A lesson

I loved my girlfriend with all my heart. She was a busy lawyer, who didn’t have the bandwidth to initiate a breakup but did have the capacity to emotionally manipulate and exploit me until the very end.

Whilst I would always prop her up through her mental health issues, she weaponised my low self-esteem and used it to demean and bully me on a regular basis, in the form of verbal and physical abuse. As a sufferer of low esteem, she made me feel extremely unattractive, ugly, lame, unpopular and worthless.

She was living with me during the end of 2020 and despite not following government guidelines, the lockdown weighed on her mentally, and caused her to externalise her mental health on me even more.

A week before the breakup, she was going out and drinking heavily every day. During one drunken episode she beat me up, on another she urinated on a friends sofa. As I later found out, she initiated the breakup as she had regularly been texting her ex in a sexual context. She’d been texting him throughout our 2 year relationship, claiming it was for “friendship”, but I never called her out as I didn’t have the confidence to do so. Eventually she confessed that the breakup was to “protect me” and she had sex with her ex the day after and for the months leading up to Christmas. We were sleeping in the same bed at my flat; her routine was to go for “late night walks”, have sex with her ex, and then come to my flat and cuddle up to me.

I’ve never felt this low and I didn’t know humans could treat each other this badly. I helped her move to her new flat before the new year and she’s given me the option to be friends with her. Every time we’ve spoken since the breakup, she’s been attention seeking and curt.

My low self esteem has compelled me to make poor decisions in my previous relationship; but I realise now I need therapy as no human being should withstand this mistreatment. I hope this story serves as a lesson - you are all better than this.