thanks, Kimmy.

We actually had a talk about to today, he had a look at the websites i was on and one of them was a test to see if your relationship was abuse (not the best means of judgement but i figured i'd give it a go anyway) and it came up with moderately abusive. He was quite upset because he doesn't consider himself an abusive person.So we talked about it and basically his position is that anyone will react violently if you push them far enough. Well, thats the justification for the physical violence/threat. His yeling/namecalling/etc is that i make him feel like he can't talk to me about anything so it builds up over time and eventually comes out in angry outbursts - but then again, he seems to be having a lot of those lately. He says he can't talk to me because i always threaten to break up with him and that in itself is abuse. I explained to him that the reason those situations keep occuring is that the problems we have never get solved. Now i probably shouldn't have said this, but i admitted to him that the only reason we're still together and didnt break up properly any of those times was because he threatened to kill himself and i couldn't let him do that. It was an awful thing to say, he cried a bit. See? I'm quite a ****** person.

The thing is, he says i push him to these extreem behaviours and on one hand, i can understand why. But on the other side, this seems like the typical behaviour of an abusive person - to blame the victim (though i dont really feel like a victim at all).

I don't want to leave him because i love him and he loves me. I know there are people out there who would say that no one who hurts you loves you but i think thats ignoring the complexities of the situation. And like, I don't think its always about control, i think he just loses his temper sometimes. The way he handles it isn't right but i don't think its worth leaving him over. My only concern is that it'll worsen because he doesn't accept responsibility for what he does.