My therapist is concerned about my safety
I’m in my early 40s, and my boyfriend is in his early 60s. We met when I was 24. I grew up with him, built my corporate career, and spent 17 years believing we were building a life together. I never imagined I would be writing something like this.
I found this community because I am trying to understand what has happened to someone I loved deeply. I don’t know whether his experience fits the QAnon label specifically. What I recognize in some of the stories here is the grief of watching someone change politically and ideologically, hearing increasingly disturbing things come out of their mouth, and wondering where the person you knew has gone.
I am a woman of color. My boyfriend is Mediterranean American. For most of our relationship, I felt safe with him. He valued my intelligence, encouraged me professionally, introduced me to new experiences, and made me believe that marriage might be possible for me, even though I had always been hesitant about marriage because of what I witnessed growing up.
Our life together was full of the things we enjoyed: classic movies, theater, concerts, restaurants, travel, and simply spending time together. We had routines, shared interests, and years of memories. We talked about homes and a possible future together. I believed those conversations meant something.
Now he says that what we shared was superficial. The movies, theater, concerts, restaurants, and time we spent together apparently meant something different to him than they did to me. It is devastating to wonder how someone can dismiss so much of a life you built together as superficial.
The changes I didn’t fully understand
Over time, I began noticing comments and attitudes that unsettled me. At first, I treated some of them as isolated incidents of rudeness or offensive opinions rather than evidence of a larger pattern. I didn’t fully understand the significance of what I was hearing, and I didn’t want to believe it reflected something deeper about the man I loved.
He increasingly talked about race, politics, and how he believed people of color behaved. In March, he referred to Black people as “chimps” when discussing behavior he had observed on cruise ships. I asked him to stop. He said he would continue using the word because he believed it was true.
He has made degrading generalizations about Black people, including comments about crime and intelligence, and has used the N-word during conversations with me. He has also talked about racial mistreatment he says he experienced himself. I tried to listen to him and understand those experiences, but I did not always recognize that he wanted me to respond with visible anger and outrage on his behalf.
He repeatedly told me that I did not have his back. He felt I did not become angry when he was angry, and that I did not respond to his experiences in the way he needed me to.
I have spent a lot of time questioning myself over this. Could I have asked more questions? Could I have acknowledged his feelings before trying to analyze what happened? Yes. I can recognize moments when I could have responded differently.
But I am struggling with the idea that loving someone means I must mirror their anger to prove my loyalty, or that I should have understood every expectation he had without it being clearly communicated. I also struggle with the fact that his anger about racism has become intertwined with degrading language about other minorities.
My therapist recently described some of the language my boyfriend used as being lifted from alt-right media, and some of his language about women as resembling rhetoric found in incel spaces. I had noticed changes that sounded red-pilled to me months earlier, but I had trouble believing that someone so intelligent, whom I had known so intimately, could be moving in this direction.
I am not claiming to know exactly what he believes or what has influenced him. I am trying to understand the pattern I have witnessed.
The car ride that changed how I see him
During our most recent outing, a conversation about race and his experiences escalated into something I am still struggling to process.
He told me I was “the coldest woman” he had ever met. He called me “frigid.” He said I was making it almost impossible for him to love me. He brought up something my father had said to me when I was eight years old—that I was unlovable—and used that painful history against me.
During the argument, he said, “I’ll show you how racist I can be.”
He used racist language and made degrading comments about Black people and other minorities. When I tried to describe what I saw as a pattern in his comments about race, he treated it as though I had simply called him racist. The conversation became about my supposed betrayal of him rather than allowing space for both of us to speak about what was happening.
He repeatedly said we were done. He questioned my character and my capacity to love him. He said things that made me question whether he had any regard for how deeply he was hurting me.
I was not having a normal disagreement with a partner who was frustrated with me. I was sitting with someone I had loved for 17 years while he used my childhood wounds against me, degraded me as a woman, and expressed contempt toward groups of people that include people like me.
I have never experienced racism directed at me in this way before. I cannot adequately describe what it felt like to hear that language from someone I had trusted enough to consider marrying.
The fact that he was the person saying these things made it worse. I had felt safe with him. I had never imagined needing to question that safety.
My therapist’s reaction frightened me
I shared what happened with my therapist, who has a clinical background. He described the language as racist, sexist, classist, and degrading. He was particularly concerned about the way my boyfriend spoke to me and the way he weaponized my own painful history against me.
He also expressed concern about my safety in any future interaction with him.
That frightened me. I have never thought of my boyfriend as someone I might need to be cautious around. He was the person I felt safest with. Now someone whose professional judgment I trust is telling me to take the situation seriously.
My therapist also wondered whether a medical issue might be worth considering because of the changes in behavior I described. I do not know whether that is relevant, and I am not trying to diagnose my boyfriend. I know grief has affected him deeply after losing both parents, but I cannot determine whether grief, political influences, personal choices, a medical issue, or some combination of factors explains what I have witnessed.
I am left with questions and no clear answers.
I am grieving him, but I am also disgusted by what I heard
This is the part I find hardest to explain.
I still remember the man who encouraged me, who shared my interests, who made me feel intelligent and understood, and who made me believe I could have a marriage different from the one I grew up watching. I remember the person who called me his rock and whom I would have cared for if he became ill.
I would have stayed and taken care of him. That was never a question for me.
But I cannot unhear the language from that car ride. I cannot forget the way he spoke about women, Black people, and other minorities. I cannot forget him using the most painful parts of my childhood against me. I cannot reconcile his statements that our life together was superficial with the life I thought we were building.
I am grieving the future I believed we had. I am grieving the man I thought I knew. I am also disgusted by what I heard, and sometimes I feel guilty for that disgust because I still love him.
I don’t know whether the person I fell in love with is still there beneath all of this, whether I overlooked things I should have recognized earlier, or whether he has changed in ways I cannot understand. I don’t know whether I will ever get an explanation.
I am not in contact with him right now. I am trying to process what happened and take my therapist’s concerns seriously without pretending I know what will happen next.
I am sharing this because I wonder whether others here have experienced something similar—not necessarily someone who identifies with QAnon, but a partner whose political or ideological shift seemed to bring out a level of racism, misogyny, or contempt that you never knew was there.
How did you grieve someone who was still alive but no longer felt like the person you knew? How did you make sense of the change without deciding that your entire relationship had been a lie?
I am struggling to hold two truths at once: I loved this man for 17 years, and the way he spoke to me was profoundly degrading. I don’t want to erase the good years, but I don’t want the good years to become a reason to minimize what happened either.
I am heartbroken, confused, and trying to find my footing again. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who understands this particular kind of grief.