Hi Anita,

I spent a lot of time thinking about my situation after I made the post a month ago. I’ve come to this conclusion.

At the time I met my ex and we were friends, I noticed that he was genuinely trying to improve his life. At first, he had low amounts of empathy and would manipulate teachers or students for small gains, or humiliate people for his own entertainment, but after a while, I noticed he was trying to be kinder to people and learning to be more empathetic. He genuinely had a heart that cared. I know this because when we were still in the beginning stage of our friendship, he cared so much about me and would check up on me regularly. Even if he didn’t know how to empathize fully, his actions were showing that he cared.

So up until the middle of our relationship, he was treating me very nicely. There were definitely some incidents where he would have no remorse, show little care for me, someone, or a situation, it really bothered me but I would talk to him about it in hopes he would understand. The reason I stayed even after seeing him act very rude sometimes, was because I could tell he was genuinely trying to be better. I would notice improvements and every time I told him that I needed some extra love & care, he would try his best to give it to me.

In December 2019, we were both going through a difficult time in our lives. We were both struggling with our mental health, I was struggling with my anxiety + depression, while he was struggling with undiagnosed hallucinations, epilepsy, depression, etc.

After thinking about what had happened during December 2019 – April 2020, I realized that we were in horrible mental states and we were struggling to survive each day let alone give each other love and support in the relationship. I was expecting to receive love & empathy when I was going through a tough time, and my ex basically overworked himself and was burnt out from trying to take care of himself + take care of me. This led to us having arguments and it became very toxic. He had reached his limit and was expressing himself through anger and short temper, while I was expressing myself through sadness and frustration.

When we reunited in February 2021, he was still going through a rough time. I remember him telling me about his emotions and what he was going through. We were communicating nicely until around April, he started getting frustrated with me because I would tell him that he is acting very rude and he reached a point where he stopped caring about how he was acting because he was dealing with a lot of mental stress. So he had priorities, obviously, if you’re having a lot of mental stress, you start acting rudely towards people.

I hope that makes more sense.