Red Flags

The first two to three months of the person I started seeing were incredible. Never been in a relationship for more than two to three years. She told me earlier that she was planning on going on a one-month vacation with an ex-boyfriend who she claims that she had never slept with. 3 months into our relationship it was clear that she planned to go on the trip. She had a virtual collection of ex-boyfriends around her. To go on the trip and she laid on a guilt trip. She told me I needed to be checked in with to make sure that he would be ok but she was dating somebody. Was more than twenty years old her professor. He was pretentious obnoxious bragged bickered with her and even mocked us. She seemed to trigger his mocking by acting mock shmoopy with me and he started acting mock shmoopy with his partner. She initially excused his behavior as signs that he was getting old and was losing confidence. Our first real fight was when she booked her flight to go on the one month trip with the third ex boyfriend. I had to surmise that they intended to stay in the same hotel room together. I even offered to pay for a separate hotel room but was declined. Prior to her leaving she introduced me and the ex boyfriend to her Core group of friends at the same dinner. Although he had asked her not to she brought a birthday cake to that dinner for him. When she brought it out everyone started singing Happy Birthday to me because they expected that I would be the source of her attention. She said between us and rubbed my leg in a sexualized manner as some form of appeasement or reassurance. When people started asking her about her upcoming trip they seem too surprised that it was not with me and that it was with the guy she was not currently dating. I fought the impulse to politely excuse myself go pay for the entire tables Bill and never be heard from again. Actually, our first real fight was when I had become uncomfortable with the number of ex-boyfriends she kept around and told her that perhaps I was being an unenlightened mail and needed to seek the Friendship of females myself. She told me that she would be very uncomfortable with this as new friendships with females would be risky to our relationship because I would experience the grass is greener on the other side. She explained that she came with baggage that included ex-boyfriends and previously planned trips. In exchange she would tolerate my baggage which included three children and an ex-wife. She did not seem to understand that my children were not baggage. She also did not seem to understand that a desirable group of flattering ex-boyfriend was very different than a horrible ex-wife that I did not want to have around at all. This exchange of baggage made no sense to me or anybody else that I talk to. I decided to stay while she went on the trip. She left me daily reminders of her affection throughout my house and sent me emails as Clues to find these reminders of affection. I tolerated the trip and was in daily contact with her and took interest and support in her enjoyment of her time. When she returned we had one or two reuniting sex evenings and then she went totally cold for 2 to 3 weeks. I had planned dance lessons for us upon her return and she told me they were too expensive despite having just spent over $5,000 on her vacation a couple hundred dollars on dance lessons was unacceptable to her. She excused her own withdrawal and cold shoulder and of me as a mini depression that she went through by having to come back to the workaday world that she had enjoyed taking a break from. It was very clear to me that she was taking something out on me very directly. Whenever I try to leave she would repeat that she felt we had something very unique and she would become over-sexualized in her behavior. As soon as I agreed to stay she would cool off again and pull back sometimes immediately within the same conversation. Eventually I became completely intolerant of her relationships with ex-boyfriends. We went to therapy and it was agreed that she would continue those friendships but that I did not need to have anything to do with them. She concluded in therapy with the therapist that I was just obsessive and she withdrew from therapy leaving me to work on myself. Her 40th birthday came up and I attempted to step up and plan it because she complained that she had done so much for so many of her friends with weddings and birthdays and she felt that it was unlikely that somebody would do it for her. I tried to do it and started to coordinate the event and asked her for a guest list. She provided me with a guest list that included all of the ex-boyfriends. I became upset and she fired me from party planning she did not remove them from the list and one of her friends took over and planned the party. I did not attend the party and all of her ex-boyfriends did. On the day of her actual birthday I took her for dinner and bought her $500 skis. I had also contributed $300 to pay for the venue of the party that I did not attend. When I told her that I wanted to get back to where we started with a very passionate relationship she told me that it was unlikely that we would ever return to that honeymoon. I finally broke up with her and left the relationship and started looking for new dates online. She noticed that I was looking for new dates online and contacted me again to beg for a second chance. Foolishly I gave her a second chance and she said that she had given up the ex boyfriends. Our first fight was the next day when I asked her to remove them from Facebook as a part of the disconnect. She said that this was totally different and was simply an escalation of what she felt was excessive and controlling Behavior. I let it go for 6 weeks and eventually became upset about it again when Facebook started recommending her ex-boyfriends as potential new contacts for me. I renewed my request that she take them off of Facebook although I had agreed to just leave it alone as a show of trust. Eventually I left her again she had removed one of them and told me that she would slowly remove the others until she had a sense that I could be trusted not to be upset about it. She did not seem to understand that I did not want to share a life with somebody where are shared and public photographs of my children or our vacations together would be delivered to her ex-boyfriend. During our relationship I was transparent about the fact that I am living with an anxiety disorder and have gone through depression because of my divorce. This admission became an excuse for her to lay blame on me for any and all of our difficulties. I had become extremely upset on several occasions during our relationship when it felt futile and that I was not getting anywhere. I blew up verbally and at one poin punched an ottoman. On one of the last days of our relationship before our final and permanent break she told me that I was her first and last abusive relationship. I decided to not fight with her we had over 10,000 texts of fighting that was so convoluted it made my head spin. I told her we tried it didn't work no hard feelings let's both let go. Her immediate response was again to repeat that we had something unique that perhaps it was just timing and that if I changed my mind I should keep her email and phone number and get in contact with her again. Very strange! I feel stupid for having gone through this. Before she left for her trip I even purchased and engagement ring and we had been literally picking wedding cakes and dresses. Later on she told me that I should not have been upset about the trip because we had only known each other for 3 months but things had become serious very quickly and we were planning a future together. Later on she also backfilled the story and told me that ultimately she decided to go on the trip because I had become upset about her going on the trip. Her interactions with my children were also very strange. She was not familiar with children so I gave her a great deal of benefit of the doubt. The first time she met them she was almost totally shut down and withdrawn, not interacting with them almost at all. Slowly over time she didn't warm up to them and started buying very thoughtful and appropriate toys for them. For a. She did seem to be bonding with them and reading with them. Later on she became very concerned about whether they would develop into selfish 13 year olds which was very far down the road. She started to want to plan and have me follow through with various activities related to training them to do dishes clean up after themselves give selflessly to others. None of this seems terribly problematic at first other than the fact that she wanted me to move their development forward on my own and that she was not a part of it. I told her that as my partner she would always have my support and helping move the development of the children forward and that I would always have her back. She did start to do some of these things with me but then that became the primary focus of her her interactions with the children was training them for the possibility of her sharing a life with them. Arguments with her over just about everything were endless and almost always heated Kama even when it was stuff that was unrelated to our relationship. Karla Homolka head come up in the news for example and I talked about how horrible I felt about the fact that she was in the public having done what she had done to all of those girls. I identified specifically with the parents of these children having two girls myself. Although she was an Express feminist she did not believe that harmonica could possibly have been as evil as she was shown to be and blamed all of her behavior on having been a younger woman who fell under the direction of a psychopath. This argument went on for more than 3 hours and included a watching of a full documentary. I found myself reading books about him off go to get all the details to build my argument. I realized shortly that this was entirely ridiculous. But all of our arguments were like this almost everything was a fight. Over time she became more and more sarcastic towards me and when I told her about how her sarcasm was affecting me she explained it away as being meaningless fun and a part of her personality that I needed to accept. She told me that I was being oversensitive in spite of having made fairly uncomfortable jokes about my sexuality. The last and final straws of our relationship came when I seriously injured my shoulder and required surgery. I had to talk her into visiting me at the hospital immediately after my surgery. I also had to talk her into sleeping next to me at my house when I had just come home from surgery and had three small children to get ready for school the next morning. I had to tell her that I was afraid both for myself and for my children if anything should go wrong or if I was unable to care for them. Asking her to do these things felt like a huge imposition for her. Well I made more money than she did my actual excess money for free spending is severely limited by the number of children I have and the size of my mortgage and debt. She has much more free play with her money but despite that my gift to her ran into the thousands of dollars while hers were in the low hundreds. Eventually I decided that she had an inability to attach effectively to people and I told her so. I stopped trying to tell her what I thought was wrong with her difficulties in our relationship and I asked her to formulate her own understanding of the difficulties that she brought to the relationship. It took several days for her not to be defensive and just tell me over and over again that I just wanted her to say the things that I wanted to hear. I kept putting it back on her and asking her to formulate her own understanding of her own behavior. She did not seem to understand the question at times and was completely unable to formulate any understanding of her own behavior. The closest she came to self realization was that she explained that she had given up their boyfriends for me. That was her attempt at explaining her part in the demise of our relationship. It was totally externalised and there was no felt sense of responsibility on her part. I went to Great Lengths to explain my part and the things that I had done wrong and felt sorry for. I offered these things about my own behaviour with great apology no excuses and no retractions. She was unable to do anything even close to it. One of the reasons I stayed for a year in this type of torturous relationship was my unwillingness to end a relationship and have a second failed relationship following a divorce. I wanted this one to be a success. I ignored all the red flags including the fact that at the beginning of our relationship I asked her if she had a self-destruct button. She clearly had far more than one self-destruct button. My ex-wife was extremely controlling of me and the children to a degree that was totally unmanageable. She may have been there is a cystic herself or at least had an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Any difference between me and my ex-wife was pathologized. If I listen to the TV slightly louder I had a hearing impairment. If I walk to slower than she did I had Oppositional Defiant Disorder. If I didn't keep track of time or dates as well as she did I had ADHD. If our daughter showed stranger anxiety has a two-year-old she thought her daughter had a personality disorder. I have no idea why I would enter into a second relationship that had many of the same characteristics. Perhaps it is entirely predictable. I never want to do that again but still find myself drawn to people online that probably fit the bill. I need to trust my gut and run!