Colton,

Sorry about the late reply, I was away from civilization for the week-end 🙂

Yes, all of those things happened. For example, one time she went on a trip for a couple of days and I cooked some vegetables that were dying in the kitchen because she bought them to make something but didn’t feel like doing it. Which was not ok because I should have let her do it (no chance with wilted vegetables… no point in explaining, either). Another time she was driving on a dirt road and I heard a long tearing sound. I didn’t say anything because it was a difficult road and there was no point telling her that she must have clipped a stone. You can imagine who was to blame for the scratch – she actually spent a whole evening recounting where we’d passed while I was driving to tell me where I might have done it. I’d park the car perfectly and she would get angry that I was too close to another one – I actually showed her there was more than enough room and all she said “it doesn’t matter, I got this wrong this time, there was definitely another time when you were too close”. Because we had different work schedules I changed mine every day so I’d come home one our earlier – the only caveat was that there were 2 minutes in the evening where I had to check whether anything urgent had happened in the interval I was no longer at work, part of the deal for this arrangement to work. There were probably 5-10 occurrences in one year where I took more than those two minutes, with 15 being the max. Of course, I spent “all evenings working and not paying her enough attention”. And trying to discuss these things was, in the beginning, met with tears and talk about how she’s not good enough for me or anger. Later on, it was mostly anger, and the rest accusations about how I wasn’t doing a good enough job and I hadn’t shown enough interest in our relationship. I became everything from a bad cook (and most people I know actually appreciate my cooking), to a bad driver (I haven’t had one accident ever and most people I’ve driven around appreciate my driving style), bad boyfriend – you name it. I “lived inside a shell” (although she wouldn’t feel like doing anything when given free time), was “too different”, “spoiled” (there was no argument that she brought for this except for the fact that my mom is the type of person that’s hyper-concerned about everything), etc. After we broke up, I actually pulled up some ancient conversations from when we met (chat history can be useful sometimes) and spent time reading them to see whether we were actually that different. Either she lied in the beginning or simply changed.

The point is, all of those rules and scripting, as Anita pointed out already, were a result of her own fears, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy and others. A lot of them got projected on to me, some of them got exacerbated – like the quick check of e-mail for more together-time with “working all the time”. In fact, I tried to get home earlier so we’d spend more time together and she wouldn’t worry that I was actually out with some girl at work she felt I was cheating with. So neither solution worked. It can’t work unless she also accepts that she has to put some effort into it.

As for the tipping point, I actually thought about breaking things off for a couple of times but just rewinded the good things in my head and thought there might be sense in trying to improve things. In the end, fights occured more and more often and she just showed less and less respect. She actually tried to push me at one point but I’m well-built so there was no chance that would succeed. After that, one week later, I just tried taking her hand into mine, non-violently, and she started screaming that I wanted to physically assault her. On one hand, I’m disappointed with myself for getting into fights in the first place. On the other, I tried constructive discussions for a lot of times and at some point I just couldn’t except the constant insults and demeaning. There were a couple of moments of regret from her side about the way she acted but now that I think of it that was probably more of her own fears of being abandoned or some form of hot/cold attraction – aka trying to seem open from time to time so I’d be accepting of all the other bad things that happened. In the end, we just broke things off because of her bad behavior. We actually kept in contact for a while because she wouldn’t grab her stuff from my place and that would be another carousel of love/hate/regrets/no regrets to the point where I simply became immune to anything she said and just blocked her out forever.