Back Together After 7 Years On And Off

[HamsterMan]

Hello, Loveshack! This is my first post here, and I wanted to get your opinion on a specific relationship issue and how we are handling it. First a bit of background:

 

We met 7 years ago (at the time, we were both 30 years old), and we got into an intense relationship for about a year that was very loving but also suffered from a lot of conflict - she and I both had problems of our own that made it difficult to build a healthy partnership. Specifically, I had problems with depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. In previous relationships, I had suffered from anxiety that my partner would leave me, and I had tended to choose partners who were ambivalent about me. Who knows why.

 

She had similar problems (without the substance abuse) and had a pattern of toxicity in her previous relationships: she would meet a guy, idealize him and think he was perfect in all ways, fall in love, get to know the guy as a real person (with all his flaws), and then she would turn on him - be extremely critical, start fights, fall out of love, and eventually dump the guy in some cruel way. She admitted this to me and warned me about it before we started dating. Of course, I thought that I was the perfect guy for her so it wouldn't happen. But it did. We were running a tech startup together (which is how we met - I hired her and she soon became a VP), and I made a strategic decision (perhaps a mistake) that was causing problems for the business. Despite a promise to each other that we would always put the relationship ahead of the business, she used my mistake (which may not even have been a mistake) as an excuse to viciously chew me out, tell me I wasn't sufficiently masculine for her, etc. And then she dumped me, a Facebook message and then blocking me from everything. Not cool... this wasn't someone I was casually dating, we had been dating for a year and living together for 6 months.

 

About 8 months later, I had moved to a different city, where I found new investors for the business, built a new team, and was beginning to fall for the web developer I had recently hired. It was deja vu, kind of... until I checked in on Facebook at a fancy Italian restaurant on a date with my employee, and my ex saw it - even though she had blocked me, we had 300 mutual friends thanks to the business, so the news spread quickly. She called me up, crying, and asked if she could come see me. I said she could, at her own expense, and we got back together after a romantic weekend in a fancy hotel.

 

I decided to give up on the business and I moved in with her. Pretty much immediately there were problems - she was finding little things to fight with me about, and I saw a message she sent to her friend saying she would probably stay with me, but that she was sad, because I was totally in love with her and she was not totally in love with me. At that point in time, I was much more stable in my life, career, and health, because I was taking medication that treated my mood disorder and my addiction problem. However, she did not believe in antidepressants etc and thought they were the source of our problems connecting with each other. So I foolishly went off them, and also went off the addiction medication. While I remained relatively functional (at my respectable 6 figure job), the relationship was very volatile - it would swing from these blissful romantic weekends to these horrific fights. We saw a couples counsellor, but it was a joke - I recall one session where I told the counsellor that she was on dating sites, talking with random dudes on the phone, and that she also demanded I do 100% of the housework, "to prove that I was responsible" before she could think of marrying me. The counsellor called her out on her behavior, and she sheepishly agreed to be more considerate of my feelings in the future. After the session, in the parking lot, she FLIPPED OUT at me, saying that I was not being "a man", and that the problem was my father, who, to her, was effeminate and not a good masculine role mode. I had said during the session that I wanted a relationship that was a partnership, where we both contributed in various ways. During the fight, she said this was some kind of weird communist idea from my parents. Etc. The next day she was all smiles, blamed it on PMS, and we took off on a lovely trip to Cancun.

 

Obviously this relationship was toxic, and I didn't have the self esteem to leave, because the combination of stress and going off my antidepressants had caused me to become emotionally reactive. During our fights, I had often broken down and cried about how worthless I felt, and her harsh response to seeing a man crying had made me think that I was lucky to have her - that nobody else would want to date me. Eventually, things imploded in spectacular fashion: she was away on vacation and had asked me to renew our car insurance. I saw that she was "cheating" on me online, talking to guys again, and resolved to end the relationship when she returned. Because of this, I didn't renew the insurance, as it was her car and I wasn't going to be driving it. However, when she got back, we somehow resolved things (again), and this miserable relationship continued for 3 months, until she got pulled over for driving with no insurance, got a $5000 fine, and her rates doubled. She dumped me soon after. And quite frankly, both our behavior was appalling towards the end. Although I had definitely not been the cause of the relationship turning toxic.

 

I got in another relationship soon after, which failed because I was cheating on the woman with my ex - who insisted on being "best friends" with me, even though she refused to consider fixing the relationship. I moved to San Francisco, and my life totally fell apart. Meanwhile, she was in a relationship with this controlling narcissist, and she almost got sucked in. However, eventually she left, I left San Francisco, and after 6 months of ambigious "friendship", we decided to try a relationship again.

 

That was a month ago. She has changed: she has admitted to herself and to me that she had been abusive to all of the guys she's ever dated, including me. She takes antidepressants now, and so do I. And we both see our own therapists. And the relationship is actually good - we don't fight much, we are really loving to each other, she makes an effort too. There's only one problem, and I would like your take on it (in the context of our history, because that matters):

 

She has remained in contact with that "narcissist" she dated while we were broken up, and I don't like it, because he doesn't know that she's seeing anyone else. He's in a different city, but still. When I confronted her about it, she said "I'm 37 years old, and I have no idea if you and me are going to work out - so I have to be practical".

 

I told her that this crossed a "red line" and that if she wanted to be with me, she had to be with ME. She could explore that relationship later, if she and I did not work out. The compromise we reached is that she won't have any contact with the guy for a month while we continue to explore the relationship. If it's going well at the end of the month, she'll tell him it's over for good etc. She showed me her messages so I know she actually did it.

 

Look. Right now the relationship is great. Has been since we got back together just over a month ago. But honestly. Am I wasting my time???

[Zahara]

That was a month ago. She has changed

 

One month is a drop in the bucket to achieve change. You both sound like very toxic people and in that sense, I don't believe a month has changed anything. It takes much time, effort and commitment to unravel what has been emotionally and mentally ingrained for so long.

 

The fact that she wants to pursue a relationship with a man you both label a narcissist is a HUGE red flag.

 

One of the signs of a narcissist is to idealize, devalue and discard. Sounds similar to what you mentioned about the men that enter her life.

 

You mentioned that your self-esteem is broken. It would be best to step away, find your independence, focus on rebuilding your self-worth and self-respect and seeking relationships that are rewarding and fulfilling to you. There's a reason why this hasn't worked out for seven years. Nothing much has changed.

 

Eye opener: You have spent nearly a decade going in circles. Life is short. Stop wasting your years trying to make something work. Even at this point you are still having to make ultimatums, wondering what tomorrow brings and if it can work out. It shouldn't be this hard, worst of all, damaging.

 

In any case, wait till your month is over and go from there. If you both decide to move forward, I would very tread carefully.

Edited September 20, 2018 by Zahara

[Orokotikki]

Am I wasting my time???

God yes man, wasting your time!

 

Time which could be used to improve yourself, and (I suspect most critically for you) you are wasting your OPPORTUNITY to meet other QUALITY women.

 

Oh sure maybe you can play the field, especially since you are not adverse to cheating, but you aren't going to find a quality partner while lugging that lodestone - even if a prospective woman doesn't know, the quality woman's bull**** radar will detect and be repelled by it, leaving you to only find other hot messes (at best).

 

Her ACTIONS show you to mean little to her, despite however much she may claim to value you with her WORDS.

[HamsterMan]

You both sound like very toxic people and in that sense, I don't believe a month has changed anything.

 

How do you define "toxic people"? Personally, I use the term to describe someone who is abusive, or to describe a relationship dynamic that is unhealthy for a variety of reasons, could be an abusive / narcissistic partner, could be due to infidelity, etc. If by "toxic people" you mean anyone who behaves in ways that cause toxicity in relationships, then I don't believe that is still the case for me. In the past, I would act very moody and got angry frequently, largely due to substance abuse. I've been 100% clean and sober for over a year now, and this is probably why my behavior in the new relationship is so much mnore positive than it used to be.

 

What I see as my biggest remaining problem is that I often get anxious and insecure in relationships, but I think a lot of that is because, in the past, I had too many issues to be a stable long term partner, and women would see that and often would leave me. Today, if I take an objective look at how I treat my partner (or even how I treated the "rebound" partner before I cheated on her with my ex), I've got a lot to be proud of... I am loyal, loving, flexible, supportive, and reliable. My self-esteem is progressively improving as I observe my own actions and realize that I've successfully overcome some difficult challenges.

 

God yes man, wasting your time!

Oh sure maybe you can play the field, especially since you are not adverse to cheating, but you aren't going to find a quality partner while lugging that lodestone

 

I am highly averse to cheating. I ended the relationship with that other woman after the first time sleeping with my ex... I didn't get caught, but the fact that I cheated sign was a clear sign to me that I needed to break up with the woman, because it showed me that I was not that into her. I have never cheated on a woman that I was "in love with" (which is why I have never cheated on my current partner whom we are discussing here, nor during 2 multi-year relationships that preceded her)

[Mardelis]

I am highly averse to cheating. I ended the relationship with that other woman after the first time sleeping with my ex... I didn't get caught, but the fact that I cheated sign was a clear sign to me that I needed to break up with the woman, because it showed me that I was not that into her. I have never cheated on a woman that I was "in love with" (which is why I have never cheated on my current partner whom we are discussing here, nor during 2 multi-year relationships that preceded her)

 

 

What you've said here is very telling. You start with saying that you're highly adverse to cheating and end it with "it's ok to cheat on a person I am not in love with".

 

 

You might have made some progress in the last year of being clean but you've got a long ways to go before you come close to really figuring out what needs to change.