Marcus was upset with me when I was in India. I did not feel that he was justified in his original complaint, but in the end, we decided not to talk anymore. It was a bad breakup but I am not sure what could have made it better.
While I was in India, I did not use email for about 10 days. By that time when I wrote to Marcus he was upset. I thought that was a little melodramatic but I did not say anything, but actually in hindsight somehow he was really hurt. I told him that I had Sou as a lover in India and he took it really personally. In the past, he had told me that it was okay for me to date others while I was a away for a month, and he also wanted an open relationship for his sake, but somehow having me with another guy made him really feel hurt. I felt absolutely terrible; I never would have expected this response from him, particularly because he as a Broadway performer had a lot of opportunities to meet who he liked.
Not longer after having returned to America I emailed Marcus. He had asked me not to communicate with him again, but when I wrote him, he said that he did not mean to say that and that he would have written me after a while. We exchanged some emails, then we exchanged some chat, then we talked on the phone once. My priority at this point was determining how to communicate safely with him. I had a six-month romantic relationship with him and he had taken action to end that abruptly, so while he was talking to me I wanted to salvage something and make a friendship. If need be, I was thinking that we could just not talk for a while and then resume some kind of friendship after some more time passed.
He was making me feel weird and he was tripping hard for a lot of reasons unrelated to me. I sympathize with him but for him to have cut me off from our established relationship while I was in India and really occupied with other things was transgressing polite behavior for me. I was getting the sense that he was willing to freak out and freak hard without giving me any chance to communicate with him. I can deal with a lot of drama but refusing communication is more than I will ever tolerate.
We had these talks, he seemed fine, and I thought that we could peaceably coexist. He told me I upset him in various ways, but said he was not comfortable saying how. He told me some things but he is quite a reserved person in expressing his feelings and I hardly understood him. I asked him to come to relationship counseling with me and he again refused, as he had repeatedly since literally our first date, and I asked him to talk to my counselor if I were to go on my own, and he was ambivalent.
We had another talk by phone and we talked about various things. Nothing in that conversation stuck out to me as hurting his feelings or getting any emotional response from him. He told me at the end to have a good night, and that we would talk again soon. From my perspective we had a safe and leisurely conversation. He did not really express much emotion, or rather, he seemed like his normal self to me. That night over a period of hours he wrote me some crazy emails accusing me of bizarre and nonsensical offenses, and then the following day he wrote to me that I was worse than a particular random criminal who in his past had tried to kill him during a mugging. He often talked of that attack throughout our relationship as a bad event of the worst kind, and for him to suddenly hate me for reasons I do not understand was upsetting to me. I suppose that getting accused of being a bad person was better than him cutting me out of communication without me understanding what was wrong, which was his original plan, but when he cut me off this second time it was for offenses he only imagined and with a hate I feel that I did not deserve. Ultimately, I am taking this breakup as him fundamentally not accepting me for who I am, because we were together for six months without a complaint from him. This is the worst breakup I have ever had, and also the only bad breakup I have ever had. I do not understand him and throughout knowing him I always felt that he had emotions that he could not express to me and that he did not understand himself.
I just feel used; I feel like I was the same person throughout our relationship and that I was open about who I was, and then somehow when he had time to reflect he decided to tell me that he never liked me. I have no idea what he might like. I liked him. I regret the loss of time. If he did not like me then I wish we could have established that a lot sooner.
The biggest problem for me in the relationship was that he had a mental problem with low self esteem. His condition was really odd – in person he seemed completely normal except that he refused to initiate social engagement with anyone. The strange thing was that I doubt anyone ever noticed this shyness because his mental barrier was only initiation of contact, so if someone started talking to him in a social setting, he behaved as an extrovert and was proficient in leisure conversation. He worked as a Broadway performer for years, and in an unrelated skill set he was a total handyman and electrical engineer. He liked to say that when he was touring with theatre then he made friends with everyone. He was highly creative and had analytical skills, plus he could do all kinds of practical work with his hands. He was educated, good looking, a great conversationalist, and had a lot of impressive talents, but he would get extremely depressed if anyone ever complimented him. He never had a reaction to anyone’s face, or would ever be anything except completely happy around everyone. I never saw him unhappy in all the time I knew him. He would only get unhappy when he was alone, and when that happened, he would review every nice thing that happened to him and start dreaming that all good things in his life were some kind of trap to catch him.
When I was in India he told me I was crazy, and I said fine, I will go to a counselor. I asked him what he wanted me to tell the counselor and he said to tell the counselor that I do not read emotions in others. That is probably true – other people have told me similar things, and for my own self, I know that I am wound a bit differently and always run optimistic even in bad situations. I do not think I ever have problems being optimistic except when there is trouble, and generally I stay out of trouble, so my inability to see things any other way than optimistically usually works out when everything is good around me. In any case, I got a counselor and am seeing this person for a while. I definitely do not ever want to have a bad ending to a relationship like this ever again, and maybe I can get some insight.