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When I was 29, I met a guy. I’d been living in San Francisco for a few years, mostly single. A main reason I had uprooted my life to move across the country was to leave a 4 year relationship behind, the guy I was supposed to marry in my early 20s which was appropriate marrying age in the late 90s. My dog had just died suddenly and unexpectedly, and my brother and a handful of friends lived in the Bay Area. Seemed like a great way to start over, and I was ready to leave the Southeast, where I’d grown up and attended college, behind.
I moved to SF in 2001, the start of which I call my “hot mess” phase. I couldn’t really make it work with roommates because I was high maintenance and kind of obliviously insufferable. I was also desperately single. That kind of aching and longing to be with someone because that is what I’d always wanted, yet I was too dysfunctional to attract a stable partner. I just thought I was”fun” and unapologetically myself.
In reality I was doing a bunch of drugs, drinking a lot every weekend, trying to “find myself,” and morphing into whatever I thought whichever guy I was dating wanted me to be. I was completely incapable of an adult relationship but deeply pained that I couldn’t find one.
So I met this guy in September 2004. He love bombed me hard: bought me expensive jewelry from Tiffany’s (not my thing), threw rocks at the window of my studio apartment in the Lower Haight to get my attention when I’d left his house because I was trying to play hard to get even though I really wanted to stay over (so romantic), took me to wine country, Mexico, expensive dinners, bought me clothes, looked deeply into my eyes and told me I was hurt and he could fix me. I fell for it hard.
The first time I figured maybe something was off was a few months after we started dating. It was New Year’s eve. We went to a party where a guy grabbed my boob. I laughed; he picked the guy up by the neck and threw him through a glass table. We were asked to leave.
The kicker, however, was that my boyfriend blamed his actions on me. I was the reason he’d lost his temper, because I didn’t appropriately react to this guy grabbing my boob. I should have smacked that guy, horrified, instead of nervously laughing out of panic because I didn’t know how to react. I went into freeze mode while he went into fight mode. Maybe I even enjoyed it, he mused.
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