[MissBelle00]

Ok, so this is bound to be a very long post... my apologies in advance. I just want to get this stuff out, and who knows, maybe someone out there will have the patience to read it all and reply?
Here goes...

I've been with my boyfriend for almost two years now. He's my second *serious* relationship (not my second boyfriend, tho), and by far the best partner I've ever had in my life.

We're having a lot of problems right now, so many that I don't even know where to start. I'll try my best to be concise, but it is a lot...

He used to be so sweet. He was head-over-heels for me, couldn't stand to stay away from me, always wanted to be touching me in some way, whether it was holding my hand, touching my hair, or putting his hand on my knee while driving. He always had compliments for me, he said I was so intelligent, he could have smart conversations with me, I was beautiful, he was all over my body... I suppose it was a form of rose-colored glasses. Now, all he can do is criticize me and find faults in me. We don't argue every day (thankfully we're not at that point yet, because we are both very civil people), but we have been arguing a lot lately, and it's tearing us apart.

I'll give a bit of backstory.
We met at work. We both tutored mathematics at our local college. I know the whole "never date coworkers" rule or whatever, but our chemistry was INSTANTANEOUS. We were inseparable after a while. When something that strong comes along, there ain't nothing stoppin' it, y'know what I mean?
At the time I was also working my way out of a seriously abusive 4-year relationship with a guy who had severe anger issues and who almost killed me a couple times, and left several bruises on me. I think that if it wasn't for my current boyfriend (Nathan is his name, btw), I would've taken much longer to leave.
We saw each other in secret for several months while I got my financial situation in order so I could stop living with my abusive ex. We had already been broken up, but I was still trying to have some sort of respect (even though he deserved none, since he had cheated on me several times and tried to kill me), so Nathan and I never even kissed - we just hung out all the time, talked, and laughed a lot. He was my escape from reality. He was everything I ever wanted in a partner. Respectful, caring, loving, with all the right ideas.

Fast forward to when I finally got my own place (my ex still hounding me every chance he got), and Nathan temporarily lost his driver's license, so I offered to drive him around (we worked the same job anyway, similar hours, etc), and he stayed over. It was this silently mutual agreement that he came to live with me, after all we were inseparable anyway. We were so good together, so similar. He was literally the best roommate I've ever had.

Then we started having problems at work. Not between us, but with of this coworker of ours, a girl of course. We tried making friends with her when she was first hired, which was possibly one of the worst mistakes of my life. I honestly don't know how I could've been so blind to all of the red flags - this girl was a showoff, a shallow ***** who cared for nothing more than sleeping with as many guys as she possibly could. I mean, I'm not exaggerating. She would invite us out to get drinks at like, Ale House of all places, and pick up random guys to take back to her place for one night stands. Me? I'm all for girl power! If that's what floats your boat, do your thing, girl! I wasn't going around calling her a slut b/c she liked having sex. Whatever, you know? Guys do it and get a good reputation for it, why can't girls do the same? I continued trying to be friends with her.
I did some stupid stuff, like help her cheat on one of her math classes (cuz she doesn't even know math, I have no idea how she got the job), and wrote her paper for an university application once. I like to believe it's because she's a very skilled manipulator, and I just wanted to be nice.
But it didn't stop there. She was obsessed with lying. Some stuff that didn't even make sense to lie about. She started getting obsessed with some guy who she really wanted to date, and she would lie to him about the stupidest things. One day I went to watch a movie with Nate, and she met us afterwards, to ask what the movie was about. Turns out she only wanted to know because she had told this guy that she was going to the movies, but she didn't - and she didn't wanna tell him that her plans changed. So she was just gonna text him about a movie she didn't really see, to make him believe she had gone. I was perplexed. I was like, why lie? Just tell him the movie didn't work out! You went to hang out with friends or something! Sheesh. But she didn't listen.

In whichever case, so at some point I couldn't go out for drinks because of a situation with my ex. I stayed home, Nate went out with her. I was under the impression that other people had gone as well. But it turns out it was only them. I didn't hear from him for the rest of the night, and the next day he showed up at work and asked if I could give him a ride to his place because he didn't have his car. So I did, no questions, even though I had a funny feeling. Whatever. Fast forward to when he came to live with me, and I asked, and he came out with the truth. Apparently it was only the two of them, they got drunk, he drove to her place, his car allegedly broke down, he was drunk anyway, so he slept over. He said he was talking to her about me, that he cried over me, but she jumped him, kissed him, and put her hand down his pants to jack him off. He TELLS me that he stopped her, and nothing more happened. She stripped in front of him and slept naked next to him - yes, he slept on her bed, next to her naked. But he TELLS me nothing happened.

Well, we almost broke up over this. He went back to his parents place for about a week, came back over, got on his knees and BEGGED for me to forgive him. Long story short, I did, for a myriad of reasons too long to write here. We both agreed that this girl didn't need to be in our lives anymore. She actually hadn't been, because he had been ignoring her for a while. During the summer (about a year ago, actually), she would text him with **** like "I miss you", "I love you", "Let's go get some drinks again!", etc. He only replied to her once, telling her to stop contacting him.
Fast forward to a semesters later, and Nate and her are scheduled to work almost the exact same schedule. She started harassing him at work. Approaching him to tell him about her personal life, her sex life with her now-boyfriend, that she might be pregnant & that he's gonna propose to her soon, and still inviting him out for drinks. This was DURING WORK HOURS. I approached our managers about it, but nothing was done. Nathan had to tell her to stop several times. She cried some crocodile tears, and stopped for about two weeks. Unfortunately what happened was that she decided to approach ME after those two weeks, to accuse me of keeping my boyfriend away from her, and accuse me of writing that text message HE wrote her, telling her to leave him alone.

Long story short, girl was crazy, yelled at me, we had to be taken in to talk to our managers because she approached me at the work place (she was at work, I was at my own personal time - I also took classes at the college I worked at), well, it was a huge mess. Management was incredibly crappy about all of it, refused to do anything about it, the girl didn't stop - she made it her life's goal to make my work environment hell and try to get me fired. And a semester and a half later, they actually did fire me. This past March 14th was my last day at work.

This was by far one of the worst situations I had ever gone through in my life. I loved that job so much. It became part of my identity. Because of that job, I declared a Mathematics Major. Because of that job, I decided what I wanted to do with my life was teach. I never received a single complaint from a single student for the two years I worked there. My manager had the AUDACITY to look me in the face and tell me my skills were not the problem, when firing me. And that I would be better off, because I "wouldn't have to deal with her anymore". They called me unprofessional - but I know I wasn't. I was the one who saw the real her. No one believed me, no matter who I spoke to. This girl said so many lies about me, unfounded lies that she couldn't prove, yet management NEVER, not even once, thought about investigating, talking to our other coworkers, finding out who was really telling the truth. They believed her blindly. I don't know what she did or how she did it - but this girls' hatred and jealousy of me really paid off, because she nearly ruined my life.

After I lost my job, Nathan finished that semester there, and then he left too. He went to work at another campus, doing the same job, but getting paid less. Money got really tight for the both of us. I fell into a serious depression for a while. Even talking to HR didn't work, because they just played around with me telling me they couldn't do anything about the unfair situation. I laid at home crying for months. I didn't know what to do. I had never loved a job as much as I loved this one. It was part of my identity.

Nathan thought I was taking things too far. He thought I needed to get over it already, and he continually pushed me to do so - but I wasn't ready. He was very pissed off about the situation as well - but only for about a week. Then he was over it. Of course, it didn't happen to him. He didn't like my feelings about it, and he started saying I was being too negative. Eventually that turned into "You're just a negative person naturally". And that hit like an arrow to my heart.

Meanwhile, literally starting the same week I got fired, he had this idea of holding "game night" at our place and inviting all our coworkers. I didn't tell him not to do it, because I didn't want to seem like I was trying to keep him from having fun, but ****. He couldn't have been any MORE insensitive. Our coworkers couldn't understand why I was so depressed, because most of them didn't even know I had been fired. And it hurt like a ***** to see them, because now I felt like I was an outcast, excluded from the group - I don't work with these people anymore. Yet Nathan never took a hint. This continued for several weeks, and my depression was not getting any better, and we were running out of money, and he was still spending on snacks, food, and alcoholic drinks to have these people over. He got mad at me that I wasn't over my firing yet, and in turn I got angry that he was being so misunderstanding, and I built a lot of resentment.

Our communication deteriorated, and we found out we actually disagreed on a lot of important subjects. He has his own ideas, some of which are very skewed, and he LIKES to be blind. The reason I say that - he will literally shut out anything that might prove his beliefs wrong. Research, articles, textbooks, professional opinions? He almost literally puts his fingers in his ears and goes "la la la". He thinks he's right about it all. He is also very arrogant about his ideas. He has straight up told me he thinks he's more intelligent than the majority of the people out there (which might have SOME truth to it, because he is actually very intelligent), but because of that, he is completely blind to new ideas or to the fact that he's sometimes wrong. He tells me that he overthinks everything (which he does), but because he does that, he covers every base, every possible situation or logic or argument, so that when someone tries to present information to him, he dismisses it as "I've already covered that and you're wrong and I'm right". This shows a lot in his driving, which I feel is a good example to this kind of behavior; he looooves to drive fast and aggressive and risky. But he's fully convinced he's as good as a professional driver and that he's in full control. Sometimes when I'm in the car with him I get seriously scared, especially because he likes to bully other drives, like drive really close to them while passing them at high speeds, and cut them off. I have told him this and have asked him several times to not drive like that when I'm in the car, and I have told him that his cockiness is bad, that he can't trust people out there, and that he's not perfect and free of fault, but that has only caused fights and arguments, because - guess - he thinks I'm wrong.

I can't have any kind of debate or serious conversation with him anymore because it turns into an argument and we both get pissed off. I mainly get pissed off because I have found out he disagrees with some of my most fundamental beliefs - like for example, I'm a feminist. He respects women, don't get me wrong. But he's got this traditional mind and ideas, men and women are different, men are just better at some things and women are better at other things, etc, and I don't agree with that. I tried explaining to him one day about the overwhelming majority of men in the STEM fields, and how the lack of women in these fields is NOT natural - and we fought about it. I was pissed!! He can't even comprehend my most basic ideas. Even if I draw it to him:
Men's and women's brains are NOT that different. Spacial awareness is BUILT from childhood, with toys such as legos, etc, which are SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED to be given to BOYS, while GIRLS get baby dolls, mini kitchens, and easy-bake ovens - all pink! I mean, look around you! Only a blind person, or someone in serious denial would take a good look at how our society differentiates from little boys and little girls and say there's nothing wrong there!

But whatever. Our arguments get so complicated sometimes, that it comes down to finding out exact definitions of words and terms, because he ends up arguing with me that I'm just using a word wrong, and that I'm misunderstanding him.
He's obsessed with this idea that the world is out there to misunderstand him. He told me from early on that he was being constantly misunderstood by his ex-girlfriend. He made her sound pretty dumb, now that I think about it, because he told me he would say something, and she would interpret almost the exact opposite of it, even if he broke it down for her. So then he started accusing me of doing the same thing, and that eventually really piss me off - I am not stupid. I comprehend exactly what he is saying, I sometimes just don't agree with it, and he hides behind the pretense that I'm "just misunderstanding him", and we argue about these completely idiotic ideas, such as "the chaos theory" he has about the world - he says this a lot: "Everything is in a state of chaos, and the more things mix together, the more chaotic everything will become", and he applies this to the entire universe.
Well, for a long time I didn't understand this, but I did some minimal research, and really, biology isn't my thing, math is, but I found myself reading more about the laws of thermodynamics, and I zeroed in on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which talks about the Chaos Theory, but guess what - it's nothing like he makes it out to be, and it only works that way for closed systems! I pointed that out to him, and he went, "Isn't the universe a closed system?". That almost inherently deserved a facepalm. This is what I mean when I say that he LOVES to be completely blind to stuff that disproves his "theories" and beliefs.

Now comes another complicated part.
Our sex life deteriorated. What used to be great, is now almost nonexistant. I found out he has a porn addiction. He told me, before we started going out, that he would have sex with his previous girlfriend and almost immediately he would feel the need to watch porn. That struck me as extremely odd, and very worrisome. Nowadays he says he doesn't remember telling me that - but I remember it very well, because it was almost traumatizing. I feared he would do the same to me, and voila, my fears came true, when one day, we had sex, I fell asleep, and woke up to him next to me, jacking off to porn on the computer. That night is ingrained in my mind, I can't forget it, and it's so painful. We almost broke up over it as well. He got down to his knees again and promised he would stop cold turkey. He said it was because he was depressed, we had poor communication, and he just was not feeling up to it. But apparently he could feel up to porn no problem.

I thought this could be taken care of, I didn't think this was something I could exactly help him with - it's his addiction - but things got bad again. We went for about two months without having any kind of sexual relations, which frustrated me, but I didn't want to pressure him, and I was sick of being the one always initiating it - and it always ended up horribly anyway because he couldn't keep it up. We would get started, it would go ok for a bit, but as soon as he came inside me, he would go soft. This was a huge blow to my ego. Was this really the same person that used to be head over heels for me? He grew cold too. Distant - didn't really care to be so close to me anymore, didn't care to touch me or be affectionate with me. It got so bad that I honestly started thinking he just didn't like me anymore, and I voiced that. But that only served to get him mad again, because he says he DOES like me, he DOES love me, and he doesn't SEE anything wrong. Am I really the only one seeing something wrong here?

After those two months of not having sexual relations, I walked in on him watching porn again. This was the worst - a total breach of trust, after he promised he'd stop. And a lie - who knows how much he's been doing it behind my back after the first time I caught him? I couldn't deal with it. He went to his parents house again for a week, and I cried every day for a week, because I just didn't want to deal with this anymore. I had already dealt with an addiction in my life before, I don't want another one. I really wanted to break up with him, but what was I going to do? I didn't have a job, I didn't have a way to pay rent, all because of a situation I strongly feel he could've handled better (the girl who got me fired), instead of being the total door mat he was with her, and let her do what she did to me.

After this, he agreed to see a therapist for his problems, and I found one on this website. He had his first session last Friday, but he won't tell me anything about it. It cost $50, and this month we had to literally find all our scraps to be able to pay rent. He has 16 cents left in his account, and I have sixty dollars to last me for about a month and a half, twenty of which I gave to him so he would have something.

Things have definitely improved for me since I started getting over my depression - I graduated with my AA with honors, and I'm starting my Bachelor's for Math this Fall. A manager at another campus of the same college contacted HR directly to ask them if he could hire me - he knows of what happened at my previous job, and he's giving me a job with the exact same position I had previously, same pay rate, so I'll be able to go back to teaching math again. This job won't start until the end of August, unfortunately, so I still have no idea how we're gonna get by with no money until then.

I know this has been very long, and I apologize. Like I said, it was just so much, and I didn't even mention everything. I tried to come up with a way to make this organized, but my thoughts are simply so jumbled right now.

I don't know what else to do to save this relationship.

[Travelinglady]

Hi, MissBelle00, and welcome to Psych Central! I don't think you can do anything more to try to fix this relationship. Honestly, I think it would be better if you move on and look for someone more understanding, more in agreement with your beliefs, and not addicted to porn, etc.

That's my opinion, anyway.

[Trippin2.0]

Oil and water in my opinion...

[MissBelle00]

Thanks for taking the time to read my post and for replying, guys. I honestly thought no one would take the time.

At this point I am really not looking to end this relationship. He really is willing to work on these problems, and he's been willing to go to therapy and stuff.

Maybe I should make smaller posts with one topic at a time and see if I get more responses that way...

[healingme4me]

You could set some time frames, to see if things do change.

You'll be working again, kudos, after all that stress.

Maybe see about counseling for you, through your new employer. ?

[~Christina]

I would really take a step back.. There are so many red flags in this relationship.

[MissBelle00]

Originally Posted by ~Christina

I would really take a step back.. There are so many red flags in this relationship.

What red flags do you see?

[~Christina]

Your relationship started as so many do "everything is wonderful and the love is flowing " Thats normal .. the honeymoon phase wears off and then the real person begins to appear.

His needs to always be right or know more than you.
His porn issues that make you feel terrible about yourself
The huge disagreements in basic views.
His lack of concern when you lost your job and he felt you needed to get over it quicker?
Him and that other woman the whole go for drinks and he winds up staying the night with her naked ? Why didnt he call you to come get him .. Why stay there ?
Him driving reckless while in your car even when you have asked him not to .
So much lack of respect.

The whole "tone " of your post screams of problems .

You were in a abusive relationship in the past ... Well this sounds just as abusive .. hes using words not fists is all. ..Its all still unhealthy and it almost always gets worse..

Only you can decide what you want in your life.

[MissBelle00]

Originally Posted by ~Christina

Your relationship started as so many do "everything is wonderful and the love is flowing " Thats normal .. the honeymoon phase wears off and then the real person begins to appear.

His needs to always be right or know more than you.
His porn issues that make you feel terrible about yourself
The huge disagreements in basic views.
His lack of concern when you lost your job and he felt you needed to get over it quicker?
Him and that other woman the whole go for drinks and he winds up staying the night with her naked ? Why didnt he call you to come get him .. Why stay there ?
Him driving reckless while in your car even when you have asked him not to .
So much lack of respect.

The whole "tone " of your post screams of problems .

You were in a abusive relationship in the past ... Well this sounds just as abusive .. hes using words not fists is all. ..Its all still unhealthy and it almost always gets worse..

Only you can decide what you want in your life.

I see what you're saying.

Just to clear this up: the whole deal about him sleeping over with this girl, he couldn't have called me because I was still living with my ex at the time and I was hiding the fact I was hanging out with Nathan. My ex would've flipped - which he eventually did, and they got into a fist fight one night, but it wasn't that night.
I'm just trying to be fair here; What Nathan told me about the situation made sense. He said he was very afraid of telling me of what had happened because it was so early in our relationship, he was afraid it would ruin it, and I'd leave. He accepted all blame, he never once tried to defend himself or come up with excuses. And after this isolated incident, he never again did anything of the sort - he actually never even made friends with any other woman. He also completely erased this girl from his life. We're together practically all the time, he wouldn't even have time for an affair if he wanted to.

I know there are a lot of red flags in this relationship... but I honestly, honestly don't think he's an abusive person. We disagree and argue a lot, and he was insensitive a couple of times, but in no way that leads me to think this can't be worked out.

What would lead me to think this couldn't be worked out was if he'd truly not be willing to change or put in any effort anymore. He's hard headed, like me, and he IS entitled and arrogant - but not abusive.

[unaluna]

I dont think you have the same values and goals. Do you even like each other that much? You arent living by your own values, like helping the girl lie to her date, or throwing parties you cant afford. And his driving crazy - my first ex-h used to do that, and almost got me killed or severely injured a couple of times. He would have preferred losing me that way to the shame of a divorce. Really, get out while you can. Start over. Get therapy.

[MissBelle00]

Originally Posted by hankster

I dont think you have the same values and goals. Do you even like each other that much? You arent living by your own values, like helping the girl lie to her date, or throwing parties you cant afford. And his driving crazy - my first ex-h used to do that, and almost got me killed or severely injured a couple of times. He would have preferred losing me that way to the shame of a divorce. Really, get out while you can. Start over. Get therapy.

I didn't help the girl lie to her date. She asked, and I stayed out of it.
I did, however, help her cheat on her math class, which was my choice and had nothing to do with my boyfriend. So I don't see how that comes into play?

The driving, I just used it as an example of his attitude. He's never gotten me into a situation where I felt my life would be in danger. My previous boyfriend did, while driving, so I know the difference.

I think my frustrations really showed in this post to the point everyone's thinking there's no more hope. I might try to write a different post.

Also, I am getting therapy as soon as I can. My new university offers it for free, the only bad thing is that I'm not sure if I'll be able to attend classes this fall, so I'm not sure they'll still offer the services if I'm not actively taking classes...