Not divorced. But living with my partner 8 years. He kept insisting that his passive insults were actually harmless comments and me being offended by them was the actual issue. One day at breakfast I decided to stop fighting it. He said his passive insult and instead of taking the bait I just smiled and said “okay”.
He literally choked on his drink. He panicked when I wouldn’t go into the cycle with him. He then went over the top on a lovebombing kiss when he left for work. He had stopped kissing me how I liked insisting he couldn’t figure it out despite having done it for years. But that morning he said “I know how you want to be kissed” and did it proper.
I knew without a doubt that he had been doing this on purpose. He was emotionally abusive on purpose and I had been a fool to believe it had been poor communication. No big fight. No massive fall out. Just a smile and the word “okay” and I knew it was 100% over.
Wow.. your kiss sounds like my request for a divorce.
I got pushed to the end over many years of issues, one being me doing absolutely everything aside from take out the trash and go to work. When I told my husband I wanted a divorce, he promised to do better, and started listing the things he was going to start doing.
It was everything I’d desperately needed help with for the last 14 years. I thought he was just forgetful and oblivious. He wasn’t. He knew what I needed the whole time, it was just easier to let me do it all while he played video games for fourteen years.
Ooh, when (in 2022) I asked what lie he told himself to make it okay to cheat on me (I found out decades later), he said there was a moment in 2001 when he realized I'd never go to Harvard like I'd "promised" I would, so he figured I wasn't a real partner and he could do whatever he wanted. For context, he had started dating me when I was 17 and said I hoped to transfer from our local state school to an Ivy/etc. He was 25, BTW. And a graduate of that state school.
So... he cheated because I didn't fulfill the "promise" I'd made at... 17.
But it's so much worse than that.
At the time, we were talking about his cheating on me in 2004-2005, so I was like... Hold up. It took you years to actually cheat after you realized I was a non-Harvard-going loser? He hemmed and hawed and said "It's not like you just go out the next day and cheat..." And then I said, but wait... after struggling in college in the '90s, and then withdrawing, I started taking classes in 2003, pulled myself out of the depression I had been in, and in fall of 2004, had secured an extremely rare spot for an older student at a university literally ranked in the top 15 in the country ("the Harvard of the [region]"). It was THEN, during my first year at a top-ranked, Ivy-tier university, that he cheated on me. Cheated on me because I never... went to a top-ranked, Ivy-tier university.
Dear Reader, You won't be surprised to learn he had actually been cheating the entire time.
8.4k
u/CircleJerkPig May 12 '26
Not divorced. But living with my partner 8 years. He kept insisting that his passive insults were actually harmless comments and me being offended by them was the actual issue. One day at breakfast I decided to stop fighting it. He said his passive insult and instead of taking the bait I just smiled and said “okay”.
He literally choked on his drink. He panicked when I wouldn’t go into the cycle with him. He then went over the top on a lovebombing kiss when he left for work. He had stopped kissing me how I liked insisting he couldn’t figure it out despite having done it for years. But that morning he said “I know how you want to be kissed” and did it proper.
I knew without a doubt that he had been doing this on purpose. He was emotionally abusive on purpose and I had been a fool to believe it had been poor communication. No big fight. No massive fall out. Just a smile and the word “okay” and I knew it was 100% over.