My Experience With a Toxic Relationship

This past year has been quite a roller coaster ride with several different things, but most notably, my ex-boyfriend and if it's taught me anything, it's that sometimes cutting ties with a toxic person is the best thing to do for yourself.

The two of us had been together for very close to three and a half years. I had just turned 16 a few months prior to meeting him and he was about to turn 17 a few months after we started dating so we were each other's high school sweethearts in a sense. We had really only known each other for about two months before we went on our first date and then began dating that same night (probably the first of many red flags to appear).

The first six months were incredible honestly, I was so happy I had finally found someone to love me for me and accept who I was despite my sexuality and lack of religion, which seemed to be major issues in a lot of my previous relation/friendships. He was sweet, kind, understanding, and listened to me without a single complaint. At least until I decided I was ready to give myself to him, or at least I thought I was ready.

He had already been subtly pressing about the whole thing after a couple months of being together, but being the naive teenager I was, I didn’t recognize it as being pressuring. After the sixth month mark had finally arrived I felt I was ready and I finally let him take the one thing I will never be able to get back from him. From here on out, this is where things kinda start to slowly go down hill.

About a month later he began to get less patient with me, less understanding, and nowhere near as kind as he had been. He started to become extremely uncommunicative with me and wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to tell him what was bothering me. He acted as if my depression and anxiety were a massive burden to him and would get annoyed with me whenever I got paranoid or super down some days. He would constantly say that I had no reason to be depressed because I had him to make me happy, which he did, but it should be known that, that’s not how depression works.

At some point it got to where he would constantly interrupt me, run over me when speaking, or completely ignore what I had said, especially when it came to my feelings or what was bugging me. He would go hours without speaking to me, I’m talking between 8-12 hours sometimes he’d go a full 24 hours without speaking to me and I got absolutely no warning or anything and it would trigger all kinds of paranoia and panic attacks, mainly because I worried about whether or not he was okay, that was always my main concern. No matter how many times I tried to tell him this bothered me and that if he knew he was gonna be busy or distracted to take five seconds to text me and say “I’m gonna be busy for a while, I’ll talk to you later.” That’s all I ever asked for was some understanding and communication. But I never got it and it felt like I was talking to a brick wall.

This continued on for pretty much throughout the entirely relationship and eventually later on after two years, it was nothing but a bunch of petty arguments and to put it bluntly, sex. That’s all our relationship was towards the last year and a half. It became a repetitive cycle of him coming over to my house, we’d hang out normally for about thirty minutes, we’d have sex, and then he’d immediately become glued to a video game he brought with him and he’d hardly pay attention to me. Every once and while we’d go get food, but it was typically fast food so we rarely ever went to sit down and eat. And the amount of times we get into nasty arguments over little things that should have been easy to work through or never even should’ve mattered is outrageous. He would constantly shut me out when I got severely upset or when he’d get angry and we’d never get to talk through what went wrong. It was just an extremely toxic relationship at this point.

Honestly I could continue to go on and on about how toxic it really got but that’s not the point of this story and I’m not here to just complain and “trash” talk as he likes to call it. The main point of this story is to tell my experience with a toxic attachment and hopefully help someone else who may also be dealing with the same issue.

As I stated at the beginning of the story, this past year has been a roller coaster of a ride. I had finally had enough with it all at the beginning of March last year and I broke up with him for good.

The first few months were hard, because despite being the one to end things, it still hurt. I truly did love him and leaving him was one of the hardest decisions I had to make. I tried to be friends with him for a while because I felt terrible and because part of me still wanted to cling to him. But the arguing and toxicity also still lingered and it was very mentally exhausting.

I’m a very kind hearted person by nature and I always just wanna help and be a good person in general so even though we weren’t together, I still genuinely cared about him and his well being, but it seemed like he would take advantage of that and emotionally manipulate me by making threats towards himself to get me to stay and this got really bad the past few months, especially when he had been drinking.

I knew I needed to block him on all social media months ago, but my morals just wouldn’t allow me to do that and I know that honestly our relationship should have ended before the year mark even hit, but I truly loved him and thought he was the one so I held on as long as I possibly could.

Within the past few days I finally decided it was time to block him on all forms of social media that I could think of and completely cut ties with him, maybe not forever, but definitely for a long while. I had so many friends tell me that I needed to because the way he was acting was at this point obsessive and he was refusing to let me go like I had let him go and I hate that it took me so long to realize this, but I’m glad I finally have, because now I can focus on myself and my own mental health and I already feel somewhat at peace.

As a final note here, I’m not claiming to be the “innocent” one in the situation. I know I wasn’t perfect and there was a lot I said and did that was awful and I regret immensely, but at least I can own up to it and acknowledge the fact that what we had was indeed toxic and needed to end.

So to anyone, male or female, that may feel stuck in a toxic relationship or even friendship for similar reasons, know that it is okay to cut ties with those who are not good for your mental health. You should always be your main priority, I promise it’s not selfish to take care of you first before anyone else. If small, still somewhat innocent, little old me can go through this experience, survive it, and finally bounce back from it, I promise you can too.