I promised Evelyn that I would do this for her: chronicle the truly messed up relationships that I’ve had in the past. It actually works out better, so that in the future when people ask me to explain my past boyfriends and they get confused when I try to just tell them about the first, I can refer them to this blog.
I dated Justin when I was 16. He was my first boyfriend. We met in class, and started talking on the phone every night. It started out pretty typical: we would flirt, we exchanged pictures of each other, we were constantly on the phone.
We dated for about three weeks when I first got an inkling that he was crazy. He called me one day and began to explain that he was taking a girl to an abandoned barn, and they were going to “fool around.” I was confused at first, and asked him to clarify. When he did, I was shocked; I hadn’t even kissed him yet. (In fact, the circumstances eventually dictated that I never kiss him at all.)
I told him that I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, and broke up with him. A bit later, his mother called me. She was absolutely furious, and started asking me questions about what had happened, saying that after getting off the phone with me, Justin had punched a hole in his wall. When I explained it to her, she insisted that there was nothing to Justin’s claims of another girl.
I believe the exact words she used were, “He’s a diagnosed compulsive liar.”
You’re beginning to see the name of the game now. I was puzzled, confused … confuzzled. Foolishly, I took him back, even after his mother confessed this to me, and after hearing that he was prone to violence when upset. We played the break-up game another two times, with me breaking up with him and then the inevitable call that I would receive from him, begging me to take him back.
It got to the point where I was just so tired off it that the last time we broke up, it was for good. That actually worked out to my advantage because I found out later that he had been cheating on me, so his disease was not completely to blame.
Well, that’s the first. The next is a bit too overwhelming for me to write along with this one, so stay tuned tomorrow.
Ethel. 