There is no city in the USA right now which doesn’t contain a person who needs that job more than you do. Get. Out.
Get out while you still have your wits about you. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay there.
Don’t ever keep yourself in a losing situation because you are stubborn and changing your situation would make you feel like quitter. I like to look to history for life lessons, and there are plenty of examples of people who should have quit when things started going badly but didn’t because they were too stubborn and wanted to make things work. Napoleon and Hitler both really wanted to make their invasions of Russia work. The invasions had started so well, and there was so much to be gained if they won. They were stubborn guys, they weren’t going to let a little snow make them give up and go home! In case you’re not much of a history person, yeah, it didn’t work out well for them. Get out of that relationship while you still can.
I know it feels like everybody is ganging up on your boyfriend, but that’s because you’ve painted a really awful picture of him for us. He doesn’t work. Do you support him? You say he picks fights, you say he’s bizarrely jealous and rather controlling. The big red flag is when you say he has no friends. There is usually a good reason why a certain person lacks friends. Remember that kid in high school who had nobody to eat lunch with? And you felt bad for him, so you let him sit at your table. Then you found out that he was a stupid, obnoxious, mean little shit who didn’t bathe regularly?
Why?
My suggestion would be to spend a little time by yourself, working on yourself. If you got your BA around the typical age, that means you were with your previous boyfriend since your mid-teens, and then overlapped into this current relationship. You’ve never had a chance to define yourself without a boyfriend.
By the way, breaking up with your current boyfriend does not necessarily mean moving back home. You can try staying in Tucson and see if it looks any better without him dragging you down, or you can strike off to some other destination entirely.
That was my experience, too. Meg, there are better times on the way for you, and they’re almost here. I’m wishing you the best of luck.
i saw an interview with a woman who was in a very abusive relationship, physically, emotionally, mentally. she said something that really stunned me.
“i have more freedom in prison than i had in my home and marriage.”
she was in prison for killing her husband, max security, and had more freedom there.
please, work on an exit strategy. you are not engaged, married, or tied to the area. it may seem a bit overboard to you, or not so bad to you; but i encourage you to please, try calling an abuse hot line and get help on how to get away.
Good point. Whether you leave or stay in the city, don’t stay with the boyfriend. This situation has only gotten worse from the last thread (the Facebook/birthday one). No matter what you do, don’t do it with him.
And I should probably clarify that to the extent I was mentioning the possibility of staying in Tucson, I did not mean to minimize the potential fear of harm from the boyfriend. Everyone’s suggestions to proceed with concern for your safety are well-taken. I only wanted to emphasize that your options aren’t just limited to two.
Nearly everyone that has responded has focused on the relationship with your friend, and rightly so…it sounds like through no fault of your own you got hooked up with a loser. But there is something else at play here too - a sudden and dramatic dislocation from your “natural habitat” as it were.
Been a lot of years ago now, but I once did something very similar to what you did, only in reverse. I moved suddenly from the rural west to Boston MA. Not for a relationship, but for a promising job and career advancement. The sense of uprooting and displacement was huge…the whole atmosphere was diametrically opposed to everything I was used to. The fast pace, the endless killer traffic, the latent simmering anger/hostility nearly everyone seemed to hold, the loss of privacy…there was literally nowhere to go to get away from the endless swarms of people, the petty authority. I toughed it out for three years and quite literally stayed drunk the whole time…it was the only coping mechanism I had, and it was not a good one. I came away hating the place more than I thought possible and I’ve never been back, which is a shame because Boston is actually a very nice and interesting place. But I couldn’t hack living there.
What I’m getting at with this is that a physical dislocation from known and comfortable surroundings - the loss of that sense of belonging, of place, is always traumatic. It can be handled if you have a warm relationship, or meaningful & interesting work to keep you anchored, but you don’t have anything like that. No one’s at fault, certainly not you…it just didn’t work out. Cut your losses and get out.
Go home. Cut loose ASAP and go back where you’re known and comfortable. You won’t be happy until you do.
Good luck.
SS
That’s what I was thinking too, start savign money. You don’t need to go back to NJ, you maybe don’t even need to break up with the guy, but you do need to move out.
This is your best reason to stay? Your retail job needs you? There are retail jobs back home, where it sounds like you have better support system. Trust me, your employer will find somebody to replace you.
WRT the relationship, you shouldn’t be trying to salvage a relationship after one year. If you already know it’s bad…it’s bad and likely not going to change. Call it done and move on.
There is an overwhelming consensus here, Meg, and I have to say I agree with it. Get out now. Don’t tell him you’re leaving (because he’ll do whatever it takes to make you stay, including making promises he has no intention to keep), and get some distance between you. He is controlling and disrespectful, and you do not deserve to be treated that way. Think about it this way: you say that you have to look down whenever other men are passing. Does he have to look down whenever other women are passing? Based on what you say here, I’m going to guess he doesn’t. It’s a very big red flag, in any case.
As for your job, it’s retail. They can and will drop people like hot potatoes. There are people who are desperate for a job. They would love to have your job, and the company would be glad to hire them. Don’t worry about leaving retail–they’ll deal.
It is frightening to realize that you’ve read what was written on this thread over and over again- and seeming to ignore the contents of the posts. That guy is not a boy friend, nobody treats a friend the way he treats you, and he should be more than a friend.
This is my last post to you because I realize that you’re in denial of the seriousness of the situation.
Good luck to you, I hope you listen to other worthwhile advice you get. I find this too upsetting to continue the dialogue.
When people show you, who they really are, (and he has), it’s your job to see, (and you don’t seem to be able to).
Nor do you seem to be able to understand the advice you’ve asked for. You’re young, it’s true, but that’s no excuse. You come across as an intelligent young woman. Ignore what you feel and think, at your peril.
In my experience, life sends a pebble before it sends a brick. You’ve identified the pebbles but seem to not realize there’s a brick coming.
I wish you nothing but the best, because I think you’re really going to need it.
Rather that just add my voice to the thundering roar of, “Get out!” that is pervasive in this thread, I’ll point out something that is implicit in many of the statements of this thread but that no one has (I think) stated explicitly, which is that you have no control over this lad’s behavior, and that lack of control combined with your having pegged your living situation and future along with his is making you unhappy. People are happy when they feel like they have control over the course of their lives, and right now, you don’t. Even if you don’t leave him (which I would agree with the consensus would be for the best) you need to detach the notion of your personal success from his controlling behavior and downward personal spiral.
As for the many claims that you should be concerned for your personal well-being in response to any defiance of his controlling behavior, while they may seem hyperbolic, they come from people who have experienced similar situations. Regardless of what you think of your particular situation, you should certainly make efforts to allow you to extract yourself from this situation with minimal loss should the situation take a turn for the worse. By marginalizing your own (clear to others) concerns and warning signs that you have explicated, you are setting yourself up for a much worse personal failure than merely having to leave a relationship.
If you do nothing else, please talk to a therapist or counsellor, if for no other reason than to validate the clear concerns you already have about the situation.
Stranger
That by itself should cheer you up!
Sending out a wish that your life improves!
Sorry for the long delay in my reply. Like I stated earlier, I was at work!
My “swimming” song is more about moving forward every day. I don’t want to fall into a pattern where I sit and feel depressed all the time; I know that I need a mantra to keep me going. So, that’s mine.
I am a little older than the average BA, but yes, I moved from engaged to living with another person in about four months. Maybe it was too soon, but I really believed in what I had found.
I appreciate and understand everyone’s very strong advice to leave. I am also taking it to heart that people are advising from personal experience. I am listening, really. I’m not going to let myself get to where I was feeling last night again.
Thank you for your support and well wishes
Hi Meggroll. I agree with everyone else about leaving your boyfriend. But I was also interested in how you described not wanting to leave your job because they need you.
A few years ago I had an average retail job in a bookstore. I was incredibly unhappy for a lot of reasons, almost all of which went away when I moved to London. It took me nearly two years to actually suck it up and leave because I ‘knew’ I was valuable to the bookstore. And sure, I wasn’t a bad employee. But, with the perspective of a few years, I can see that I really clung to the idea of being necessary to the bookstore because I felt I had nothing else in my life that was a success.
I might be off base here, and I apologise for being presumptive, but do you think that your reluctance to leave is based on the fact that it’s an aspect (maybe the only one) of your new life in Tuscon that you feel you’re in control of/succeeding in?
Someone mentioned giving notice - I think it’s a good idea. I don’t know how employment law works where you are, so probably double check and see if telling your boss that you’re leaving in a month is grounds for them to let you go that day, but if you give them enough warning - a month, six weeks, you won’t really be abandoning them, because that’s plenty of time for them to find a replacement. And then you’ll have an concrete end point to focus on.
You are young and inexperienced, even though you are educated. As we can see from this thread, and your b-day esperience, your boyfriend hasn’t improved, even though you had the heart-to-heart. Please follow the advice on this thread to move out. It will save your life. Literally. Go back and re-read, uh, was it **Alice The Goon’s **post saying you’re in the honeymoon period and your relationship won’t get better, since this sort of dysfunction is cyclical. Now, I hope you see that she was right.
Also, I think that when he sweet talks you, apologizing and ‘sugar-pie’ and ‘sweetie babe’ or whatever-ing you, you will give him some money. It will be an emergency, of course, and you will not have the heart to refuse him.
When you go to work next, call your parents and ask if they will pay for a ticket for you to go home immediately. If they do, get on whatever mode of transport it is and do not even go to the apartment in which you are living. Move back in with your parents. Dopers on this thread can refer you to books about this kind of bad relationship. Your health and life are in danger. Your problem is not only within yourself, it is also within your boyfriend. You may get to feeling well, but, he will blow up on you, and *you aren’t strong enough to defend yourself, either mentally or physically. *
Reread the italicized part, and let it burn into your brain, because you aren’t, regardless of how great you feel now.
And, your good feelings today means very little, to him. He will do you dirt again, only worse, and you will feel worse, because you thought that the problem was solved. Just like his jealousy bit.
Stop saying you are listening to everybody; you aren’t. If you listen, you will hear, and what you are hearing is “It’s just great, and he’ll change!” which shows that you *aren’t *listening. Stop this. You are playing the fool. Bitter heartbreak will be the end, if you are extremely lucky. Physical violence is what is coming down the pike.
Also, please do not tell him that you don’t need him, or are leaving him. Just do it.
Best wishes,
hh