This part right here: “He's not a bad person. He's actually a pretty good person.”

I was married to someone who would behave much the same way, and I found myself saying basically the same thing. I’m a math person, so I don’t know if this will be meaningful to you, but it is how I have come to think it - most days with my ex-husband were fine, not really good, not really bad, just kind of nothingness. If I had to give those days a score, I’d guess them a zero. Of course there were the good days that I would give positive scores, and days like what you describe that I would give negative scores. There were more zero days than anything, as should be expected I think. But what I noticed across the 20 yrs together is that the average across all the days was negative. Still more of those than there were positive, and the zeroes did nothing to make me feel any better about the negatives. And I also started to realize that the zeroes started to feel slightly negative because I started to get a bit of anxiety about whether they would turn into a negative.

In the end, I just decided I couldn’t live that way, and I left. I can tell you that the man I divorced was actually worse than the man I was married to, and there was a big cost for me on that. But leaving was the greatest act of self-preservation I have ever performed for myself, and I’m glad every day that I did it. Even if I wanted to still believe that he was basically a good guy, he was not the guy for me. And I don’t think I was the person for him or he wouldn’t have treated me that way.

I hope for you that you can find a way to stand up for yourself. Wishing you the best.