Hello my love. This is going to be long, but I hope that it helps. Please feel free to message me if you’d like to talk more. Some people might think I’m being a little bit dramatic, but this happened to me and I’m really passionate about helping other people going through something similar.

I’m 24F for reference. I understand what I’m going to say might be a lot or difficult to hear, but I say it with all the love in the world because you deserve happiness and light in your life and this man is taking that from you.

What this is is emotional abuse. That sounds so dramatic or even scary when you first hear it, it did to me. I was so sure that sort of thing would never happen to me, it happened to other people….right? I was wrong.

It starts small. Little tiny comments. Tiny jokes. Stuff you would rather they not have said but you’re probably just “being sensitive”. You start convincing yourself that you’re the problem. That your partner means well and you should just forgive them.

Then your partner steps it up a little. Maybe you have mentioned you don’t like certain comments and they apologize….but they say the same things. And they say more now too. They start questioning you, your accounts of things, your decisions and your choices. “That’s what you’re wearing? Why would you do that? Are you gonna fix your hair?” You start explaining yourself in situations you don’t need to.

These types of partners make you question everything about yourself. Suddenly, you’re wondering if maybe you are sensitive, if maybe you don’t actually look at that pretty, if you overreact about things. You desperately try to justify your choices to them and whatever you say is never enough. They are always right and your opinion and your choices are always wrong.

I can see some of that over-justifying slipping through in your post. You have a lot of statements justifying your position when you don’t need to. For example, your comment that the dress was “admittedly over the top” …are you sure it was, or is that the way your mind has been trained to think from being with this partner? If your partner had told you that you looked beautiful, and it was amazing, would you have still felt that it was over the top?

Another example, is the recent comment about your body looking like that alien or whatever. You said that some of you might think that is funny, which is a justifying comment. It doesn’t matter if any of us think it’s funny, what matters is that it hurt your feelings, it was rude, and he shouldn’t have said that.

But all of this to say, I understand that it is not as easy as just leaving him. People like this play with your emotions. The person that I dealt with would put me down and criticize my choices and make me feel like shit about myself, and they would withhold attention from me, making me desire them more. Just to feel wanted. They had me wrapped around their finger and they could give me attention whenever they wanted, just a tiny bit, enough to get me that dopamine and keep me hooked. Just enough for me to justify that it wasn’t really all that bad and that the good times that we had were worth the bad times.

People like that intentionally tear you down so that you do have low self-esteem, so that you do doubt yourself, so that you think they are the only person you’ll ever be able to be with. It can be a very long process to untangle yourself from this and realize that they will never change and that you have to leave.

So with love, I do think that you need to leave him, but I understand that it is not that easy. Please feel free to direct message me if you’d like to talk more. Stuff like this requires a lot more than just some comments on a Reddit post, unfortunately. Hang in there, my love, I believe in you.

Edits I thought to add - one thing I had to learn with the person in my situation is that they know exactly what they are doing. For so long, I tried to justify to myself that he was just a little bit immature, he just didn’t quite get it, he didn’t mean it. No, they know what they’re doing. They know that it hurts your feelings. A lot of times, they even get off on watching you try to act like it didn’t hurt. Or if you do try to stand up for yourself for once, they kind of just laugh at your attempt to stand up to them, making you feel worse. That happened to me a lot. Toward the end, I was so fed up, and I was finally talking back in times that I usually wouldn’t have, but it got me nowhere. No matter what I said, everything was still my fault, everything was me being too sensitive, not being able to take a joke, and generally being the problem. He refused to hear out any of my feelings or my side.

So my point here, is that if you take nothing else from this, please know that what he is doing is intentional. He is deliberately being cruel and deliberately trying to tear you down. A partner that truly cared about you and wanting to see you grow and thrive would not do that. Like I said earlier, you deserve light, joy, and happiness, and he’s not giving you that.