How I Realized I Was In Toxic Relationship.

Nine months ago, I ended a toxic relationship. Being in my 40s, I thought I knew to identify bad relationships, but it took me two and a half years to realize what was happening. It has been the biggest emotional rollercoaster of my life.

Our story started three years ago. We work together. I was the new hire at the office and ten months into my job I noticed some heavy flirting from him. I flirted back at first. It was fun, he was cute, funny, and we worked together incredibly well. There was only one slight problem: he was married.

I quickly realized I needed to stop this situation before I got myself into trouble, so one day I asked him if he had a crush on me over a text message. He did admit he liked me, apologized if he had made me uncomfortable and promised to stop. I told him he was married and, even though I had flirted back, nothing could happen between us. The next day we had planned to have lunch together and, determined to keep my work relationship with him intact, I kept our plans. We met and discussed the situation in person.

At that point, he confessed he and his wife were about to split up and assured me his marital situation had nothing to do with me. I gave him advice from my personal experience of been divorced myself and told him he should deal with his marriage before trying to start any new relationship with anyone else.

Two weeks later his wife moved out.

And we got really close. We talked all the time. We flirted, we got to know each other and made plans to start dating once his divorce was final. His divorce was incredibly painful. There were many times he pushed me away, but I tried my best to be supportive. We went out on our first date the day his divorce became final.

Our first date was followed by two years of a lot of tears and painful moments. As much as we wanted to be together, he, of course, wasn’t emotionally ready to be in a relationship. He was distant, was not affectionate, didn’t communicate, had depressive tendencies, and would push me away when he was having a bad day, or things in life got rough. I never felt I was truly part of his life, nor did he make any attempts to be involved with my son and be part of my life. All of this was intensified by his ex-wife constantly texting, calling and trying to keep him as miserable as possible.

I loved him and knew from personal experience that getting over a divorce is never easy. I continued to play the role of his therapist and tried to help him through his grief. I had high hopes that once he got over the divorce everything would be great.

But that day never really came.

After one year, I ended our relationship. We didn’t talk for three weeks, but then we started texting again. I was pulled back under promises that he understood my needs and everything would be different. We got back together after two months, and then had the best two months of our entire relationship. Everything was as it was supposed to be and I thought we were really going to make it. And then he hit me with the worst news I could have possibly heard. He had slept with someone during the two months we were broken up, and this woman was now pregnant with his child.

My head was spinning out of control. Why did he do this? Who was she? How often did he see her? Why didn’t he use protection? Did he like her? I was incredibly hurt by his behavior. This woman was already 12 weeks along at the time we both found out about the pregnancy. She was having this kid and invited him to be as little or as much involved as he wanted to be.

The next six months were hell. I loved him, he loved me, but I was desperately trying to figure out whether I wanted to be part of this messy situation. Our relationship during that time was a mix of happiness with outbursts of anger. During that time, we broke up maybe three times for a day or two, and I threatened to leave him about 20 other times. We went back to the same pattern we had been on during our first year together.

Despite the fact that he had made a huge mistake, he pushed me away, didn’t communicate much about what plans he was making with the kid’s mom when the baby was born, how he was going to handle co-parenting, what would happen to us, where I fit into this whole mess. He didn’t answer any of those questions for me, nor did he ever try to make me feel better about the situation. I felt he was watching me drown and would not bother jumping into the pool to save me.

Yet I stayed with him.

During the entire pregnancy, he seemed to be in denial that it was happening at all. He didn’t tell anyone at work, waited five months to tell his friends, barely discussed plans with the mom or me. I felt hopeless, but, for some reason, I was still trying to make this relationship work.

The two weeks before the baby was born were absolute hell. We were both anxious and all we did was argue. We agreed to take a little breather from the relationship to calm down from all the anger and unhappiness we were under. The mom went into labor two days after we decided to take a break, and before we had a chance to discuss our relationship again.

The way it all went down wasn’t ideal.

On Monday morning I went to work and he wasn’t there. I texted him about five times asking if he was at the hospital before he admitted he indeed was there. He had been at the hospital since Sunday, but never told me. He didn’t tell me his daughter was born. He didn’t come to work that week. Though he claimed he wanted to be with me and wanted to continue the relationship, at no point did he ask me to come to meet his daughter. He didn’t thank me for a gift I had dropped at his house, didn’t tell me when he went home from the hospital and didn’t inform me at all about what was happening. I would call him and he wouldn’t call me back, all the time still texting how much he missed me, loved me and of course how he wanted me in his new life.

I was a mess. I felt he was still pushing me away during this incredibly hard time and I was just hopelessly waiting to be asked to be part of the whole thing.

The week after his daughter was born I went away to clear my head. Before leaving, I sent him an email explaining how I felt about what had happened, and the things I thought we needed to discuss before we started to see each other again. I was still optimistic that things would get better. I was also hoping during the time I was gone that he would finally come up with a solid custody agreement with the kid’s mom.

In the middle of my vacation, I checked on him to see how things were going. It became clear from our short conversation he hadn’t made any progress with his situation, and instead told me he needed to figure out his life before him and I started seeing each other again. “Figuring out his life” didn’t mean figuring out our life with this new baby. This was his life, and he was doing this without talking to me, including me, working together as a team or anything along those lines.

Of course, he still claimed he wanted me in his life, he just needed time. After two and a half years of waiting for him to get divorced, getting over the emotions of the divorce, all the emotional support I had given him, and hearing the news he had gotten someone else pregnant, he wanted me to wait some more. I realized at that point our relationship would never change and I had to put on my big girl pants and let him go. I told him I was done and broke up with him.

For months I wondered why he did this. I will never have closure on what happened.

Until the day we broke up I had never thought of him as a toxic person, but the more I thought about him, the more I realized I had just ended a toxic relationship. I looked online for articles on the topic and checked for signs in my relationship that pointed I had indeed been in a toxic relationship. I was somewhat looking for closure on the whole situation since I wasn’t going to get closure from him. These are some of the common signs I discovered:

Persistent unhappiness

There was a persistent feeling of unhappiness throughout my relationship with him. I often wondered whether I was generally an unhappy person who always wanted more and was never satisfied, or if he was really the one making me unhappy and I was trying to force a relationship that wasn’t good for me.

Negative shifts in your mental health, personality or self-esteem

The longer I stayed in the relationship, the more I realized he didn’t have my back, he didn’t think of us as a team, and things would never improve. I distanced myself from friends and families. I would yell at my son for no reason and was just in a bad mood. I didn’t want to get up and go to work, face him or anyone we worked with, or just do healthy things I needed to do for myself. This relationship was affecting my well-being from every angle. It affected both my professional and personal life.

Arguing without communicating

That was all we did. I would often talk and talk for 15 minutes without getting a response back, or just get a “sorry.” He never fully engaged in a conversation with me about a difficult topic, which would make me incredibly angry.

Feeling like there is no point

Many times during our relationship I felt things were going nowhere. But hope is the devil. I kept hoping for things to improve. I thought, if only I were more patient and gave it time, things would improve. There were never any signs that things were going to improve anytime soon.

You only think about making him/her happy

A major portion of my time with him was spent supporting him emotionally and being understanding of everything he had gone through between the divorce and the shocking news of the baby. My own happiness took a backseat to his problems.

You are just not happy anymore

This was the bottom line. I was so incredibly unhappy and just had no idea where to turn, or how to get out of my funk. All my efforts to wake up with a positive attitude and look at things with a different perspective were futile.

At the end of the day, I still loved him and letting him go was incredibly painful. But I had to really think about myself, the effects this person was having on my well-being, and cut the strings completely. I had to think about my long term happiness above all.

He and I still work together. He insists he isn’t saying goodbye to me, and will try to win me back at some point in the future. That thought scares me. I am scared of falling back into the same trap. But all I can do in the meantime is continue to work on myself and keep remembering all the things I want and need in a relationship and demand those things from anyone I get involved with.