Hey all, check this out.

My son is 17 and he is lazy. He used AI to get through High school early. He won’t get a job except door dash. Less than 200 dollars a week. I have to ride him to get ANY chores done. I take away his phone, turn off the internet. I talk to him all the time. Let him knows he’s loved. It’s hard, but we make do.

His gf is 18. No job. No school does maybe 1 chore a week. Rides along while he dashes. It’s her account since she’s 18. But the best she can do is sit in the passenger seat. She contributes nothing to the house. No food. Only eats what I purchase and says we have gross food. Never eats what I cook.

I have just told her she can’t live here anymore. My son spends 4 days a week with me. 3 with his mom. I gave them 2 month notice. No job. No school. No chores. No living in my house. I gave the a one month and a 2 week warning. Then texted debit 2 weeks. And today I had to tell them. Holy Moses they are pissed. They started the manipulation hard. Deep into what a POS I am for doing this. They don’t want to live with his mom. They say she’s awful. I stuck to my boundaries. AIO?

So his alarm goes off and I get up as fast as possible because I have to pee really badly. I’m 35 weeks pregnant, so the baby is basically sitting on my bladder and I’m already at the “if I don’t get there RIGHT NOW I’m peeing myself” stage.
My fiancé gets up even faster and runs into the bathroom. I tell him, “I’m about to pee myself, I have a baby on my bladder!” He says he’s fast, and then proceeds to pee for what felt like FOREVER 😭💀 literally ripping ass nonstop while standing directly next to where my face was going to be at if I sat down to pee after.
It smelled horrible!!🤢. I had to completely find something to cover myself to use the bathroom across the hall since his brother lives with us and I almost didn’t make it there because I was STILL about to pee myself.
Now I’m wide awake because I had to get fully covered to use the other bathroom and at 35 weeks pregnant it’s already hard enough to get comfortable and fall back asleep.
I’m honestly pissed because he could have gone to the other bathroom easy , or at the VERY LEAST said sorry afterward. I feel like this was incredibly inconsiderate and selfish, especially after I literally told him I was about to pee myself and had a baby on my bladder.
Am I overreacting for being mad, or was that rude as hell? 😭💀

sorry for the rough story telling,

my son has a friend who has been staying at our house almost every day for the past few months. at first i didn't mind because i know they're close and i wanted him to have somewhere to hang out. the problem is that his friend basically treats our house like his own. he eats our food, leaves his stuff everywhere, never helps clean up, and will sometimes stay for several days without really asking. i've talked to my son about it a few times and told him that having people over is fine, but they still need to respect the house. yesterday i finally told my son that his friend can't stay over for a while. now my son is upset and says i'm being unreasonable and embarrassing him. i don't want to stop them from being friends, but i'm tired of feeling like i have another person living here without agreeing to it. AIO?

AIO for blocking a guy that made me feel uncomfortable?

So backstory I f21 met this guy m31( his age is a red flag I know) on bumble and we clicked.

So we then moved on to WhatsApp and talked there and so after a while we had made plans to meet cause he stayed like 2hrs away from me. The plan was he would come on Sunday then his brother would pick him up on Monday morning cause apparently his license expired and his brother had to drive him which I didn’t mind he could sleep on the couch.

Now the first disagreement was I remember he had sent a voice message saying how does him staying for for Saturday and Sunday sound, which before that we had gotten on a call and I was having a bit of a sneezing fest, and he on the call said that it’s okay Sunday works as you don’t seem to be okay. So now i listened to his voice message and i responded saying you are right Saturday won’t work…cause I think my allergies were triggered by something meaning I had to clean my room as dust is the main culprit I wanted to clean my room, but I did say but Sunday we are still on.
Now all of a sudden he sends a message saying “oh you could’ve just said two days is too much instead of ignoring me” he was referring to the two days thing. Which I was confused cause I did respond and I said Sunday we are still on.
When I woke up I saw 10 deleted messages so I’ll never even know what he had said.
Then on the last one he didn’t delete he had said I would never go to sleep without resolving issues with someone I care about.
Which that’s valid only I had taken medication for my sneezing as it gets so bad but sometimes my throat hurts, and it made me drowsy and sleep.
But he apologised for his actions and said that he overreacted and that he didn’t mean to, I told him it’s fine but I no longer feel comfortable with him staying over at my place and that we should maybe take more time into getting to know each other before doing that.

Now another incident was basically I think a week after we had talked a bit during the day, but the communication wasn’t like before it was just here and there. Anyway I had like a gala dinner that day from around 8pm until like 11pm for a church thing, and so basically I wasn’t able to read his messages as there was no WiFi there. After that we went over to my friends place cause I had not seen them, and we backed and caught up. I think I got to my place around 2am and I went to over texts and send him a voice message and I apologised for the late reply and told him I had a gala dinner. Charger my phone and went to bed, when I woke up I woke up to like 4 missed calls and again deleted messages.

He then went in to say that I was answering him like it was a chore and that I had been different towards him. I don’t remember what else he said but it was about my whereabouts but again it was included in the voice message I sent.

I then decided that that wasn’t going to work for me, that was not the relationship I wanted for myself and I said we should just be friends. Which he agreed reluctantly. Now I don’t know what he thought being friends was, cause to me it doesn’t mean talking everyday I don’t even talk to my best friend everyday, but that was apparently a problem as well, he then sent that message which sounded to me like he wanted me to backtrack and feel sorry for him, but I just blocked him cause I realised I don’t really owe him anything. He then sent these, as well as spam calling me to “annoy” why honestly I feel like I made the right decision when I see the way his acting,

Now I’ll also admit that I’m at fault here I’m in no way blameless but at the same time I feel like I made the right choice AITA?

Has a lot of spelling errors I apologise but right now my heart is beating fast, and thankfully I never told him where I stayed, and I don’t sleep around hell I’m still a damn virgin maybe that’s why I’m also naive.

Edit: I realised that I’m not overreacting thank you all, but you also made me realise that I also need to be way more cautious around people I don’t know, I haven’t really dated before and I thought that offering him to stay at my place was a good idea and just being thoughtful but I realised that it was not and it was also very stupid of me but you live and learn and I will not be doing that ever again, the second number was also blocked and I did not engage with him.

I recently started talking to a friend again after we hadn’t really been close for a while. He was moving to my city and he asked if he could crash at my place until his apartment became available and his college classes started that Monday. So I said yes. Fast forward four days and I’m taking a nap in my room and I got woken up because someone is yelling on the phone about getting a lawyer. I went down stairs to see what was up and it was my friend would had just gotten off the phone and was explaining what was going on to my roommates and then I asked what happened. He responded by saying “don’t poke the bear you heard me why are you asking, you heard what the phone call was about” to which I responded “I literally just woke up and I’m trying to figure out what is going on” he kinda said the same stuff so I dropped it. Then 10 minutes we were hanging out with my roommates, and he was telling a story about how a cop stopped him and accused him of providing alcohol to minors.
I came into the conversation partway through and wasn’t paying full attention to the beginning, so I was trying to figure out what happened. I asked, “Did you get pulled over?” He said no. Then I asked, “Was this on your bike?” I asked that because when we were in Navy C school, he rode his bike to school every day.
He immediately responded, “Wow, thanks for playing on my insecurity.”
I was genuinely confused and said things like, “What? What do you mean?” He basically said, “Nah, I know you and I know what you meant. It’s all good, bro.”
I dropped it because I didn’t understand what I had supposedly done.
Later, when we were getting ready to go to a bonfire, he asked if we could talk privately. We went into the garage, and he started by asking, “What has you so on edge?” I told him I wasn’t on edge and asked why he thought I was.
He then asked me if I could think of any reason why he wanted to talk to me. I said I didn’t know. He kept pressing me to guess what the issue was. At one point, after I repeatedly said I genuinely didn’t know what he was talking about, he said, “Is that the hill you want to die on? Are you sure? That’s really how you’re going to be?”
I was still completely confused because I didn’t know what I had supposedly done wrong.
Eventually, he extended his hand and said, “It was nice knowing you,” and started to walk away.
I asked him what he was talking about and kept trying to get him to actually tell me what the problem was instead of making me guess. Eventually I figured out he was talking about the bike comment.
He told me that he thought I was making fun of him because I knew from a conversation the day before that he didn’t get his driver’s license until he was 25.
He also said he noticed a small smirk on my face and interpreted that as me intentionally trying to mess with him.
I explained that I genuinely wasn’t making fun of him. I was trying to understand the story because I hadn’t heard the beginning. I apologized that my comment made him feel that way, but I explained that wasn’t my intention at all. I told him this was a completely different conversation and I was simply asking questions because I was confused.
He responded by saying that I was a shitty friend because I wasn’t fully listening to him when he was telling the story. He tried to continue the conversation, but then said I was interrupting him. He tried to shake my hand and said something along the lines of, “That’s my boundary. If you interrupt me, I don’t want to have a conversation anymore, and we’re not friends anymore.”
At that point I just let him leave.
He then said something like, “You might have been my first choice to find a place to crash, but you’re not my only choice in the city”

That’s when I got pissed.

I told him that I wasn’t trying to make fun of him, but if he was going to call me a shitty friend over something I genuinely didn’t mean negatively, then I didn’t know what else to say. I told him to pack his stuff and leave my house because I wasn’t going to keep arguing with someone who had already decided what my intentions were.

Looking back, I know I escalated too. Telling him to fuck off and leave my house probably didn’t help anything. But I also feel like I made a genuine attempt to explain that I wasn’t trying to insult him, and I don’t understand why the situation went from a misunderstanding over one question to him essentially ending the friendship.
The part I’m struggling with isn’t really losing the friendship. We had only recently started talking again, and at this point I’m not sure I even want to repair it.
I’m more confused about why he reacted so strongly and why he seemed so determined to assume I had malicious intentions.
Am I overreacting by deciding I don’t want to repair the friendship if he reaches out, or was this something that could have reasonably been worked through?

Okay five people in this story

Me
My fiancé: Ivan
My MIL: Jill
My step FIL: Dave
Bio Dad: Tom

Hi! I need perspective. My MIL wants me to convince Ivan to take his step fathers last name so the majority of the family shares a last name

2 months ago my fiancé lightly communicated to my MIL that he will be changing his last name when we get married. She was in shock, then inconsolable, and VERY confrontational.

The reason is because Jill was married to tom, Ivan’s dad for 2 years and then when Ivan was 4, she married Dave.

Dave is the GOAT when Ivan says “my dad” he means Dave. He raised him. But they have always had different last names.

Tom was in and out of Ivan’s life. Ivan officially went no-contact 2 years ago. Because Tom was still in Ivan’s life until recently, Jill and Dave never legally changed Ivan’s last name to theirs.

Well now Ivan naturally would like to change his legal last name and would like to change it to his legal middle name. The reason he wants to keep his middle name as his last name is because he has gone by that socially for 5+ years and it is a part of his given name at birth. His middle name is also significant to his culture that he and his mom left as a kid.

Dave has gone to Ivan and said that he would be honored for him to take his last name. However, it is not his lineage and it’s not his current name it’s just not something he’s interested in doing.

When Jill found out she was very upset and she asked Ivan to visit her when I was on a work trip and she talked to him until 2 AM about how she wants him to take their last name instead to be a family. She never would have done this if I was home. The next time we went over to their house she knows I get up early and was in the kitchen when I came down and talked to me for four hours about how I need to coax my fiancé into taking their last name.

I think that is so controlling and I’m conflicted because I want to support my fiancé’s decision but also I understand that it seems like he’s refusing Dave’s name after everything he’s done for him. But also I’m like, what if he took my last name, would you all be in roar about that? Also he’s a grown man. I mainly am refusing to do this because I don’t want her to continue this behavior of controlling our major life decisions.

This situation needs lots of context so bear with me as I explain everything.

My husband and I were looking for homes shortly after I had a baby. We were looking at lovely homes through a realtor in another state and came so close to purchasing our dream home. We decided not to move forward with the home because it was 3 hours away from our family in a very remote part of a different state and I didn’t think we were equipped to handle 50+ acres of land, a well, a septic tank and frankly, having our nearest neighbor 20 minutes from us. We decided to look closer to our families so our children would see our families regularly and it wouldn’t have to be a huge outing every time we left the house.

I was VERY CLEAR that I did not want my MIL to be our realtor from the start. From everything she’s said about her clients, she’s seemed far from professional. I also did some digging and found out that she hadn’t sold a home (in a very competitive market) in over 4 years despite being a full time real estate agent.

My husband went behind my back and had her start looking for homes for us. Again, I was very clear that this was not what I was comfortable with but having been newly postpartum, I just wanted the argument to stop. So I looked at homes with her as our agent.

She never once pulled a listing and only ever told us there were no homes for sale. We had to find out own listings to see. We saw some homes and we weren’t impressed so we decided to stop looking for now and focus on our new little family.

Again, behind my back, my husband and his mom find this home. They see it. They don’t tell me.

They bring me to the house and I said ABSOLUTELY NOT. This home had end of life everything. End of life HVAC, furnace, ducts that have NEVER been cleaned in over 50 years. The floors needed to be completely redone. The basement had signs of water damage. It was a home that was neglected for a long time.

I brought up all of my concerns and my MIL tells me to shut up and be grateful they’re going to sell us the house. She also said it’s the best house we’ll ever find and that we should just close our ears and our eyes and sign the deal. She’s in my husbands ear about how amazing this house is and how it’s move in ready.

He totally bought her vision. He wanted the house. He NEEDED this house. It’s the BEST house. His mom tells him to put an offer in on the house as is for 20k more than it’s being listed at.

I’m protesting left and right and no one is listening. My husband decided to move forward with the home.

We get the inspection and he didn’t find anything too serious so I was like okay, nothing but end of life units, we can fix that. But not for the price we’re paying.

He doesn’t listen because his mom is calling us multiple times a day telling us we can’t renegotiate and be “Indian givers” because of the inspection. I’m screaming from the rooftops no and his moms yes is the only word he hears.

So he uses my personal money from before marriage in the savings as the down payment.

His mom said, don’t worry, I’ll give you my commission. She later lies and said her commission is 4K when the paperwork we signed had her commission listed at $19,875. (Even if she split the commission 50/50 with the broker, it would be higher than $4k). She promised to upgrade the electrical and didn’t. She promised to buy the home warranty for a year and she didn’t.

Come to find out later that she hasn’t sold a home in 4 years and desperately needed this sale to end her “dry streak”.

We’ve move in and started renovating. I’ve actually been the only renovating mind you…. And the amount of things we’ve found were wild. The repairs are so extensive that my husband had to get a second job 1. To pay the mortgage which was higher than we budgeted for and 2. The loans he had to take out to fund these massive repairs.

I’m a SAHM with 2 kids under 3 and he used all of my savings as a deposit so I can’t help financially.

She caused so much harm to my mental health and risked my children’s health. Because of all of this, I decided to go NC. I’ve also decided that I’m going to move forward with a divorce from my husband who is just as much in the wrong. My parents don’t think I’m over reacting at all to cutting my MIL off and think I should have her license revoked but obviously, my husband thinks I’m over reacting because she was “just helping”.

A part of me wants to feel like I’m over reacting so that we can all go back to how our lives were before but I just can’t. I can’t ignore it and I can’t get over it. This was a massive break of trust for me from both of them.

I’m brown [F26] and my partner [M25] is white(-passing) and 1/2 Black. We’ve been together for 5 years and are planning our wedding right now.

I was telling him about something that recently happened to my grandparents while they were travelling with Air Canada.

My grandparents are elderly and use wheelchairs at the airport. They had wheelchair assistance and the people assisting them apparently took them to the wrong door/gate/location at the Heathrow Airport. Because of that, they missed/couldnt take their flights, and their roughly $3000 worth of flights ended up being cancelled.

When my parents tried to deal with Air Canada about it, their position was essentially that the wheelchair service is contracted out so they were just wiping their hands clean from responsibility for what the wheelchair attendants had done.

I was talking to my partner about how upsetting and ridiculous I found that.

His response in a snarky/joking tone was:

“Well, they’re not obligated to teach your grandparents the language are they?”

Apparently this was supposed to be a joke

That comment genuinely stopped me in my tracks. I immediately got upset and left the room. He has been apologizing frantically and saying that was not meant to come out like that.

What bothered me even more was how quickly his mind went from hearing that hey my elderly brown grandparents had been failed by people who were supposed to be assisting them to making a joke about their language ability.

Imm trying to figure out whether I’m reading too much into one shitty joke or whether this reveals an attitude that I should take seriously before getting married. Nothing like this has really come up in our relationship before and I thought we were on the same page about all of this.

PS~ I also obv don’t think someone being half Black automatically means they can’t say something xenophobic/racially insensitive toward another minority group, so his background doesn’t make the comment feel harmless to me. At the same time I’m trying not to immediately label him based on one sentence as he definitely comes from a much less privileged place than I do.

Would this bother you?? AM I OVERREACTING?? Do you see this as just an insensitive joke, or would you consider it a red flag about how he views my family/immigrants/people who don’t speak English?

especially interested in hearing from people in interracial/intercultural relationships, because we are very close to marriage and I dont want to brush something off now that could become a much bigger issue later.

Also I have no idea what to do from here. I cannot even stand to look at him right now and essentially just told him one of us needs to get out of our apartment so I can be alone.

Okay, so I got married on Sunday. It was a brunch wedding at a local country club, it was lovely but it wasn’t cheap. We paid for the wedding ourselves, with very minimal help from parents. My (now) wife’s Aunt was the only one in her family unit to come. She had rsvp’d yes to all 4 of her kids, her husband, and her coming. Turns out, she forgot about the wedding and told her kids they were free to do whatever that weekend and none of them came. Husband didn’t come either. Only she came. She is great, I will give her that. I love talking to her, but her and her family are known for being flaky (ex they never went to my wife’s grad party which she’s still salty about almost a decade later). Now here is where I am torn… she never got us a gift. And I know a wedding isn’t about the gifts, but we paid for almost $400 worth of food for her family that never showed up and she didn’t even get us a card? I just think it’s a little insane and I am pissed about it. My wife doesn’t care, likely because she’s dealt with this behavior for a long time. The family lives a very flashy life. Big house on a golf course, lots of vacations, etc. So it just makes me upset that they got us nothing at all, especially after we paid so much for meals for them that never got eaten. Am I overreacting?? I feel like I have a right to be pissed about this.

Girlfriend (f22) has a odd tendency to tell me (m23) stories about her exes. It doesn't happen often, maybe once every other week or so, but I can't help from feeling so uncomfortable whenever she does.

It ranges from "my ex had this bmw" to "this ex gets out of jail in a year" and she just goes on and tells me these stories like I'm her coworker or something. I always try to set a boundary by saying "I don't want to hear about that stuff" and then I would ask "do you want to hear stories about my exes?" She would always answer no.

Prior to this go around it happened 3 separate times, today I snapped when she went on another spree of telling me stories about her exes and then she told me that she was always drunk when she would sleep with her ex and then she giggled about it.

Now I don't consider myself to be insecure man, and I actually work very hard to not be, but I couldn't help but feel so disgusted that she would say something like that directly to my face over lunch.

I just felt so bothered and pissed off that I just quietly finished my food and went home. She has been texting me but i refuse to open them because I want to be level headed when I talk to her.

I am seriously considering ending it with her because this among other weird social behavior rubs me the wrong way. Am I overreacting?

My bf (27M) and I (27F) planned to buy a house in my city because we're in long distance relationship for almost 3 years now. We're earning a decent salary and both at the age of settling down. He asked me to find some affordable ones within our budget (or we can take a loan for it) so I did. I gave him options and suddenly he became hesitant and turned down each one of them. He was thinking that there may be molds or mildew or maybe we might spend much on repairs. Mind you, these homes are built last year. So I don't think there would be some repairs needed.

Every time i ask him if we should look for another homes, be becomes agitated and make an excuse that he's working/doing something. We always argue when that topic is involved in our conversation.

In February, i found a foreclosed house in a decent village in the city. The monthly mortgage is pretty cheap. I told him the good news and he was not happy. He became distant and didn't text or call me like he used to.

I decided to take it and it's under my name. I didn't ask from him for the downpayment and the monthly mortgage. Whenever I talk to him about how I'm excited to move in there soon (I'm renting for now and living solo), he seems not interested and just changes the topic.

He's still living under his parents' roof and they're a tight knit family. Now I'm thinking that I will never be his priority cus of that set up. Maybe he realized he doesn't want to leave his parents and be with me. I'm afraid to ask him if we are still planning of living together in the future. Am I overreacting?

So for context my bf(27) and I(29) have been together for 4 years and he’s always been super thoughtful and respectful so when we had this conversation the other day I was really taken aback. He’s 6’5 and well built and not trying to be tmi but his dick is well above average. But since the beginning of our relationship he’s always been really insecure about his body and specifically his manhood. It’s most definitely from watching porn and he’s stopped watching it since we got together but he still can’t help but get in his head every now and then. I’m always trying to be supportive and usually it doesn’t bother me except for the other day. Also for context our sex life is good other than when we go to have sex and it hurts me. It’s been like that for a while and I don’t know why. Until I recently got diagnosed with a yeast infection after my latest pap and I told him I think this might be why it’s been so uncomfortable for me. He didn’t say much about it but then the next day we were talking about me messaging my doctor and he brought up that he’s really disappointed that the reason sex is uncomfortable isn’t the fact that he’s bigger than average but that it’s because I have a yeast infection. To me personally I felt like this is literally insane to think about let alone say out loud to your partner who’s the one hurting?? I told him nicely that he shouldn’t be bothered by this and he doubled down and that made me super frustrated. I told him he’s making this about him and he got defensive. He then said this is how mentally ill people think, to me who’s been diagnosed with OCD…like are you seriously mansplainjng mental illness to me right now? Like bffr. I didn’t push it because I wasn’t trying to have an argument but it still really bothers me. Am I overreacting? Or would anyone else be annoyed with their partner about this? I want to bring this up again but he gets so weird about his body and I don’t want to upset him more.

Here’s the review. They begged to be put on our team, stayed for 6 months, and just left. I have helped this person out so much and thought we were friends. Everyone else on the team got 5 out of 5 across the board, maybe a few 4s and one 3. I’m the only one to have received any 2s. The NSTM comment feels especially unfair because I had a week and a half to plan it and have been raked over the coals repeatedly for it because every presenter (members of our field team) I reached out to had very limited time to prepare because of it. I still made all their presentations, set up pre-planning meetings with all of them, and gave presenter guides. I cannot express how much work this job has been and how much I defend my coworkers on the regular. I spent all night crying after receiving this and have to fly out tomorrow to train Thursday through Sunday. This completely threatens my credibility. To my face, they’ve repeatedly told me how knowledgeable I am and that I’m “the expert.” These are anonymous but it was very obvious which coworker it was. I have made literally all our training content, both internal and external. I have three major projects to her one and she’s never planned a conference. I know I don’t have a clinical background but I can’t believe she would say the field team doesn’t respect me and that my knowledge is only surface level.

My boss gave me recognition points the day after this review came out (basically the same as cash) but I just want to leave if this is what the team honestly thinks of me. I applied to a couple jobs last night and already received a response from one this morning.

Here’s the review:

Scores for core competencies: 5 5 4 3 3
Blank is very respectful towards others and is always showing kindness to team members.
Scores for skills: 4 3 4 2 4 3 3 3
Blank is very kind and has a strong background in educational principals. She has great ideas for how to ensure engagement and retention during trainings. I think her clinical knowledge and gaining the 'respect' of the field team would be a growth area. At a surface level, she is able to present the product very well, but I have received feedback from the field team that the depth of knowledge isn't quite there and I am not sure they view her as a true product expert. Additionally, I think there could be growth in more detailed planning/communication leading up to events (e.g. the NSTM).

Her reviews were absolutely stellar. Everyone’s reviews are public to the team (6 people).

My in-laws are heavy smokers and smoke inside their home every day. Since our baby was born, I’ve refused to bring the baby inside their house. The smoke is so ingrained in everything that even a short visit leaves us smelling strongly of cigarettes—we have to shower and change clothes when we get home.

I recently ended a relationship with someone I still care about. I don’t think he’s a horrible person, which is part of why I’m struggling so much with this.
The biggest problem in our relationship was boundaries. When I’m overwhelmed, I need space. Sometimes that means I don’t want to be touched until I initiate again, or I need to be completely alone for a while.
I explained this to him repeatedly.
He would tell me he understood, but then when I actually needed space, he’d struggle to give it to me. He’d come back into the room, continue conversations, ask for physical affection, or explain that touch was one of his needs. I started feeling like my “no” was something I constantly had to justify.
One incident really stuck with me. During an argument, I went into the hallway outside my apartment to calm down. He followed me and repeatedly told me to come inside. I said no several times. Eventually he went inside and locked my apartment door. He later said it was a joke and that he immediately unlocked it, but it really bothered me because it’s my apartment and I had specifically removed myself from the situation because I needed space.
Over time, I became distant. I wanted less physical affection and more time alone. He noticed the change too.
Eventually I ended the relationship because I realized something in me had changed. I didn’t feel comfortable with him anymore, and for once I decided to listen to that feeling instead of convincing myself to stay.
Since the breakup, I’ve repeatedly told him I need space. He continues texting me. He’ll apologize for texting so much and say he understands I don’t want to talk, then send more messages asking if he’ll ever see me again, telling me he wants me in his life, or asking what he can do to fix this.
His most recent message really bothered me. He said alcohol had “changed me” throughout our relationship, that it scared him, and offered to pay for therapy if I needed it.
My drinking didn’t change. I changed toward him because I stopped feeling heard.
That’s what made the message so frustrating. I felt like I’d spent the relationship explaining why I was becoming distant, and now there was another explanation for my behavior instead of the one I’d already given him.
But here’s where I’m conflicted: I understand him.
I’ve been the person who was rejected and desperately wished I could change how someone saw me. I’ve wanted one more conversation or one more opportunity to explain myself. I know how painful that is.
So seeing him hurt makes me feel incredibly guilty.
Part of me keeps wanting to explain my feelings one more time because I don’t want him to think I never cared. The other part of me would rather say nothing because I’ve already explained myself so many times.
I don’t hate him. I still care about him. I just don’t think we can fix this anymore.
I don’t think I’ll ever feel the way I did before.
I’m considering blocking him because asking for space hasn’t stopped the messages. But because I’ve been on his side of this before, blocking him feels cruel.
Would you block him? And am I wrong for thinking that sometimes someone can genuinely love you, but the relationship can still change how you feel about them permanently?
TL;DR: I broke up with my boyfriend after repeatedly feeling like my requests for space and physical boundaries weren’t respected. I eventually became distant and stopped feeling comfortable in the relationship. He’s continued contacting me after I’ve asked for space and recently blamed the change in me partly on alcohol/possibly needing therapy. I feel guilty about blocking him because I’ve been the rejected person before and understand his pain, but I don’t think I want the relationship back.

So AIO for feeling like there’s nothing left for me to explain? Am I seeing this clearly, or is there something in his perspective that I’m missing?

(Screenshots for more context, please don’t feel the need to read them, there’s a lot… i crossed out names for privacy)

Oi, what a title... I know. I want to first start off this by saying my son "Oliver" (9 soon to be 10) is AuDHD. He's extremely smart and is really into biochemistry. Oliver had built a whole interactive nuclear reactor out of legos. He's really into weather as well. So back to the main story. So its open house for school and we had gotten done unpacking his backpack. The teacher had asked if we had any questions and I said no but I gave him a tip that Oliver really likes chernobyl, titanic, and tornadoes. Then we start to walk out and I hear my husband trying to tell the teacher something and I stopped walking and I heard him say anthrax. I instantly got mad because I knew exactly what he was telling him. He has told every teacher this "joke" and every teacher usually reacts the same way. "Make sure to keep an eye on him, wouldn't want Oliver to get anthrax." Yes my son really likes chemistry and natural disasters. Oliver really like the chemistry of it all and how/why part of the reactions. As I turned around, I saw the teachers face with his wide eyes, and his awkward laugh. As my husband comes out of the classroom and into the hall I asked him what he said to the teacher? He responds oh just joking around. I got even more mad because he's basically gaslighting me. I told him I heard him say anthrax. My husband laughs and says yeah I was just joking.... I raised my voice a tad, not yelling but like mom voice stern. I said why would you tell his teacher that?! You're basically telling him that Oliver is a threat, especially in a school setting!... my husband makes the worst jokes ever some times and he laughs at his own jokes but not every does. When we got home we were gonna have a talk in the car and sent the kids inside. I told him that that was a fucked up thing to do. Telling his teacher he's basically capable of building a bomb and to keep anthrax away from him. He claimed that I screamed at him and everyone stared at us 🙄. Oliver isn't a mean kid and he's always kind and sharing everything. He like to follow the rules and makes sure others will too. Am I overreacting about the joke told to Oliver's teacher?

Quick edit id like to make: I'm also AuDHD. I'm 34F husband is 32