All hail the toxic love

It is a Thursday morning, close to noon.

You are working, like every day, when a pressure starts building in your chest. You would never admit what it is, because you are big and strong, and big, strong men are not supposed to be afraid.

But you are afraid.

Finally, the time comes.

You get up. You get in your car. You drive.

The pressure gets worse.

You agonize over arriving and, very rationally, push the accelerator to the floor.

It is win-win.

If you die, you will never get there.

If you die, everything disappears.

If you die, you do not have to see her.

You trace the lines back through your memory, trying to find the moment everything became like this.

Trying to find an exit.

How can a person turn into a jail?

A dark well keeping you trapped at the bottom. Feeding on the best parts of you. Making you lose focus. Making you lose interest in everything. Killing you slowly. Growing like a cancer while saying she loves you.

If you loved me, why did I almost die?

If you loved me, why did my life wither under your shadow?

You carry the curse of Attila.

Nothing green ever grows again where you set your foot.

The damage persists because, even today, years and years later, I still feel that shadow weighing on my chest when I start speaking about this.

But this is the kind of conversation worth having.

Because abuse is not something abstract.

Because it happens to anyone.

Because it murders your soul from the inside and rots away your sanity.

And yes, this can also happen to big, strong, kind of bullyish men like me, because abuse is not linked to the victim.

It is linked to the abuser.

And yes.

I lost my temper that one time and yelled back.

With all my strength.

With all the power my lungs could muster.

Three words.

Just once.

LEAVE ME ALONE!

I did it.

And let me tell you, I paid for it.

Not in bruises.

Not in broken bones.

I am too big for those.

I paid for it in lost self-esteem, trauma, and years of accumulated pain.

Because that is one of the cruelest parts of abuse.

Eventually, after enough pressure, enough fear, enough humiliation, you stop recognizing yourself.

And when you finally react, when you finally push back, you end up carrying the guilt for a crime that was committed against you.

It took me about ten months to recover my full sense of self after the nightmare ended.

But the trauma patterns established themselves in a few ways. You never return completely to the person you were before.

So why are we, as a society, not taking this seriously?

My mind is full of the horror stories of my friends.

The news is full of the horror stories of strangers.

And yes, it is not everyone.

But it can be anyone.

And you will never know until you are lying in your bed, in the dark, wishing you could die so you do not have to see this person again.

So you can finally be free.

Well.

Do not die.

Death is boring.

Just remember, like I have said a few times before: true love does not hurt.

It does not sink your life into chaos.

But besides that, I was wondering…

How does a relationship turn toxic?

We all know the answer, right?

Girls be crazy.

We wonderful men just have very bad luck.

Okay, no, that is too stupid even for a joke.

If it takes two to tango, it takes two to toxic.

The pairings are very, very variable, but usually a toxic relationship is the result of love — or something similar — between two people who are very different and a very bad match.

Let’s go deeper.

My most toxic relationship found me passionate yet detached, a bit boring, a bit older, a bit too into my own world for my own good, quite satisfied with what my life was. Ambition? Yes, but also a lot of comfort in my position, sharing most of my time with a girl who was anxious about attachment, incapable of staying put for more than an hour, young, a bit too into my own world for her own good, full of drive but not yet full of achievements to compare, full of competitiveness, and with a lot of things yet to do.

It was dead before it started, and it took nigh on four years of our lives.

If you ever read this: I’m sorry.

Why did it turn abusive?

Because the expectations got out of hand.

She wanted me to be her trip partner to a lot of places that all kind of looked the same, and she wanted me to do a lot of things that I really didn’t care about. And even if I accepted, she wanted me to be enthusiastic about it as well.

You’ve read me.

I can’t fake enthusiasm.

That is not the only reason, obviously. You can be a bad match and keep things cordial. Hell, you can be a bad match and stay the fuck in love.

But it can eventually fall into a destructive spiral, and it is so clear to me right now that I can almost write the equation to express it.

The dangerous point is your sense of entitlement.

You may want a thousand things, but you are not necessarily entitled to them.

I’ll go further and say that being comfortable dealing with your partner not being into your specific interests is key, especially when you like very specific or very repetitive things.

All malls are the same.

There is no way around it.

There will always be an abusive side in an abusive relationship. Sometimes it is mutually abusive. What is more romantic than M.A.D?

Sometimes the most vulnerable side gets a perverse sense of achievement from taking what no one else takes, derives a sense of worth from it, and projects the awfulness onto everyone else around them, creating a toxic wasteland that would make Fritz Fucking Haber blush.

But even the passive side, the one that wants nothing more than to get out, is a participant in the equation.

And even if we do not victim-blame — and we do not need to — staying can easily turn into enabling.

And then there is physical violence, financial dependence, and a lot of colorful details that make the situation inescapable.

Getting out is hard when you say “I’m not happy anymore,” “I don’t want to stay,” “I’m tired,” or “I was dreaming about dying so I could get away from you,” and the other person only hears “I’m being mean to you.”

But hey, crazy ex stories, amirite?

No advice.

Or maybe a bit.

All that shit up there?

Maybe, I don’t know…

Don’t?

This shit is too much for me.

Peace.