….the potential pregnancy saga, I have to get something off my chest. It’s about the last guy I was seeing, before I started seeing my now-husband. We’ll call the previous guy, “The Spin Doctor,” because literally everything he says is spun to his best advantage, and he is a master of PR.

Essentially, I started seeing someone who turned out to be the aforementioned Spin Doctor. I didn’t realise at the start of the relationship, but in hindsight, the SD decided they understood me based on a few factors, and treated me “accordingly”. As he’s also sort of an accidental misogynist, that did not go well.

I’d love to post this on Facebook, get some support from my real-life mates, but the last time I did that, I just got a list of reasons from The Spin Doctor (and his new girlfriend–well, not new, since he started seeing her the day after convincing me to take him back, which was in April, but you take my point) why it was perfectly acceptable that he behaved that way. I can do without the hassle. I’m going to post here, and just hope he never sees it. I digress. Moving swiftly on.

In a writing prompt, the question was asked: “What do you want to say to the person who broke you?” And this was my response:

“It was domestic abuse EVERY time you screamed and shouted at me when I hadn’t raised my voice or even said anything unkind. It was abuse every time you blamed me for something I didn’t do. It was abuse every time you stomped around your house, looming over me, leaning into my face, slamming doors and cabinets and generally making me feel unsafe, when you were meant to be offering me a room 3x a week so I could finish my degree.

It was abuse when you said I ‘couldn’t be raped’. It was abuse when you, months later, proved that you weren’t joking, when you forced my hand onto your dick and told me that ‘you can’t dip in and out of people like that’ (in other words, finish jerking me off and I don’t care about your RSI pain) and later berated me for being upset about it. It was abuse when you were screaming at me so loudly in the car, for 10 solid minutes, while I begged you to pull over and let me out, that eventually I lightly tapped your face to get you to stop, and it was definitely abuse when you blacked my eye nearly shut in retaliation.

It was abuse when you said, ‘I’ve come to terms with the fact that your kids might always be awful, and I have to protect myself from them.’ All of that was abuse. You didn’t ‘make one mistake’ (blacking my eye). You abused me repeatedly, for a year and a half, and threw money at me to ease your own guilt…. but *I* know, you’re an abuser.”

I still have mixed feelings about the guy–you always do, in a situation like that–and, as stated above, there were times when I screamed too, times when I almost struck him, and, once (under extreme duress) I even slapped at him (I say “slapped at” because it was the kind of tap you do to get someone’s attention, but it did knock his glasses off and I’m sure it was disorienting). I’m certainly not blameless, in that relationship.

The thing is, I wanted to be with him, and I made it very clear over and over again, but he just wanted to stick his dick in me; preferably, without ever having to deal with my actual life, or, God forbid, my children. Once he got tired of pretending to actually care, the gloves came off, the abuse escalated, he to the point of his taking shots at my kids. In the end, it was that comment about my kids being awful that made me walk out of his house and take a train back home, missing a uni lecture in the process; I stayed for months after he blacked my eye, but I was permanently gone as soon as I had somewhere else to stay, after the comment about my babies.

The last time I tried to talk to him about any of it, he showed no awareness of wrongdoing, nor remorse. He actually denied making that comment about my kids; awkward, as the comment was made in a conversation via Messenger, so…? I mean really, what *is* the point, I ask you? And I may as well ask you, the anonymous reader.

God knows, I’ll never get a straight answer out of The Spin Doctor.