I feel like I truly let her down because in that moment, I was a coward. I thought if I ignored the situation it would be swept under the rug but that was not to be the case. On several other occasions, people in my life treated her with less respect than she had shown them. These are the key points in the shattering of her trust. I have never had an affair, I have never thought of having an affair. I've never fancied anyone the way that I fancy this woman. I just don't have what it even takes to have an affair, I made the promise to myself when I first began dating, I would leave whoever I was with before I dipped my toes in those turbulent waters because I had too much respect for myself to be that person who could have an affair.

On top of all of this, a few weeks prior to her discovering those texts and the beginning of all of this, we found out she had cancer which required surgery and several weeks of radiation. I took two weeks off of work to be with her during this time, cut out all of my nights shifts at work all together and went down to essentially 3 days of work a week which resulted in me making half the money that I had been used to. But I wanted to please her. She worried about me working late nights and I agreed with her and also didn't like to be away from her so I willingly cut out those night shifts. I know that when I started to pull away from that job is when she would make comments about me being a bartender (she had a well paying corporate job at the time). On two occasions she called me white trash because of my occupation and the people I was forced to associate with through work. Keep in mind, I had absolutely no outside contact with anyone who came into that bar and by this time, my ex had long stopped coming into the bar. She snobbed that bar and the people who went in there and told me I was just like them. This increased my self doubt and although I needed the work/money, I shied away from it because I felt she looked down on me. When a shift would become available and I felt we needed the money, I knew I could not take a shift without talking to her about it first and it always ended in an argument with her coming up with a bunch of other alternatives before finally saying just do whatever you want to do. I began to feel controlled. I had always been independent, I always made my own money and supported myself along with whoever I was seeing at the time.

Our relationship has deteriorated so much I honestly don't know if it can ever be repaired. My self-esteem is at an all time low. For months we have fought on an almost daily basis. I cry at least 5 out of 7 days a week. I have pushed everyone out of my life. I have constant anxiety.

The thing is, I deeply admire the person that she is. She is kind and generous and intelligent. She's a great communicator and listener. She's got a big heart. I respect the person that she is but I do not respect the way that she has treated me. Because all of these qualities I see her treat other people with, she doesn't treat me with them anymore... Anymore. She says it's my fault because I haven't done what's needed to repair the trust.

What am I doing wrong? I'm completely transparent, I'm honest, I'm an open book now except that I can't talk about my feelings. I lose my patience and get defensive and I don't know how to stop that but she says those are the biggest things.. She just can accuse me of anything and explode on me and I, after cowering in fear, am supposed to talk her down.

I don't get it. I don't get why I still hold out hope that we can be the same couple we were two years ago.

Welcome to MB.

You and your GF are living together? Do you have children together?

Dating is an interview for marriage. The abuse on both sides is horrible.

We are living together and we do not have children nor a desire to have children.

Skgres, welcome to Marriage Builders, sorry for the reasons that brought you here. I realize you are not married so most of these concepts don't apply, but Dr Harley has written about how disastrous living together really is. Most of the domestic violence occurs in these relationships. They are typically very violent and abusive because people who live together are renters. Renters tend to keep score and when the score is not even, they resort to abusive tactics.

Check this out http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8110_cohabitation.html

Regardless of living together or married, this is a train wreck that should have been abandoned about 20 months ago. Why live with the mutual abuse day after day, that is just masochism.

AGG

I live with the abuse because I feel responsible for this relationship being in the state it is in. She wasn't abusive at first. She became frustrated that I couldn't repair the trust. I'm beginning to think I just don't know how. She said, just listen to me, she told me what she needed but I couldn't stop defending myself. What do you say when someone accuses you of cheating, of lying, takes shots at your character? I came into the relationship with a few bad habits that I really worked hard on correcting and for the most part have but it was too late once the trust was gone. I just don't understand how it could possibly lead to constant accusations of cheating? I had left my job as a bartender where she implied on several occasions that anyone could be coming in there and I could be doing anything with them and literally on my second day at my new job, she implied that I might be sleeping with our boss. She still thinks that's possible and still implies I might be. This is a temporary job that will be over in a few weeks so I'm trying to ride it out. For the longest time, I really believed that once the trust was back, we'd be impenetrable. I excuse some of her abuse because I understand her frustration but the way I see it now, we're just not working together if she's not willing to hear me out. It's as if she expects me to be ubermensch, equipped with these super human powers of being able to deflect the verbal assault and character assassination because I broke the trust.

See, in my mind I think... If someone didn't stand up for you at the dinner table to someone who was disrespecting you, you can't trust that this person will stand up for you in the future. In my head, that lack of trust in that department doesn't equate to the possibility that someone could cheat on me, even with all the other situations that happened. But perhaps my thinking is flawed and I'm not being completely empathetic to her feelings.

She sounds like a very manipulating and toxic person, at least to you. You seem to want to understand her motives and rationalize the abuse and change yourself to stop the abuse - but that hasn't worked out very well, has it?

Even if you were married (and without kids) I'd say run for the hills. Since you are not married, it should be that much easier.

There are plenty of normal people out there, life is too short to spend it with a psycho who makes you feel small every day.

AGG

Please read.
Buyers, Renters and Freeloaders

Skgres,

It really sounds like she has cheated on you, wanted to leave you, but now feels stuck with you because of her financial and medical needs, and is violently angry because of this state she is in. The thing is that cheaters hate to be cheated on.

Did she cheat on previous partners, and did she tell you horror stories about them.

God Bless
Gamma

After my father died, my mother remarried to a man that she adored. About two years into the marriage the wife of his best friend said something mean to her humiliating her in public. The marriage never recovered. From then on until she died she never felt safe with him because she felt she had been betrayed. In MB terms, he had put his friendship ahead of his marriage.

One thing you will learn if you hang around here (and I hope you will) is that it is important to take care of your spouse as she needs to be cared for. It does not have to make sense to you. It just has to be right for her.

living_well, thank you very much for sharing your mothers experience with me. I am your stepfather, in that sense. I know I let her down and it was more than once. I was a coward for not standing up for her and she has never forgotten that. Since then, I feel like she really is looking for instances where something is said or someone does something disrespectful and waits for me to say something. At times, I have. Other times, I'm a little late on the gun and sometimes, I just don't even see the harm done, the way that she does.

Gamma, I truly don't believe she has cheated on me. She admits to cheating in the past, emotional affair or otherwise but I know she's not cheating on me. She rarely speaks ill about anyone, exes included. She gives a pretty balanced view, some bad but also plenty good. I do agree, to some degree, with what you said. I think perhaps she does feel stuck with me now. I hope not, but it's the way I am beginning to feel. She always has her mom to go home to, but at nearly 50 years of age, I know she desperately doesn't want that and wants to feel like this is her home, too. I feel that she regrets falling in love with me, thinking I wasn't the person she initially thought I was and I do believe she's angry and resentful. It doesn't help that the constant belittling has completely chipped away at my psyche and self-esteem and tattered as I am around the edges right now, I am sure I wouldn't even find myself attractive. She'll chew me out and then tell me go ahead and mope now. I even hate myself for it but I just feel like her personal human punching bag at times and I can't seem to break myself out of this cycle, I don't know if I can with the constant verbal abuse and guilt. Given the loss of employment and the medical condition, it has been a huge source of stress. She lost her health insurance and desperately needs follow up tests/exams. The last thing I want is to add further to her stress. She wants her home to be a place of refuge and peace and I desperately want that for her as well and I take this very hard, very personal, that this fighting continues. Sometimes I think if I just shut up, if I just give her lip service, if I'm just agreeable, things will be okay. Other times I think, if I just leave maybe she'll be better off.

You should move out. Non committed (and you really are not sure about one another, are you?) Live-in relationships often generate abuse on both sides.

This is exactly the kind of toxic living situation Dr H describes.

Until you have dated long enough to know that you want to make a life time commitment, you are not commited.

Until you are sure enough to actually do it, you are not committed.

She knows she is not your forever choice.

You know you are not hers.

That's scary for you both. And when we can't rely on commitment we resort to anger, disrespect and other manipulation tactics to achieve short term what only mutual commitment and willingness can achieve long term.

With the cancer and premature moving in together, you have never taken the time needed to really get to know each other.

Date someone properly and make up your mind to marry rather than subjecting them to a stressful living together trail run.

The cancer situation was way above what your realtionships commitment level could handle.

Wow, you are way overthinking this and spinning it into something very complicated when it's actually much more simple.

Did you read the article that Melody linked for you?

This is the norm for renter/cohabitation relationships = use anger and disrespect to get your partner to do what you want and it becomes a bad habit that is very hard to break. If you read the article, you will see this is typical - the problem only gets worse and the lovebusters destroy the love you two have for each other.