Belle de jour's story

I think it’s time I did this right. Here’s my story, which is only posted now as I wasn’t feeling ready to do that for a long period of time. So, here goes:

I met the N through a common friend when I was 19. During an 8 year course I would see him only in the company of others, until we totally lost track of each other. In 2009, I met a guy, who turned out to be close friends with the N too. This guy claimed he was interested in me, talked to N about it and the latter befriended me on FB. The N was in Berlin at the time doing his PhD and I was in Greece working.

We started chatting almost every day and he seemed enthusiastic to have found me. From day one I was told how kind, how supportive I was. He was dealing with great stress having just moved to another country and I was the only one who understood him (as he said). Soon, he became pretty suggestive, sending me his poems and wanting to spend more time with me on the internet. When summer came, he returned to Greece for vacation and we got together.
Red flags were all over the place since we’ve started dating. On our first date he was very bold with touching and he also said ‘it’s ok to use people, that is why we exist’. I remember I felt really weird about it but I explained it away thinking that he couldn’t mean such thing. Plus, he was an educated, intelligent man and to my eyes a decent, honest guy (as he often said about himself). Early on, he confided he was deeply hurt –by whom he never told me-and that he wouldn’t let anyone come so close to him to cause him such excruciating pain again. So, I’ve set out to be the hero…

He cried before making love for the first time but during the very action I felt so humiliated and used as he avoided touching or kissing me. He even tried to turn my face away every time I wanted to look at him. Basically he had to not look at me during sex to ejaculate. Sex, with few exceptions, was robot like, no eye contact, just a mechanical action, though he would always brag about how his previous girl friends enjoyed it.

From the very beginning he would suggest doing this or that together but he never followed through. He claimed that he was different from any other man I used to know and I would find out eventually. He also said that his personality was so intense that it seemed to affect all of his girlfriends and as a result he would get easily bored and break up with them. I said I wasn’t one of them and he replied “good, because if you were, I would have to break up with you right now”. This was said without any emotion and I thought “what the hell”…

When he returned to Berlin, contact via Skype was almost 24/7. He seemed to desperately need my company and I mistook this for love. He would send me poems, letters and cards and I was thinking “what a romantic guy he was”. I visited him in Berlin where he told me he wanted a child and he was afraid I would panic. Soon enough we were discussing the possibility to move with him to Germany and live there together.

He had the weirdest friendship with a 19 year old man; the N was 29 at the time. 70% of our discussions in Skype, revolved around the fact that E (his friend’s name) disrespected him, didn’t honor their friendship, didn’t admire him as he used to-his words exactly-and he put his girlfriends before their friendship. He wanted me to reassure him that he won’t lose him as a friend. N’s relationship with his mother was weird as well. He would call her crazy, they had huge fights all the time but he bragged about the fact that she adored him, that she looked so young and had a terrific body.

Gradually his behavior became contradictory. Some days he talked to me as if I were his buddy and some others he showed a loving side of him. I’ve started to notice that whenever he felt ‘down’ we made marathon talks but if he had a good day, he would forget I even exist. When I expressed my thoughts he said, “you are on my mind all the time, what more do you need” or “it’s so unbearable to fall in love with you from where I am, don’t you see I’m in pain? Perhaps you deserve better”…One day he broke down, saying that he always disappeared when he perceived things in a relationship were getting serious, but I made him feel like he was a better man and for this he wanted me in his life forever.

Soon, emotional blackmail began. He threatened me that if I made him feel bad again he would come to Greece only to see his family, that it’s not his business to put himself in my shoes, cause his problems were bigger than mine and that if I showed any sign of insecurity or jealousy, he would assume that we were incompatible and he would have to break up with me. By that time I was so confused that I always ended up apologizing about everything. Whenever he came to Greece for a few days, I was craving to see him but he, especially towards the end, would spend most of the time with his friend E and his buddies, all at the age of 19-20. I was trying to put myself together, after being rejected again and again and he threatened me that if I didn’t take an initiative to meet him, he would leave Greece without seeing me.

I could go on and on writing about this nightmare. I broke up with him only because I couldn’t face one of his rages about something I did wrong – I revealed something he told me to a mutual friend and she felt she had the right to tell him I did. Anyway it’s irrelevant. For 10 months he hoovered himself or by proxy, flooded his FB page with pics of him and OW, deleted them, put them on again, commented on my every post and when I didn’t reply to a text, he accused me of being emotionally unstable and that I had serious psychological issues. I answered telling him that he’s an empty shell of a man to which he replied that it was my fault we broke up and I should never forget that, that he never loved me as much as I did and that I shouldn’t complain because I knew where I was getting into from the very beginning. His last attempt for contact was a text to inform me his grandfather had died. I sent my condolences (that’s how stupid I was) and then I went NC.

It’s been 10 months of NC now and I feel stuck to a place of anger and doubt. It’s so difficult to accept how dysfunctional, abusive and disordered he was that I keep inventing excuses for him. I could never imagine how a 1,5 year relationship could cause so much chaos in my life.