My Relationship with Allison/Sine

My relationship with Alison
Alison has been saying a lot of horrible things about me recently. Some of them are true, some of them are distorted, and some are completely false. She has also left out most of the bad shit that she did to me. For example, she recounted her experience with an argument we had where I wanted her to come up with a punishment for herself, without mentioning that this argument was about her pressuring me into sex and then telling me that it wasn’t that bad. I don’t particularly want to share all of this information (some of which is sensitive for legal purposes), but I do want to defend myself and present my side of things.

I knew our relationship was really fucked up, and asked multiple times to break up, to which she’d reply that in that case it would be too painful for her to live in the same house as me, and I’d have to rent her a room somewhere else, or she’d just be homeless. (Which… ended up happening anyway.) I couldn’t afford this, so I didn’t break up with her.

To be upfront, it is true that I have yelled (i.e., spoken angrily, not raised my voice and literally shouted) at her, on many occasions, sometimes for hours while late at night, sometimes while she clearly wanted me to stop. I regret having done this now. I did not do this because I wanted to hurt her; rather, it was a bad strategy to try and get her to understand the consequences of her actions on other people and change her behavior. I’ll detail my specific frustrations with her later in this post.

I have also ignored her when I was angry at her and snapped at her for smaller things.

The post about how I offloaded management of my triggers onto her was largely true. Interestingly, she left out how that was largely a reaction to her continually pressuring me into sex I didn’t want, and continually talking and joking about my triggers around me for months after I had asked her not to. The “stupid” thing she said which had made things worse was graphically describing a rape to me after I had clearly told her that this topic upset me. There was the aforementioned argument where I wanted her to come up with a punishment for herself because she’d pressured me into sex after she had agreed not to, and then said it wasn’t that bad. I had told her my hard limits at the beginning of our relationship, and she did not respect them. She later said that she had forgotten them. I am not comfortable going into more detail about my triggers or most of her sexual boundary violations. I will say that I have something that looks a lot like PTSD as a result of all this, it was utter hell for two years, and I thought it would be for the rest of my life, until things finally improved somewhat this year thanks to help from a friend.

I also never said she had to take care of me 100% of the time; what I said was since she self-identified as being great at social skills and it would presumably be less fraught for her than me, would she mind changing the subject smoothly if it came up. I am also extremely skeptical that she was in the top 1% of avoiding triggers, since she forgot or slipped up constantly. The part about her coming out to me as a rape survivor ascribed a ton of malice to me that wasn’t there; as soon as she told me I had stopped being angry, asked if she was ok talking about it, then afterward didn’t really know what to say. Eventually we went to sleep. “Has suffered the correct amount” didn’t come into it at all.

And, though she hasn’t directly accused me of this, I did cheat on her. This was in the midst of a really horrible, isolating mono-poly situation which I had stupidly agreed to because she was upset at me whenever I did anything vaguely poly-like (for example if she saw me kissing someone at a party she would run out of the room), until, not knowing what to do, I finally broke up with all my other partners. (Meanwhile she would brag about making out with people in front of me, or have sex with other people in my bed and not wash the sheets.) This does not excuse me cheating on her, but I regret agreeing to that arrangement and think it was exceedingly unfair to me, and I didn’t have any way out of it short of breaking up with her which was unfeasible for reasons detailed above.

However, I was never being malicious or trying to hurt her, as she has accused me of doing. And, to be clear because a lot of her recent posts have been ambiguous about who did what, I have never sexually assaulted her, hit her, or choked her. I don’t know who “getting the Big Reveal that actually my partner wanted to do kink because they directly valued my suffering and would be just as happy to hurt me outside of kink” was about, but I did nothing of the sort. The stuff I listed above is the only stuff I did.

A pattern I noticed with Alison is that she seldom directly asks for anything. Instead, she will suffer, or need something, or be upset at you, very hard until you do what she wants. Later she will deny responsibility for this, because she hadn’t directly asked for anything, act like you did what she wanted because you just wanted to, and be upset if you say otherwise. I find it ironic that she talks about people singling her out for abuse based on weak boundaries; she herself selects for people with weak boundaries, because they’re the only ones who will comply with this. For example, when we first started dating, I found myself taking her to get groceries every week, even though there was a grocery store within 20 minutes’ walk down the street, until it somehow became my responsibility and I knew if I didn’t see her that week she would just not get groceries (and then tell me she was hungry until I ordered her pizza online). It’s not just me either - other people end up detangling her hair for hours or taking her to the doctor or any number of other things, until they burn out.

A list of things she has done:

Told me I was a sociopath until I believed her (I no longer do). One of the reasons she said I was a sociopath was that I have high sociosexuality - i.e., I’m a sociopath because I want to be poly.
While smoking weed, surprise shotgunned me (blew smoke into my mouth) after I had told her I didn’t want to get high, multiple times.
While in the UK, messaged me in the middle of the night that the buses weren’t running and threatened suicide unless I found her transportation across the city from a different continent. Was upset when I told her I never wanted to do this again.
Then when she came to the US, repeatedly had me pick her up at the train station in the middle of the night because she hadn’t read the train schedule ahead of time and missed the last train.
Drank herself to blackout because I cuddled with someone at Solstice.
Did not work or do chores or even do her own immigration paperwork. She spent the last few months smoking weed, doing her makeup, and going to concerts while I worked full-time and paid for everything.
I told her, multiple times, that I was burning out doing all this work for her, and begged her to please help me do some of the work. She did nothing.
Said she became depressed when she couldn’t get sex, and that I was the only person she could meaningfully have sex with (which, when I finally stopped having sex with her, magically turned out to be false). Then when I had sex with her, was upset with me for not being enthusiastic enough.
When I asked her to stop talking about her drug use on her public blog, with her face and legal last name on it, which would definitely get her kicked out of the country, was upset at me for “policing her self-expression.”
Had a complete lack of cleanliness intuitions, like not touching my towel after sticking her hand in the toilet bowl (not in the water at least).
Didn’t clean up after herself in general, leaving her things strewn over the floor.
Regularly borrowed my things and then lost them, damaged them, and/or never gave them back. Then said I’d gifted them to her (I hadn’t) and was upset because I didn’t want her to have joint ownership of literally all of my property.
Cried because I didn’t want her to read my journal.
Threw a fit because people wanted to enforce quiet hours in our house. In spite of what she said about being in a house with eveningness, it was usually her who kept everyone awake by talking loudly in the living room in the middle of the night.
Every time I asked her to do something, she would have some reason she couldn’t. Vacuum? No, the dust hurts her eyes. But she vacuumed her parents’ car all the time at home…? No, that’s different. Empty the dishwasher in the morning? No, she won’t remember. Can she set a phone alarm? No, she doesn’t keep her phone on her. (She wanted me to remind her every time, which at that point I might as well just do it myself.) Walk somewhere to run an errand? No, she’d get lost. Except that she also walks as a hobby and somehow that works out. Work at the grocery store? No, she’d have to take Uber there and Uber is expensive so it wouldn’t be worth it. (This is months before she apparently decided she couldn’t work retail because of her regular running away from home.)
Or I would ask her to do something and she would agree but never do it. For example I would ask her to go get her social security card and she would say she’d do it in the next two weeks, and it wouldn’t happen, and this went on for months. Which is a large part of why she doesn’t have a bank account, which is a large part of why she doesn’t have access to money. I would have used it to transfer money to her if she had one.
I asked her to plan our wedding months in advance because I frankly didn’t have the energy, and then she refused to let me ask how it was going, until about two weeks before the date when she revealed that she’d done next to nothing, and everything was really rushed and stressful and I ended up doing half of the work exactly as I hadn’t wanted.
She cried when I asked her to do her own laundry because “partners should do all their chores together”, even though I’d been telling her for months that I was burning out and needed to do less work.
She seems incapable of doing anything for herself, even making a google search. Her complaint about her phone not having data could easily be fixed if she would go to a Target or Safeway and buy a data card.
She had a lot of fears about the power I had over her, being the one funding her and making her immigration possible, and would never talk about it to me, which is understandable since she didn’t want to give me any ideas. But she seemed to think that if I loved her enough it wouldn’t be a problem, and instead of trying to do things that would make me actually love her, sought reassurance by getting me to perform like I did, by not dating other people, by not breaking up with her, by doing her laundry.

Similarly, she was more interested in being reassured about and having the appearance of contributing enough, rather than actually contributing. She once told me she felt bad about not contributing enough, so I gave her a list of things she could do to help, and she had some reason she couldn’t do any of them. What she wanted was for me to assign her some busywork so she wouldn’t feel bad, such as filling my water bottle.

Everything was about her needs all the time. The temperature she wanted the room to be at. She got the electric blanket every night even though it had been a gift to me. We got the juice she liked instead of the juice I liked. She didn’t want me to get a shelf for the shower even though there wasn’t enough room for all our things on the built-in shelf, because she didn’t like having things on the shower floor, and told me I had too many things and should get rid of them, even though I was the only one out of the two of us paying any rent on the shower. I came home to some minor emergency all the time - she needed me to pick her up, or to get her food because she hadn’t eaten all day (in spite of there being groceries in the fridge), or she’d spilled hot chocolate in the living room and not made any attempt to clean it up. I felt like she was more my child than my wife most of the time - but she was upset that I felt like I was her caretaker.

She made, in my opinion, completely idiotic decisions in the name of self-expression - insisting on going out every day while we were living with my parents, even though this made my mother suspicious that she was cheating on me and we really needed my parents’ support, blogging about things that would get her kicked out of the country immediately and linking her blog and facebook and name around everywhere. It felt like she was constantly sabotaging her own immigration, risking really bad consequences for both of us, as well as taking all the effort I was putting in and throwing it away. Like I was trying to do a nice thing for her (and had naively expected that she’d do an equal share of work) and not only was she not helping out, but she was actively undoing all my work. So why was I even bothering to help her?!

Here are the final messages I sent to her, which she thinks were abusive and the last straw in deciding I was irredeemably abusive before she blocked me and ran away, and which I think were me trying to get her to wake up and consider the consequences of her actions, (context: I had asked her to stop posting about her drug use in public, she was upset at me for policing her self-expression):

me:

Maybe it showed because i was logged in, who knows

But I’m mostly convened [concerned - typo] about the content. Do you think a govt agent would be impressed?

I see this as, you asked me to work hard and be conscientious and curtail my own self expression and be miserable for the next few years, and i agreed because i thought you would be doing the same

But not only do you not, you don’t even help, and not only do you not help but you actively sabotage it!

“I want to immigrate but only if someone else does all the work and I get to  overshare about whatever i want and they buy me uber and doordash and cater to my every whim about what juices to buy and whether i want a shelf in the shower” is BULLSHIT and you know it

Do you think you’re entitled to have people hand everything to you for the rest  of your life?

If I’m helping you out and you don’t even clean up after yourself, much less pay rent, something is deeply wrong and shameful. Do you get this?

I try to make sure your immigration goes through and you COMPLAIN about it

I’m approaching this from the angle that an  adult should take care of themselves and the extent that they don’t is a problem. You seem to be approaching toss [this] from the angle that everyone is like your parents and should take care of you and give you whatever you want

You have had a work permit for 8 months and not gotten a job. That’s unacceptable. And i don’t mean software -  target is hiring. [other local store] is hiring. Minimum wage in [area] is 15/hr. The only reason you don’t have your own money is that you don’t care enough to

[Alison’s ex] almost died because of you. [Alison’s other ex] is broke. Do you feel good about that?

(Brackets above are to redact sensitive information or to clarify typos.)

I never wanted to marry her in the first place. It happened because the person who was previously doing her immigration suddenly collapsed, and Alison was panicking at me, and I knew it would be really bad if she had to go back to her country, and had the ridiculous idea that I would be blamed if I didn’t save her, and “somebody had to and no one else would” (which I think is a terribly unhealthy, counterproductive idea in most situations that has gotten romanticized in our community). And, to be fair, I did actually have feelings for her at the time, and she was by and large the only good thing in my life. I was under the mistaken impression that the person was previously doing her immigration would come back and be in charge again, I wasn’t thinking about the legal consequences for myself. I outed myself to my parents and it was awful. I spent a month having uncontrollable fits of rage (misdirected at the person who had collapsed from the pressure of taking care of Alison while she didn’t help in any way) while spending 16 hour days frantically googling immigration law. If I’d thought for 2 seconds I would have set clear boundaries and conditions - that this was contingent on her getting a job and doing chores and so forth instead of lying around browsing tumblr all day or going out partying, that I would continue to be poly. If I’d thought for 5 seconds I would never have agreed at all. Especially if I’d known what it would be like.

And once things started going that way, I wish I’d broken up with her a long time ago. I had the idea of keeping it together until the wedding, until our anniversary, until her birthday, until the interview. So we’d be convincing, so she wouldn’t be homeless. This was a mistake.

I wish I’d talked to people about this a long time ago. It was hard to. The whole situation has been incredibly isolating. Breaking up with my other partners, moving away from most of my irl friends because Alison living with my parents was completely unsustainable, and just hiding things by default in the interests of keeping up appearances for immigration. We were fighting a lot at the end, she would leave the house and not talk to me for days, I would worry that she was going to kill herself or overdose or something. It cast a shadow over everything. Just taking care of all of our responsibilities was exhausting, and then our relationship was bad on top of that. I’d been depressed throughout college and really hoped the next few years could be a time to rest and heal, and just didn’t get that. When we fought, I would try and try to tell her what had been bad for me, and she would stare at me silently and sometimes just walk out, and I would despair of ever getting anything across.

My friend noticed something was wrong and was helping us talk to each other and things were getting better, until I sent those last messages and she ran away for good, which is a decision I still find baffling.

What I want now is not to hurt or “poison” or trap her in this situation, but to get the fucking immigration done because I made a commitment to that (and expect to be blamed if it fails), then get as far away from her as I can. And it would be nice if she’d pay me back for all the money and time and work I’ve spent on her, but I have no illusions that I’m getting any of that back. I wish none of this had ever happened.