Dating : Trash Days

I am still talking to one of the girls I mentioned in the last post. I’ll call her Q from here on out because I hope I’ll be talking to her for a bit. And our conversations have been going well. There is nothing wrong there.

The thing that is wrong is that I am not over my ex in the way I hoped I was. I never shared many details with my relationship with people outside of it until very recently. By talking to some close friends and family, I’ve realized I’m still really hurt by the fact that we’ve broken up. And that I feel like she did me wrong.

I understand there are two sides to every story and I am the villain in her story. But I have been reflecting on not only the minor ways she treated me but also the major ways she treated me. On the fact that I ended up doing a lot of the emotional labor. And physical labor when we briefly lived together before the pandemic. While we were together, I told myself that was all in my head, that if she was doing a bad job I was also probably doing a bad job. Again this is not to say I actually was faultless this whole time, I do have many faults and some of them got in the way of our relationship. But I felt I couldn’t complain too much about the things she did that hurt me because I always ended up apologizing when she hurt my feelings.

There’s something my ex did that really hurts me now and I’m writing here because I don’t know if I can bring myself to tell my family and friends about this detail. But it’s been keeping me up at night.

We moved in together at the start of 2020 but ended up quarantined in different places at the start of the pandemic. But while we lived together, it was her first time living on her own, and she didn’t know how to do a lot of basic household chores (load the dishwasher, take out the trash, cook anything, feed my pet, etc). Of course I don’t mind doing some of these chores, and I don’t even mind helping show her the first time. But having to repeatedly help her with everything, especially little things that I had to figure out on my own when I lived on my own for the first time, really started to wear on me. It was frustrating and irritating to me. It frequently felt like it was easier for me to just take on more of the work then explain how to take the trash out over and over again.

A few months after we were living in separate places, during the summer, I told her about how living with her had been really stressful because of having to teach her how to do every little thing. She told me that my frustration with her made her feel like I was being ableist towards her because she has a disability which made it hard for her to both learn how to do chores intuitively and to do them. I conceded and apologized to her for it.

This is the part that’s been making me feel extremely uncomfortable. A few months after we had that conversation, I moved in with three new people, two of which coincidentally had the same disability as my ex. And… I literally never had the problem I had with my ex with them. They never expected me to teach them how to do basic household chores. One of my roommates sometimes had trouble cooking because of her condition, but she wouldn’t expect us to cook for her. And all three of my roommates knew how to take out the trash and do the dishes.

I’m sure that my ex truly believes that I was being ableist and I want to stress that I don’t doubt I’ve been unwittingly ableist before. Never with malicious intentions though, and I would’ve worked on it when the incidents occurred if my ex brought it up then. But she never brought up her disability while we were living together, only after the fact when I mentioned it was hard for me to be acting as her mother. And yeah. I apologized to her for not being more patient with her.

So maybe I’m the asshole. But I also feel as though I was gaslit for years by her into believing that whenever she hurt my feelings I was also hurting her feelings twice-fold. I was never allowed to be upset at something she did without her getting even more upset at me for being upset and then I would say sorry.

I’ve been thinking about incidents like this more and more lately. And it just sucks. Because I don’t want to be caught up on my ex. And I was totally cool with her and I remaining friends. But the more I think about some of the ways she hurt me, the more it’s dragging me under. Especially as I’m telling my friends and family about some of those incidents and they’re telling me that they weren’t okay, it wasn’t okay that those things happened.

And of course we still had good times, too. Because I would’ve left her a lot sooner for some of those big incidents if there wasn’t incentive to stay with her. Do I regret staying with her for so long now that we’ve separated? I don’t know. I honestly do not know.

I don’t know how I can in good faith keep talking to Q when all of this is going on in my head. It doesn’t feel fair to her. I really am not in the place to keep dating. But also our conversations have been purely platonic so far. I’m just worried things will escalate and I won’t be ready and she’ll feel like I burned her. And she is very lovely and I don’t want to leave her burned. Maybe it would be best to quit while I was ahead. But… I really like her.

I don’t know. It’s hard with all of these thoughts of my ex. It’s hard to try and put on a smile and chat with a cute girl when I’m thinking about how I was maybe gaslit for at least the last year of my relationship repeatedly in big ways.