You Teach A Partner How To Treat You

There were points in time when I realized that the partnerships that I had were heading south. In my early 20s, there was a particular guy that I was with that started having heavy mood swings and started being verbally abusive towards me. At this point, I planned my “escape” by casually getting all of my stuff into bags from his apartment and pretending to fall asleep so that he would not expect me to get through the doors that he locked when I got up to go. I fought him off me. I got to the front apartment door and started yelling and banging on the door to get out. He let me out because he didn’t want someone to come check on his apartment. I took the stuff that I could and never looked back.

I wanted to be treated well in my relationship, but when I assessed my feelings on how I felt and looked at what I was actually getting out of my relationship, I was far from where I wanted to be. I had to accept the fact that this man had issues he had not yet overcome. His issues to overcome were affecting me and it was not my responsibility to figure out why he was doing what he was doing. I was dealing with confusion, disrespect and isolation to an extreme degree that I had to sort out away from this toxic situation.

This same man that I had met at the beginning of the relationship was different now and I was very confused as to why and how this had happened…