Dear Tiny Buddha:

If I understand correctly, what you are saying is that he wanted you to cut family members and friends out of your life even though he didn’t know them, never have met them, or if the met them, his reason was not that he believed they were harmful to you, not because of any concern on his part for your well-being, but solely because he wanted to be the only person of any importance in your life.

Your time and attention to others, or others’ attention to you threatened him. His sense of safety was in you having no one else but him in your life. He accused you that you don’t love him by having other people in your life and he expressed his invalid anger at you, and demanded that you … correct your unloving ways and, as you wrote: “prove my love to him, that he was the only person I needed in my life.”

Not only did he feel threatened by your present relationships but by your past relationships as well (“he couldn’t get over it”, your past, that is).

He wanted you to wear less revealing, or less attractive clothes and to stop exercising so that you don’t attract the attention of strangers.

What you are describing, if I understand correctly, is not him treating you like garbage, as you stated earlier. It is not him treating you like something of no value. He thought of you as someone very valuable to him, so much so that he wanted this very valuable person, you, all for himself. What you are describing is a pathology on his part. It is not reasonable to expect a girlfriend to cut off all her relationships so to prove her love, to make herself unattractive so to not attract anyone’s attention.

I suppose he never had a healthy relationship with a woman, not with you and not before you. I doubt any woman accommodated such an extreme demand on his part. Or that any woman ever will.

anita