Hi. I need help, please. I am trapped in a relationship I did not voluntarily enter and that I need to escape from.
I am writing everything down here for both catharsis and to help me gather my thoughts and make an escape plan, and posting this publicly because I want advice, moral support, and especially any ideas from people who have escaped similar situations. Ideas of what to say or do, any books that can help me make a step by step plan, any charities that can help (thought I have reached out to some before without much joy). I am trying to get out of this in the least traumatic way possible for both her sake and mine. Any constructive replies welcome, please.
Please also be nice, if you don't have something helpful to say don't say it at all. It may be confusing for you how someone could end up like this, maybe I seem to be an idiot or a weak person or something. It's confusing for me too. I could never imagine being in this situation, I used to be an assertive, in control of my life, strong willed person. A series of events happened to me that made me weak and vulnerable and susceptible to ending up like this. I was sent to this reddit from relationships who said not to post it there. Also this is not my usual reddit account.
I am a 38 year old man in the UK trapped in a relationship with a 37 year old woman I will call LC.
We live together. We have little in common. Only that we were both very lonely when we first met. I feel that I am a victim of domestic abuse - not violent physical abuse, although I fear for my safety sometimes, but mental abuse. She controls me in many ways including:
* I'm not allowed any friends and basically only allowed out on my own when we each have to go to work
* I'm not allowed to cook, or do laundry, because I "dont do it right". Everything I say is constantly challenged as to its correctness, until I am so worn down I just agree to whatever version of truth she wants me to agree to. I am scolded even for using the wrong knife.
* My personal space in the house (which is a small two bedroom apartment) is now down to about 10%, with my own possessions, art, collectibles or decorations forced to be hidden away out of sight because 'they are untidy' or sold off because she doesn't like them
* Often I am told not to speak and that I "talk too much". Other times I am told to repeat 'LC is always right' or 'LC knows best'. Or I am told to say I love her and will never leave her, always with consequences like sulking, screaming or passive aggressiveness if I don't cheerfully and immediately respond.
* She touches me sexually in front of my parents, around the bum or nipples or upper thigh, then when I ask her later not to do that at least not in front of my parents, she gets upset as if I am the one doing something wrong by telling her that.
* I cannot eat or drink what I like, or at least if I do, it's always with passive aggressive comments about eating healthily even if what I want to eat is actually something healthy. In the meantime she is fat and does nothing but sit in a chair all day watching youtube. She jokes how she thinks she might be a 'feeder' and when we are with my family or with her friends she points at my enlarged tummy and jokes how fat I've become 'because I enjoy her cooking so much' or other lies.
* I'm told I have bad breath, or body odour, though I have good personal hygiene and can't sense it myself, no one else ever told me that either. She has no tact, no manners, never says please, thank you or sorry.
* I cannot be alone from her for more than about 20 minutes before she cries out how lonely or bored she is. I literally have to sit within 2 metres of her at all times except when we're at work. When we go outside the house we must hold hands or arms the entire time.
* She often watches me while I eat and demands feedback on what I'm eating, but if I dare suggest it isn't perfect she flies into a rage.
* She goes through my belongings, one time she was hunting through my personal stuff while I was out, and found photos of me from years ago with an old girlfriend, she demanded I destroy them and had hours and hours long screaming and crying at me. At no time did she agree they were meaningless old photos nor that she shouldn't be going through my stuff in the first place.
* I think she is starting to preemptively accuse me of the things she has been doing as some kind of defence, for example she often accuses me of shouting or raising my voice in anger, when I haven't at all, or was simply speaking loudly to be heard from the other side of the house, calling out not shouting. She has started telling me she is scared of me when I get angry in case I will hurt her. But I used to say that to her, before I became too afraid to say it because of how crazy she would get. And I don't get angry. I feel like I'm going mad, she's making me doubt my own mind.
I don't know if she even knows she's doing this, if she's doing it deliberately, or if she genuinely believes it's normal. I know as a child she was spoiled and she bullied and intimidated her parents into doing whatever she wants them to do. Being Chinese she did not have brothers and sisters.
She told my parents, behind my back, that we are planning to get married and start a family together, although this is not what I want. And now I'm afraid even to tell my parents that's not the case because of fear of disappointing them or giving them my problem. My older brother is autistic and never married. My sister is a single mother, never married. My father had a major cancer scare this year resulting in traumatic facial plastic surgery. My mother suffers anxiety attacks, from years of psychological abuse from my father although they are still together, and is already at the end of her tether with what my father has been through this year with his cancer. I also feel pressure to marry someone before I and they get too old, to give that gift to my parents, since my siblings have not been married.
I worry that I am going to capitulate, give in and accept the situation as normal because I'm too afraid to do anything else, even though it means my life is effectively over and I just exist to keep someone else happy. Lately she has become easier and happier to live with, but again I think that's because I've been trained not to do anything she doesn't like and I no longer feel like I'm myself. I can't go on like this I don't want to give in, which is why I am writing here as my last resort. I find myself wishing I am diagnosed with a terminal illness so I can use that as an excuse to say I need to go away and do my own life dreams. She refuses to attend any kind of counselling, for her own medical stress (she had cancer scares) or relationship counselling.
LC has also bought expensive wedding rings that neither she nor I can afford, and insisted I pay for half of their cost. And now she also wants a car.
I'm worried about my physical and mental health
* I've put on over 13KG in weight in past 18 months which I attribute to the stress
* My every waking moment is spent thinking about how to get out of this, what to say, what to do, how to time it so it's as least traumatic as possible
* I have night sweats, anxiety attacks, depression and trouble sleeping as a result of PTSD (see below for more on that, which predates this relationship)
* I think I'm going crazy because I'm starting to doubt whether I'm just imagining this is a problem and whether I should simply give up and accept the situation. Maybe I should feel lucky someone loves me? Maybe this is a normal relationship? and I'm blowing things out of proportion? Maybe all the things she does are sweet and loving and I'm a jerk for not appreciating it?
I have tried to get help from charities that help with domestic violence in the UK but I have found them unwilling or unable to support me being a man rather than a woman in this situation. I can understand that I suppose, it is much more rare. I have no friends except colleagues who are colleagues not close friends, and I'm afraid to involve my family as I said above, so I have no support network in place.
She also has few friends, her family is in China, she just have a couple of distant family members here and a couple of friends. So I am afraid also for her mental state if I ask her to leave, and because she has no support network. I'm worried what she may do to me or to herself.
How did I get into this situation? Surely it's easy to avoid moving in with someone you don't want to be in a relationship with? It's a complex story.
In 2010 I was in a relationship with another girl, my former fiance. During that summer, she left me for another man - she had been having an affair with her manager in her workplace, and one day I came home, found that she'd moved out while I was at work, and eventually her boss left his partner too, and then they married and started a family at the end of 2011. The last time I saw and spoke to her was early 2011.
I was devastated at the time, but instead of dealing with the trauma, instead of grieving for the loss, I threw myself into my work, promising myself I would save a decent amount of money and take a long break and deal with it at some future time. I had been on the verge of selling my business and making a decent career-break fund just before she left but as a result of that attempt to sell, I had discovered that my business partner had stolen over half a million pounds from our business which collapsed instead as a result. I had to leave that business, help with the fraud investigation and try to start over again with a new business so that I still had a livelihood and try to salvage all the hard work I'd put into that business and still make back the career break fund I wanted.
I essentially became a workaholic, working 80+ hours a week without break for months on end. Already traumatised by the breakup, and with the workaholism being both a reaction to that trauma and a traumatic experience itself, I then experienced a further enormously traumatic experience in 2012 which lasted some 2 years, too traumatic to go into detail here (you can guess how bad it is given I can talk about all these other horrible things but not that one), during which time I was diagnosed with PTSD from both those cumulative experiences and from un-dealt-with childhood domestic abuse (my father essentially doing to my mother and I what is now happening to me again) and received some counselling and attended group therapy to try and deal with all of that.
I first met LC in mid 2011, during an attempt to make new friends and try and get back to a normal life. She is from China but had settled in UK many years before and acquired UK citizenship already. We became friends, and would hang out once a month or so and talk on the phone a couple of times a week, and she was a good friend for me listening to me vent out my work pressure. But we didn't date or have a romantic relationship at all at that time.
In 2012 we did, during a moment of mutual vulnerability, get close, kiss and sleep together. Immediately after that she decided it was a mistake, and I felt it was too, and we agreed not to pursue and just be friends. We also didn't see each other for some months after that as she had a family emergency to deal with and was away. Eventually she returned and we resumed friendship and discussed on more than one occasion that we weren't right to be a couple and would stay friends and not let it go further than that, which I was very comfortable with. She also knew that I wanted to move abroad and start a new life once I'd dealt with the issues I was having at the time.
At the end of 2014 I was starting to feel much better and recovering somewhat from the PTSD I had. At her suggestion we went to China for a holiday, to get away from UK and work and go somewhere unfamiliar to decompress. This was a terrible mistake. First of all just before we left, she "suddenly" was given notice to leave her apartment, and with only 2 days to go before we flew I agreed she could leave her things at my place and she could find somewhere new when we got back. Then when we arrived in China, I found out we would be staying in her parents house, not hotels and friends houses as I thought, and she had arranged multiple dinners with her extended family to introduce me as her boyfriend. I was stunned, we had never discussed this or agreed to it. She created all this emotional debt in me to these strangers. I was shell shocked and barely spoke at all for the entire trip, deigning to deal with it when we got back to UK, since I was trapped there in China unable to get away on my own. When we got back I tried to deal with it, and she had planned another trip to china on her own a few weeks later, so my plan was to tell her plainly once she was back with her family so she had a support network to deal with this. I was struggling anyway to confront her about it, still feeling intimidated and emotionally weak and unassertive.
But then when she was back in China she had a cancer scare, endometriosis, badly diagnosed in china as womb cancer, and my plan fell apart, as much as I was distressed with the situation I couldn't not let her come back and get a second opinion and the benefit of free NHS doctors. So I chickened out again. Looking after her when she came back while she was tested and given all kinds of medicine that made her moody, lethargic, aggressive, depressed. I felt I owed her to do that after she had been there for me when I needed. And from then, I was trapped.
Within weeks, by the summer of 2015 I became truly afraid of her, she would do crazy things like pouring bleach and then boiling water on my garden plants just because she had seen some ants and wanted to 'destroy their nest'. She would talk about how if I ever cheated on her she would cut up all my clothes like you read in the newspapers. And if ever I tried to have a serious conversation about our relationship, or suggest we get counselling, she would fly into a rage which would last for 12 hours or more with shrieking, screaming, wailing, crying, threats to cut herself, threats to take overdoses of pills or alcohol. So eventually I just stopped trying because I became so afraid of how she would react. I don't know if it was her or her medicine.
In the second half of 2015, I kept a spreadsheet diary of all the crazy abusive things she was doing with times and dates. After a few months of this things seemed to get better and I stopped writing down every individual thing. But I can't help feeling I had the fight beaten out of me. Now I don't know, if she was the one who changed, or it's just because I no longer fight back and have acquiesced. I feel like I'm conditioned to no longer fight back, I try to speak but the words don't come, like when you can no longer touch the metal railing for fear of static electric shock. She picks on me for ever smaller and smaller things.
Ultimately, if I can, and because I've become too afraid of confrontation, I want to find a way out that is as un-traumatic as possible, for both of us. Untraumatic for me because with my PTSD I am averse to conflict and afraid of reopening. Untramatic for her because despite everything, she was a good friend who was there for me when I needed someone, even if now I'm being forced against my will to repay that x100, and because my fiance left me and it nearly killed me, I feel unable to do that same thing to someone else.
I am aware of the argument that being in an unhappy relationship is worse than not being in one and in the long run even she will be better off finding someone who will love her honestly. We don't have sex, haven't done since that earliest time except one feebled attempt, in early 2015 when she basically forced me to go along with it, albeit not very successfully.
My dream following recovering from my PTSD was to travel for 6 months to a year, maybe start a new life abroad, and I saved money to be able to do that. LCY knows this, but she has basically imprisoned me and made it impossible for me to pursue that dream. With no hope of being able to do that - to rediscover myself, to grieve for the love I lost, to plan what I want to do with the rest of my life, I feel like my life is at an end, and anything that happens to me from now on is just existing to serve someone else's needs. Similarly, I wanted a career break, but because of her condition she moved to working part time, and I was forced to support her by continuing to work myself. It's as if everything I tell her I want, she takes for herself.
I own the house we live in, so I feel I can't just leave, it needs to be her to leave. I pay all the bills and the mortgage and everything is in my name only. Although she occasionally offers to contribute, I refuse, although I know that is another way she is taking advantage of me, I can't take the risk that she lay claim to my house.
We spend every evening sitting in near silence watching TV or youtube, which is torture for me, I used to be a social person, doing activities in the big city or socialising and networking for my entrepreneurial work. I love to travel abroad but now I'm trapped. Now all we say to each other is how was your day, and other small talk. Avoiding any serious topic in case it ends up in a big screaming fight. I am well educated, ambitious and successful. She is not. It's like she's living her life through me.
I want out, I need out. I am so afraid of the confrontation I need to have. If only there is some way to make her realise on her own that this is not working and she needs to go. I can't bear to do to her what my fiance did to me but I have no choice. I want my life back. Please help me. I simultaneously hate her, feel sorry for her, love her as a friend but she not the person she used to be, and also afraid of what the break up will do to her parents and my parents, even though I know she's created this debt in me to them all, not me.
P.S. please ignore references to Reddit, I originally wrote this to post it there and pasted it here.
I am writing everything down here for both catharsis and to help me gather my thoughts and make an escape plan, and posting this publicly because I want advice, moral support, and especially any ideas from people who have escaped similar situations. Ideas of what to say or do, any books that can help me make a step by step plan, any charities that can help (thought I have reached out to some before without much joy). I am trying to get out of this in the least traumatic way possible for both her sake and mine. Any constructive replies welcome, please.
Please also be nice, if you don't have something helpful to say don't say it at all. It may be confusing for you how someone could end up like this, maybe I seem to be an idiot or a weak person or something. It's confusing for me too. I could never imagine being in this situation, I used to be an assertive, in control of my life, strong willed person. A series of events happened to me that made me weak and vulnerable and susceptible to ending up like this. I was sent to this reddit from relationships who said not to post it there. Also this is not my usual reddit account.
I am a 38 year old man in the UK trapped in a relationship with a 37 year old woman I will call LC.
We live together. We have little in common. Only that we were both very lonely when we first met. I feel that I am a victim of domestic abuse - not violent physical abuse, although I fear for my safety sometimes, but mental abuse. She controls me in many ways including:
* I'm not allowed any friends and basically only allowed out on my own when we each have to go to work
* I'm not allowed to cook, or do laundry, because I "dont do it right". Everything I say is constantly challenged as to its correctness, until I am so worn down I just agree to whatever version of truth she wants me to agree to. I am scolded even for using the wrong knife.
* My personal space in the house (which is a small two bedroom apartment) is now down to about 10%, with my own possessions, art, collectibles or decorations forced to be hidden away out of sight because 'they are untidy' or sold off because she doesn't like them
* Often I am told not to speak and that I "talk too much". Other times I am told to repeat 'LC is always right' or 'LC knows best'. Or I am told to say I love her and will never leave her, always with consequences like sulking, screaming or passive aggressiveness if I don't cheerfully and immediately respond.
* She touches me sexually in front of my parents, around the bum or nipples or upper thigh, then when I ask her later not to do that at least not in front of my parents, she gets upset as if I am the one doing something wrong by telling her that.
* I cannot eat or drink what I like, or at least if I do, it's always with passive aggressive comments about eating healthily even if what I want to eat is actually something healthy. In the meantime she is fat and does nothing but sit in a chair all day watching youtube. She jokes how she thinks she might be a 'feeder' and when we are with my family or with her friends she points at my enlarged tummy and jokes how fat I've become 'because I enjoy her cooking so much' or other lies.
* I'm told I have bad breath, or body odour, though I have good personal hygiene and can't sense it myself, no one else ever told me that either. She has no tact, no manners, never says please, thank you or sorry.
* I cannot be alone from her for more than about 20 minutes before she cries out how lonely or bored she is. I literally have to sit within 2 metres of her at all times except when we're at work. When we go outside the house we must hold hands or arms the entire time.
* She often watches me while I eat and demands feedback on what I'm eating, but if I dare suggest it isn't perfect she flies into a rage.
* She goes through my belongings, one time she was hunting through my personal stuff while I was out, and found photos of me from years ago with an old girlfriend, she demanded I destroy them and had hours and hours long screaming and crying at me. At no time did she agree they were meaningless old photos nor that she shouldn't be going through my stuff in the first place.
* I think she is starting to preemptively accuse me of the things she has been doing as some kind of defence, for example she often accuses me of shouting or raising my voice in anger, when I haven't at all, or was simply speaking loudly to be heard from the other side of the house, calling out not shouting. She has started telling me she is scared of me when I get angry in case I will hurt her. But I used to say that to her, before I became too afraid to say it because of how crazy she would get. And I don't get angry. I feel like I'm going mad, she's making me doubt my own mind.
I don't know if she even knows she's doing this, if she's doing it deliberately, or if she genuinely believes it's normal. I know as a child she was spoiled and she bullied and intimidated her parents into doing whatever she wants them to do. Being Chinese she did not have brothers and sisters.
She told my parents, behind my back, that we are planning to get married and start a family together, although this is not what I want. And now I'm afraid even to tell my parents that's not the case because of fear of disappointing them or giving them my problem. My older brother is autistic and never married. My sister is a single mother, never married. My father had a major cancer scare this year resulting in traumatic facial plastic surgery. My mother suffers anxiety attacks, from years of psychological abuse from my father although they are still together, and is already at the end of her tether with what my father has been through this year with his cancer. I also feel pressure to marry someone before I and they get too old, to give that gift to my parents, since my siblings have not been married.
I worry that I am going to capitulate, give in and accept the situation as normal because I'm too afraid to do anything else, even though it means my life is effectively over and I just exist to keep someone else happy. Lately she has become easier and happier to live with, but again I think that's because I've been trained not to do anything she doesn't like and I no longer feel like I'm myself. I can't go on like this I don't want to give in, which is why I am writing here as my last resort. I find myself wishing I am diagnosed with a terminal illness so I can use that as an excuse to say I need to go away and do my own life dreams. She refuses to attend any kind of counselling, for her own medical stress (she had cancer scares) or relationship counselling.
LC has also bought expensive wedding rings that neither she nor I can afford, and insisted I pay for half of their cost. And now she also wants a car.
I'm worried about my physical and mental health
* I've put on over 13KG in weight in past 18 months which I attribute to the stress
* My every waking moment is spent thinking about how to get out of this, what to say, what to do, how to time it so it's as least traumatic as possible
* I have night sweats, anxiety attacks, depression and trouble sleeping as a result of PTSD (see below for more on that, which predates this relationship)
* I think I'm going crazy because I'm starting to doubt whether I'm just imagining this is a problem and whether I should simply give up and accept the situation. Maybe I should feel lucky someone loves me? Maybe this is a normal relationship? and I'm blowing things out of proportion? Maybe all the things she does are sweet and loving and I'm a jerk for not appreciating it?
I have tried to get help from charities that help with domestic violence in the UK but I have found them unwilling or unable to support me being a man rather than a woman in this situation. I can understand that I suppose, it is much more rare. I have no friends except colleagues who are colleagues not close friends, and I'm afraid to involve my family as I said above, so I have no support network in place.
She also has few friends, her family is in China, she just have a couple of distant family members here and a couple of friends. So I am afraid also for her mental state if I ask her to leave, and because she has no support network. I'm worried what she may do to me or to herself.
How did I get into this situation? Surely it's easy to avoid moving in with someone you don't want to be in a relationship with? It's a complex story.
In 2010 I was in a relationship with another girl, my former fiance. During that summer, she left me for another man - she had been having an affair with her manager in her workplace, and one day I came home, found that she'd moved out while I was at work, and eventually her boss left his partner too, and then they married and started a family at the end of 2011. The last time I saw and spoke to her was early 2011.
I was devastated at the time, but instead of dealing with the trauma, instead of grieving for the loss, I threw myself into my work, promising myself I would save a decent amount of money and take a long break and deal with it at some future time. I had been on the verge of selling my business and making a decent career-break fund just before she left but as a result of that attempt to sell, I had discovered that my business partner had stolen over half a million pounds from our business which collapsed instead as a result. I had to leave that business, help with the fraud investigation and try to start over again with a new business so that I still had a livelihood and try to salvage all the hard work I'd put into that business and still make back the career break fund I wanted.
I essentially became a workaholic, working 80+ hours a week without break for months on end. Already traumatised by the breakup, and with the workaholism being both a reaction to that trauma and a traumatic experience itself, I then experienced a further enormously traumatic experience in 2012 which lasted some 2 years, too traumatic to go into detail here (you can guess how bad it is given I can talk about all these other horrible things but not that one), during which time I was diagnosed with PTSD from both those cumulative experiences and from un-dealt-with childhood domestic abuse (my father essentially doing to my mother and I what is now happening to me again) and received some counselling and attended group therapy to try and deal with all of that.
I first met LC in mid 2011, during an attempt to make new friends and try and get back to a normal life. She is from China but had settled in UK many years before and acquired UK citizenship already. We became friends, and would hang out once a month or so and talk on the phone a couple of times a week, and she was a good friend for me listening to me vent out my work pressure. But we didn't date or have a romantic relationship at all at that time.
In 2012 we did, during a moment of mutual vulnerability, get close, kiss and sleep together. Immediately after that she decided it was a mistake, and I felt it was too, and we agreed not to pursue and just be friends. We also didn't see each other for some months after that as she had a family emergency to deal with and was away. Eventually she returned and we resumed friendship and discussed on more than one occasion that we weren't right to be a couple and would stay friends and not let it go further than that, which I was very comfortable with. She also knew that I wanted to move abroad and start a new life once I'd dealt with the issues I was having at the time.
At the end of 2014 I was starting to feel much better and recovering somewhat from the PTSD I had. At her suggestion we went to China for a holiday, to get away from UK and work and go somewhere unfamiliar to decompress. This was a terrible mistake. First of all just before we left, she "suddenly" was given notice to leave her apartment, and with only 2 days to go before we flew I agreed she could leave her things at my place and she could find somewhere new when we got back. Then when we arrived in China, I found out we would be staying in her parents house, not hotels and friends houses as I thought, and she had arranged multiple dinners with her extended family to introduce me as her boyfriend. I was stunned, we had never discussed this or agreed to it. She created all this emotional debt in me to these strangers. I was shell shocked and barely spoke at all for the entire trip, deigning to deal with it when we got back to UK, since I was trapped there in China unable to get away on my own. When we got back I tried to deal with it, and she had planned another trip to china on her own a few weeks later, so my plan was to tell her plainly once she was back with her family so she had a support network to deal with this. I was struggling anyway to confront her about it, still feeling intimidated and emotionally weak and unassertive.
But then when she was back in China she had a cancer scare, endometriosis, badly diagnosed in china as womb cancer, and my plan fell apart, as much as I was distressed with the situation I couldn't not let her come back and get a second opinion and the benefit of free NHS doctors. So I chickened out again. Looking after her when she came back while she was tested and given all kinds of medicine that made her moody, lethargic, aggressive, depressed. I felt I owed her to do that after she had been there for me when I needed. And from then, I was trapped.
Within weeks, by the summer of 2015 I became truly afraid of her, she would do crazy things like pouring bleach and then boiling water on my garden plants just because she had seen some ants and wanted to 'destroy their nest'. She would talk about how if I ever cheated on her she would cut up all my clothes like you read in the newspapers. And if ever I tried to have a serious conversation about our relationship, or suggest we get counselling, she would fly into a rage which would last for 12 hours or more with shrieking, screaming, wailing, crying, threats to cut herself, threats to take overdoses of pills or alcohol. So eventually I just stopped trying because I became so afraid of how she would react. I don't know if it was her or her medicine.
In the second half of 2015, I kept a spreadsheet diary of all the crazy abusive things she was doing with times and dates. After a few months of this things seemed to get better and I stopped writing down every individual thing. But I can't help feeling I had the fight beaten out of me. Now I don't know, if she was the one who changed, or it's just because I no longer fight back and have acquiesced. I feel like I'm conditioned to no longer fight back, I try to speak but the words don't come, like when you can no longer touch the metal railing for fear of static electric shock. She picks on me for ever smaller and smaller things.
Ultimately, if I can, and because I've become too afraid of confrontation, I want to find a way out that is as un-traumatic as possible, for both of us. Untraumatic for me because with my PTSD I am averse to conflict and afraid of reopening. Untramatic for her because despite everything, she was a good friend who was there for me when I needed someone, even if now I'm being forced against my will to repay that x100, and because my fiance left me and it nearly killed me, I feel unable to do that same thing to someone else.
I am aware of the argument that being in an unhappy relationship is worse than not being in one and in the long run even she will be better off finding someone who will love her honestly. We don't have sex, haven't done since that earliest time except one feebled attempt, in early 2015 when she basically forced me to go along with it, albeit not very successfully.
My dream following recovering from my PTSD was to travel for 6 months to a year, maybe start a new life abroad, and I saved money to be able to do that. LCY knows this, but she has basically imprisoned me and made it impossible for me to pursue that dream. With no hope of being able to do that - to rediscover myself, to grieve for the love I lost, to plan what I want to do with the rest of my life, I feel like my life is at an end, and anything that happens to me from now on is just existing to serve someone else's needs. Similarly, I wanted a career break, but because of her condition she moved to working part time, and I was forced to support her by continuing to work myself. It's as if everything I tell her I want, she takes for herself.
I own the house we live in, so I feel I can't just leave, it needs to be her to leave. I pay all the bills and the mortgage and everything is in my name only. Although she occasionally offers to contribute, I refuse, although I know that is another way she is taking advantage of me, I can't take the risk that she lay claim to my house.
We spend every evening sitting in near silence watching TV or youtube, which is torture for me, I used to be a social person, doing activities in the big city or socialising and networking for my entrepreneurial work. I love to travel abroad but now I'm trapped. Now all we say to each other is how was your day, and other small talk. Avoiding any serious topic in case it ends up in a big screaming fight. I am well educated, ambitious and successful. She is not. It's like she's living her life through me.
I want out, I need out. I am so afraid of the confrontation I need to have. If only there is some way to make her realise on her own that this is not working and she needs to go. I can't bear to do to her what my fiance did to me but I have no choice. I want my life back. Please help me. I simultaneously hate her, feel sorry for her, love her as a friend but she not the person she used to be, and also afraid of what the break up will do to her parents and my parents, even though I know she's created this debt in me to them all, not me.
P.S. please ignore references to Reddit, I originally wrote this to post it there and pasted it here.
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