Emotional abuse or just autism?

[lemonicetea]

Disclaimer: I mean absolutely no offense to people on the spectrum. 
 

I had a friend that I’m going to call Scott. He was somebody I met off a message board in 2009. We had a lot of common interests and since I didn’t really have any friends at the time it was a dream come true. He did have autism but that didn’t really bother me. 
 

We were friends but then we started dating. Everything was fine at first but then a few red flags started to pop up. After dating for like a month I was at his dad’s house. Scott and his father got into a heated argument about something, and then Scott turned to me and said “I hope my dad dies before we have kids because I don’t want them growing up with a jackass for a grandpa.” I thought that was a weird thing to say for a number of reasons, but I chalked it up to him being angry. 
 

I don’t remember the exact specifics, but there was an instance where I did something like a family function without him. Later when Scott found out about it he was visibly annoyed and told me that I should have invited him because we are a couple and couples do everything together. 
 

Later after dating for about a year he randomly told me that his top three biggest fears is that I’m going to die, I’m going to break up with him, or I’m going to want a divorce after we marry. This comment honestly bothered me a lot. I also really want to say there was at least a time or two where he mentioned in passing that he will kill himself if I broke up with him, but I don’t remember the exact circumstances.

I felt like I was in a rock and a hard place. On the one had I did like him, we had a lot of common interests, and I didn’t have very many friends. On the other hand he’s acting like this. In early 2011, I made the difficult decision to stop dating and be just friends. To say he took this news lightly was the understatement of the century. Needless to say I spent the next several years of my life being bombarded with suicide threats, demands to get back together, and the like. I tried to just ignore it because I knew had autism and a rough childhood. 
 

Later in  2013, after I started attending university, I became friends with a guy in one of my classes. I thought it would be cool if the three of us see the upcoming Despicable Me movie. My new friend was totally on board. I told Scott about my new friend and he was having absolutely none of it. He got angry at me and told me that I need to see things from his perspective and his perspective is that this new friend is a threat to him because he’s going to steal me away. Needless to say, we didn’t see the movie (also my friend ended up moving to another state and we drifted apart). Again, I just chalked it up to autism.
 

This is more or less the story of my life for the next five years or so until 2018 when I ran into an old friend from high school. I would spend time with my high school friend behind Scott’s back because I just didn’t want to deal with Scott. I started to develops feelings for my friend and I knew Scott would never be able to handle that. I was  wondering what I should do when the pandemic happened. Since Scott lives like 20 miles away now and doesn’t have a car I haven’t physically seen him since Covid. (Also my high school friend ghosted me so that’s a non issue now).

Spending time away from him made me realize how truly toxic he was. Well, at first we were communicating like normal. Then in the summer of 2020, out of the blue, he sends me a big, long email telling me about how he was thinking about the last time we has a conversation on why I don’t want to date him and recalls me saying that he had an unhealthy relationship with me. He told me he’s been doing research on unhealthy relationships abd he fails to see how his was anything but healthy. He provided some links to some sites and asked me to read them and then explain what he did right and what he did wrong in our relationship.

I just deleted that email because I decided I wasn’t going to entertain that conversation for the umpteenth time. Then it occurred to me that even though it’s a piece of cake to delete an email, it’s a whole other animal to deal with a conversation like this in person. At that point I decided I was done with him.

I slowly cut back on responding to text messages and emails and not picking up on phone calls. This carried on for about a year. I did tell him about how I was going to school to be a teacher, however. He asked me what grade I want to teach and I half joking was like “anything but teenagers”. His was response was “good idea. The last thing I need in my life is a teenager hitting on my ex-girlfriend.” At that point I decided I was done for real. 

I ended up blocking his number. A little while later he started calling me from an old number I didn’t realize he still had, but he was acting like nothing happened. Like he was all like “I see you blocked my other number, but do you want to go see a movie?”. I blocked that number as well, and then he started sending me DM’s on a message board we were on asking me why I was ghosting him. I told him I want to move on with my life. A few weeks later he messages me again saying that he understands I want to move on, but he still wants me to call him every now and then and he would like to help me out in moving on. I told him to stop talking to me.

Although he stopped messaging me at that point (this was summer 2022), he did still send me a birthday card in the mail, which he wrote “hope we can hang out soon” that December. Thankfully I haven’t heard anything from him since (he did get banned from that message board). 
 

Anyways, I know when I told some of the earlier stuff about Scott to my mom she would just tell me to ignore it because it’s autism. And a part of me does feel really bad because I do seriously believe he doesn’t know any better. Like all he knows is that he wants to date me and….that'd literally all he knows. He’s not treating me like crap because he’s a cruel person. He’s treating me like crap because his social intelligence is literally in the toilet. 
 

Anyways, I have a hard time letting this go. Like I have a hard time moving past the abuse, or autism, or whatever it was that made me feel horrible. I realize I’m no innocent victim here because I let it go on for so long. I understand his behavior isn’t my fault, but it is my fault that I didn’t throw him out the door after the first threat to hurt himself. I just want to be free from resentment towards him and free from fear that I’m going to run into another person like him. 

[Gebidozo]

9 minutes ago, lemonicetea said:

I realize I’m no innocent victim here because I let it go on for so long. I understand his behavior isn’t my fault, but it is my fault that I didn’t throw him out the door after the first threat to hurt himself.

This pretty much sums it up. You seem to have a good grasp of what has happened and you’ve learned your lesson. I understand that you feel uneasy about Scott, and of course in retrospect you should have cut off contact with him way sooner (and in more retrospect, not dated him at all), but what’s done is done. It doesn’t matter what exactly caused him to behave like this. He isn’t your concern any longer. In the future, you’ll know that a man telling you he’ll kill himself if you leave him is a red flag.

[lemonicetea]

Another thing that makes me feel like it’s partially my fault is that I developed feelings for him. When I first started dating him, my mom warned me to not to get attached to him. She told me that he is going to loose interest and leave and she doesn’t want me to get a broken heart. 
 

He still would have made threats to hurt himself, but what do I care if I didn’t have feelings for him? He’s just some random idiot spouting out suicide threats. I could have very easily thrown him out the door without a second thought. 

[basil67]

Being emotionally abusive is not a symptom of autism.   And you should have thrown him out the door when he started threatening suicide because it's emotional manipulation.