“The bakery closes in 10 minutes and you mean to tell me that you haven’t picked up the fucking cake yet!”
“I’m on my way there now. I had some of the guys with me and I had to drop them off.”
“You do realize that I have to leave in 20 minutes to be able to make it to the reservation on time THAT I MADE right!”
“Yea I know. You know I still don’t understand why you have to spend the WHOLE WEEKEND with them anyways!”
“What do you mean...it’s my family.”
“The WHOLE WEEKEND though? I mean what am I supposed to do while you're gone with the car?”
This conversation that I laid out happened on my mother's birthday. We had been through a hard time in the past year and I decided to make this birthday of hers special. I made reservations at one of the Irish spots close to my hometown, had the whole family coming, and had a cake made from a local spot near my apartment in Bridgeport (south of Chicago).
For a couple months now, I was working on rebuilding my relationship with my family, and was making progress, so the last thing I needed was to be late for an event that I PUT TOGETHER! So of course what happens? Melvin is late. Not only is he late coming back from wherever he decided to go off to, but he’s late picking up the cake that I special ordered.
Thankfully, he got there on time but man was I mad though. I was so mad, I’m pretty sure that my eyes turned green, like the Hulks in those movies when he’s about to lose his shit.
And you know what he said to me when he got back….
“You sexy when you that mad.”
WHAT!!!!! I can’t even…
A lot of times when we are in a relationship it’s hard for us to recognize the non obvious signs of abuse. But this small portion of this conversation has manipulation all in it. Let me break it down…
Here are 3 things to pay attention to.
Blame Placing
Now within the conversation laid out, instead of Melvin taking responsibility for that fact that he was late cause he was fuckin around, he blamed it on “the guys”.
This is a common thing to pay attention to in manipulation and toxic relationship behaviors. There were many times throughout my relationship when the fault was never Melvins. It was always the circumstances around him. He would never own up to his faults.
A person who is healthy and secure in themselves has the ability to admit when they have done something wrong. Not only can they admit when they’ve done wrong, they can have a constructive conversation about it, and come up with a resolution.
In my recent interview with Krystal she stated that even when she was breaking ties with her Melvin, he insisted on stating “You know that this is your fault right?”.
Isolation
This one is huge because it’s away for your Melvin to normalize the way they treat you. It always starts out small like mentioning that they don’t like something that a friend of yours does. Or how someone is a bad influence on you and your behaviors. All the way to telling you that your family is coming between your relationship.
This is a way for this person to get you around their people and cut you off from your support system. For me, I fell into this very early on in my relationship. I began to place blame on others as to why I wasn’t coming around and never looked at the person standing next to me (Or even more importantly the person staring back at me in the mirror).
Melvin stated “You know I still don’t understand why you have to spend the WHOLE WEEKEND with them anyways!” was away for him to try and get me to cut my time with my family short and come back to him. Not because he would miss me in anyway, but because as he stated, he didn’t know what he was going to do while I had the car.
In any relationship that you choose to participate in, please do yourself a favor, and always make time for the people you spend time with when you’re single. Having a group of people you hangout with outside of your relationship is so important on so many different levels. And your partner should have the same thing.
Expectance & Entitlement
Now let me paint this picture for you. I had just spent an amazing weekend with my family but was constantly interrupted by phone calls of questioning when I was coming back to the apartment. Leading me to believe that maybe he did actually miss me in some sort of way. I parked the car, got all of my bags together, and headed up to the back entrance. As I walked in, there was a trail of clothes leading from the kitchen to the living room. There was a pile of dishes in the sink along with an ashtray filled to the brim of cigarette buds and blunts. As I walked over the trail of clothes down the hallway and into the living room...there he was. Sprawled out, in his boxers, box of pizza on the floor, blunt and drink on the table next to him, and watching a movie on the television.
Why is this so important? Because of what followed…
As I looked around I was simply asked “Why is it so dirty? There’s literally a trail of your clothes in the hall.”
“Well you weren’t here to clean up.”
Again the level of irritation surging through my body was just insane. Now I know many of you may be reading this and thinking why didn’t I tell him to get the fuck up and get out of my apartment right? What you don’t know is that about a month earlier I had tried that. It ended with me being choked against the kitchen wall and crying in his lap afterwards asking “Why do you treat me like this?”. This man choked me and threatened me more than once when I tried to get him out of my apartment making comments like “I’d like to see you try” or “What’s yours is mine”.
Never once did this man have a job to help with the rent or groceries. Never once did he offer to help clean the apartment. And he sure as hell didn’t feel any type of way when he would take the car and leave me in the apartment ALL DAY LONG.
Melvin felt entitled to benefit from the things I did to secure what we had. Not only that but he felt entitled to benefit from what my FAMILY would put in securing those things as well.
So as I put the things away and began to clean the mess he took my keys and left. He truly did believe that because he was in the apartment that I paid for all weekend, he had the right to take my car and be gone for as long as he saw fit. And that’s exactly what he did.
Now I think we all know and recognize when a person expects things from you and has an air of entitlement about them so I won’t break this down any further. What I will say though is that it is NOT ONE person who makes a relationship work or function in a healthy way. It is the responsibility of both people.
I do hope that this helps some of you in recognizing different, non obvious signs of abuse, that may be happening in your relationship or even that of someone you are close to. If you do see this happening in your relationship please have the courage to address the situation. If you do not feel comfortable addressing these issues alone with this person then ASK FOR HELP.
I need everyone to understand that asking for help is not a shameful act. We all need help at one point in time or another. Let your pride down and have a conversation.
Always remember that you are worth it. You deserve the best. Never settle for less.
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