Towards the end of 2013 I went through a traumatic break up which was caused by the cheating of an ex boyfriend I was dating for at least 6 months, so I decided to remain single – beginning of the next year 2014 until my wounds had healed enough just to have some time to myself without interacting or even entertaining the opposite sex, though it wasn’t an easy period of my life at the time as I was still vulnerable and still grappling at the horrible events that took place which lead to my break up but to cut the long story short. We arrived at a social event one day together only to end up leaving separately due to a huge argument and with accusations thrown in the air , he left me there at the event discarding and throwing away all my personal belongings including my cell phone and handbag  from his car and with almost getting harassed by a few drunk unruly immature men as I tried to make an exit from this event I was thankful to be saved by security and my dad who came to fetch me at the nearest exit. So I was vulnerable , hurt and upset but started confiding in a male friend who I’d met through mutual friends a few years before and honestly it felt refreshing to talk to someone and get everything I had piled up emotionally off my chest. But as time went on we started texting frequently more and more each day – things were taking a different and unexpected turn and I was starting to realise that I was becoming attracted to him the more we communicated and we decided that we’d start “hanging out” absolutely hate the term “friends with benefits” but truthfully that is what we were to each other and  although I was still dealing with the after effects of my break up (I didn’t really give myself enough time to heal) But I didn’t really think of the harm of trying something new either it was my first time doing something like this and it was happening at a faster rate than expected. As months tumbled on we spent more time together wine-ing and dining eating and drinking out at different restaurants on the weekends It felt kind of good to have some wholesome male attention after the last horrific trainwreck of a relationship I was in and with my initial string of a few bad relationships in the past it was the first time I actually felt special quite some time lapsed and I started to realised that I was breaking my own rules but I started falling for him which would later prove to be one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made but I had to be honest about how I truly felt so I summed up enough courage to tell him but to my dismay he continued to tell me that “he wasn’t ready for a relationship” and we should rather ride the wave instead so I did ,  though I was a bit disappointed we stayed in our little arrangement though it was confusing because he had asked me the night before  “What I really wanted out of this?” before I could tell him how I really felt the day after which was a little misleading even though the initial reason of all of this was “to have fun” with zero boundaries. Things started taking a more confusing turn the deeper I sunk into it , I was starting to lose myself more than I’ve ever had before I couldn’t even recognise myself and I was becoming angrier and angrier not only at the can of worms I had just opened, not only at him but at myself .

A few people I confided in about the situation I was in tried to endlessly talk to me about how toxic things would become especially knowing that he had a rather bad track record when it came to females and relationships he was more of a floater who had quite a lot of female friends(which I was completely uncomfortable with not that I had a right to be because I quote ‘it wasn’t my place to be uncomfortable with who he associates with because we were never in a relationship” and painfully he was right) and “acquaintances ” as he would say – probably specific woman “that were possible potentials to sleep with or certain females he enjoyed spending time with other than me he’s a man of many options not the type to be tied down or controlled”- he jumps from one “female situation” to the next regarding women as “bad bitches” and claiming to only being attracted to “those kinds of women” he started making me feel more like an object of sexual lust because now it was becoming quite obvious to me that how I looked was more impressionable to him than anything else and with my observant nature and straight talking  feisty attitude it didn’t take long to voice out how I was really feeling at which he was stunned by my outspoken personality or even the fact that I could even stand up to him and say what I needed to say when I wanted to say which he deemed as disrespectful because he claims “no woman has ever spoken to him the way I’d speak to him which indicated that I wasn’t “afraid of him” which was comical because why did I feel like I needed to be intimidated by him?

Things were starting to turn sour at first he was charming something completely different from what I was starting to observe about him at a later stage of this situation we were in , he deemed himself as a ‘control freak’ and clearly by how he moved and acted he clearly seemed like the type of guy who usually got his way with women like the typical bachelor . He gradually started picking me to pieces criticizing my choice of fashion when it came to certain colours like black which he would say was EMO or GOTH , he criticized my past constantly questioning and even judging me on my past mistakes like he was so clean and saintly he out of all people was the last person to ridicule me about my mistakes , criticizing my character and personality and even my cultural background (something I had no control over – no one chooses to be born in a certain ethnic group or cultural group it just happens so that you are who you are ) He’d make negative and disrespectful comments about the cultural background I’m from stating that girls from my specific cultural group weren’t to be proposed to or even to be considered for relationship purposes because of how wayward we are because we are deemed to be associated with being gold digging , heavy drinking , witchcraft loving and loose kind of women he would even go as far as even subliminally demean and poke fun at me via social media statuses , he even once claimed that I’d tried to poison or spike his food and that he doesn’t trust my cooking and even accused me of stealing from him the more he picked me apart and even asking me ‘why I’m not like the other girls’ my self esteem and self respect diminished completely I felt like I needed to be validated and as he would say ‘show more effort” I had to ‘work my way up like I had something to prove just to give more effort to someone who had nothing else to offer other than just sex and company on lonely nights mixed with cheap whiskey and bad decisions I always regretted the morning after , he distanced himself from getting to know me and stereotyped me , but regardless of how negative he was towards me he never stopped being intimate with me , knowing how I really felt about him , I’d try to leave the situation and turn my back on him but he would always text and throw in apologies claiming he wanted peace and our friendship back only to fall back into the same old cycle of still wanting intimacy and effort he simply he didn’t deserve , giving me terms and conditions of how I was suppose to act and how he tried to make me feel like I belonged to him and for us to give it a try or a chance at being something established only to still claim whenever he felt like it that “he’d never grow to love me’ and we never official , this would tear me apart , I was mislead on so many levels it sickened me I was becoming erratic with frustration and anger and constantly lashing out and swearing at him no man has ever treated me with such disrespect and claimed to other people and me to have respected me , I was beyond stunned. After being off and on again and off again I officially had to make the decision to finally walk away and completely block him out of existence not because of spitefulness of bitterness but because I needed to change , I needed to find myself again I needed to build back what was broken and pour back the love and self respect back into myself. I realized that I had completely neglected myself because I was trying to change myself for this person , I was acting out of character abusing alcohol having emotional outbursts and even stooping as low as airing my dirty laundry to other individuals just to destroy him out of spite I was becoming the exact person who hurt me , it was the darkest yet most enlightening time of life that made quite a lot of things clear to me to me too.

I’m still battling to forgive and still angered after so long I thought I would simply be over everything by now but I’m still in pain , but everyday is a learning curve with him not taking any accountability and responsibility for his actions I guess I just learned to find closure on my own and still trying to find it to finally close off this chapter in my life and start a fresh

why does it hurt more than any other failed relationship that I’ve ever encountered before?