I didn’t know I was being manipulated when I was with him. I knew I wasn’t happy and I knew our relationship was exhausting, but I honestly thought we just had a lot of problems that we needed to work through. There was always something going on between us. Some argument, some lie, some new situation I was trying to understand. I spent so much time trying to fix whatever the latest problem was that I never really stopped and looked at the relationship as a whole.

Whenever I confronted him about something he had done, the conversation had a way of changing. He would start feeling sorry for himself and saying things about how he was a terrible person or wasn’t good enough for me. At the time, I actually felt bad for him. I thought maybe he was hurting too, and because I cared about him, I would end up comforting him. Looking back, it’s strange to realize how often I was the one who had been hurt, but somehow I ended up making him feel better.

When I found out he cheated on me, I was done. I told him I wanted him to leave. It was my house and he was living there for free, so I thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. He didn’t really argue with me about leaving as much as he just didn’t seem to accept what I was saying. He would act like nothing had happened, or like I was angry right now but eventually I would calm down and everything would go back to normal. I remember wondering how many different ways I had to say the same thing before he would finally hear me.

There were things happening outside of our relationship that I didn’t fully understand either. He was jealous when other people were friendly with me, and I later realized he had been telling people things about me that weren’t true. Sometimes I’d notice someone treating me differently and have no idea why. I would wonder if I had done something wrong. I didn’t understand that someone else was helping shape the way they saw me.

One of the things I still have trouble understanding is something he said to another woman he was interested in. Her mother was dying and only had a short time left. He told her he wished he could somehow fix it, and then said he wished my mother’s life could take her place. Even now, I don’t know what kind of person thinks something like that, much less says it. Finding out about it made me look at him differently. It also made me wonder how many things I didn’t know about the person I had been living with.

Eventually, I moved away from everyone and started over somewhere completely new. I didn’t move because I wanted some big adventure or a fresh start. At the time, it honestly felt like the only way I could finally get away from him. I had tried telling him it was over. I had tried telling him to leave. Nothing seemed to make him understand that I meant it, so eventually I was the one who left.

For a long time afterward, I felt like he had destroyed me. I had isolated myself from people, I didn’t trust myself the way I used to, and I kept going back over things that happened and wondering how I hadn’t seen them at the time. That’s probably the question I’ve struggled with the most. How did I not know?

I think part of the answer is that it didn’t happen all at once. I wasn’t standing outside the relationship looking in. I was living inside it, dealing with one problem at a time and thinking the next conversation might finally fix things. I kept trying to understand him, trying to make things make sense, and trying to get back to whatever I thought the relationship was supposed to be.

It wasn’t until I got away from all that chaos that I could finally see how much of myself I had lost trying to manage it. I don’t know if I’ll ever completely understand him or why he did the things he did.